k upon a landscape all swathed in mists, and on which darkness
is steadily settling. The reason why the men of this generation, some
of them very superficially, and for the sake of being 'in the swim' and
some of them despairingly and with bleeding hearts, are turning
themselves to a reasoned pessimism, is because they will not see what
shines out from the Cross, that God is love.

Nor need I do more than remind you, in a word, of the fact that, go
where we will through this world, and consult all the conceptions that
men have made to themselves of gods many and lords many, whilst we find
the deification of power, and of vice, and of fragmentary goodnesses, of
hopes and fears, of longings, of regrets, we find nowhere a god of whom
the characteristic is love. And amidst that Pantheon of deities, some of
them savage, some of them lustful, some of them embodiments of all
vices, some of them indifferent and neutral, some of them radiant and
fair, none reveals this secret, that the centre of the universe is a
heart. So we have to turn away from hopes, from probability dashed with
many a doubt, and find something that has more solid substance in it, if
it is to be enough to bear up the man that grasps it and to yield before
no tempests. For all that Bishop Butler says, probabilities are _not_
the guide of life, in its deepest and noblest aspects. They may be the
guide of practice, but for the anchorage of the soul we want no shifting
sand-bank, but that to which we may make fast and be sure that, whatever
shifts, it remains immovable. You can no more clothe the soul in
'perhapses' than a man can make garments out of a spider's web. Religion
consists of the things of which we are sure, and not of the things which
are probable. 'Peradventure' is not the word on which a man can rest the
weight of a crushed, or an agonising, or a sinking soul; he must have
'Verily! verily!' and then he is at rest.

How do we know what a man is? By seeing what a man does. How do we know
what God is? By knowing what God does. So John does not argue with
logic, either frosty or fiery, but he simply opens his mouth, and in
calm, pellucid utterances sets forth the truths and leaves them to work.
He says to us, 'I do not relegate you to your intuitions; I do not argue
with you; I simply say, Look at Him; look, and see that God is love.'

What, then, does the mission of Christ say to us about the love of God?
It says, first, that it is a love independe