nt of, and earlier than,
ours. We love, as a rule, because we recognise in the object to which
our heart goes out something that draws it, something that is loveable.
But He whose name is 'I am that I am' has all the reasons of His actions
within Himself, and just as He

'Sits on no precarious throne,
Nor borrows leave to be,'

nor is dependent on any creature for existence, so He is His own motive,
He is His own reason. Within that sacred circle of the Infinite Nature
lie all the energies which bring that Infinite Nature into action; and
like some clear fountain, more sparkling than crystal, there wells up
for ever, from the depths of the Divine Nature, the love which is
Himself. He loves, not because we love Him, but because He is God. The
very sun itself, as some astronomers believe, owes its radiant
brightness and ever-communicated warmth to the impact on, and reception
into, it of myriads of meteors and of matter drawn from the surrounding
system. So when the fuel fails, that fire will go out, and the sun will
shrivel into a black ball. But this central Sun of the universe has all
His light within Himself, and the rays that pour out from Him owe their
being and their motion to nothing but the force of that central fire,
from which they rush with healing on their wings.

If, then, God's love is not evoked by anything in His creatures, then it
is universal, and we do not need anxiously to question ourselves whether
we deserve that it shall fall upon us, and no conscious unworthiness
need ever make us falter in the least in the firmness with which we
grasp that great central thought. The sun, inferior emblem as it is of
that Light of all that is, pours down its beams indiscriminately on
dunghill and on jewel, though it be true that in the one its rays breed
corruption and in the other draw out beauty. That great love wraps us
all, is older than our sins, and is not deflected by them. So that is
the first thing that Christ's mission tells us about God's love.

The second is--it speaks to us of a love which gives its best. John
says, 'God _sent_ His Son,' and that word reposes, like the rest of the
passage, on many words of Christ's--such as, for instance, when He
speaks of Himself as 'sanctified and sent into the world,' and many
another saying. But remember how, in the foundation passage to which I
have already referred, and of which we have some reflection in the words
before us, there is a tenderer ex