blican and the harlot, in Thy sympathy with all the
erring and the sorrowful, and, most of all, in Thy agony and passion, in
Thy cross and death, I see the glory of God which is the love of God.'
Brother, if you break that link, which binds the man Christ Jesus with
the ever-living and the ever-loving God, I know not how you can draw
from the record of His life and death a confidence, which nothing can
shake, in the love of the Father.

Then there is another point. Christ's mission speaks to us about God's
love, if--and I was going to say _only_ if--we regard it as His mission
to be the propitiation for our sins. Strike out the death as the
sacrifice for the world's sin, and what you have left is a maimed
something, which may be, and I thankfully recognise often is, very
strengthening, very helpful, very calming, very ennobling, even to men
who do not sympathise with the view of that work which I am now setting
forth, but which is all that to them, very largely, because of the
unconscious influence of the truths which they have cast away. It seems
to me that those who, in the name of the highest paternal love of God,
reject the thought of Christ's sacrificial death, are kicking away the
ladder by which they have climbed, and are better than their creeds, and
happily illogical. It is the Cross that reveals the love, and it is the
Cross as the means of propitiation that pours the light of that blessed
conviction into men's hearts.

III. My last question is this: what does Christ's mission say about
God's love to me?

We know what it ought to say. It ought to carry, as on the crest of a
great wave, the conviction of that divine love into our hearts, to be
fruitful there. It ought to sweep out, as on the crest of a great wave,
our sins and evils. It ought to do this; does it? On some of us I fear
it produces no effect at all. Some of you, dear friends, look at that
light with lack-lustre eyes, or, rather, with blind eyes, that are dark
as midnight in the blaze of noonday. The voice comes from the Cross,
sweet as that of harpers harping with their harps, and mighty as the
voice of many waters, and you hear nothing. Some of us it slightly moves
now and then, and there an end.

Brethren, you have to turn the world-wide generality into a personal
possession. You have to say, 'He loved _me_, and gave Himself for _me_.'
It is of no use to believe in a universal Saviour; do you trust in your
particular Saviour? It is of no use