When we feel ourselves defective in the glow and operative
driving power of love to God, what is the right thing to do? When a man
is cold, he will not warm himself by putting a clinical thermometer
into his mouth, and taking his temperature, will he? Let him go into the
sunshine and he will be warmed up. You can pound ice in a mortar, and
except for the little heat generated by the impact of the pestle, it
will keep ice still. But float the iceberg south into the tropics, and
what has become of it? It has all run down into sweet, warm water, and
mingled with the warm ocean that has dissolved it. So do not think about
yourselves and your own loveless hearts so much, but think about God,
and the infinite welling up of love in His heart to you, a great deal
more. 'We love Him, because He first loved us'; therefore, to love Him
more, we must feel more that He does love us.

III. Lastly, here is the ultimate word about our conduct to men.

I said that John, by leaving out any specification of the object of
love, as well as by the verses that immediately follow, shows that he
regards the emotion as one, though its direction is two-fold. That just
comes to the plain truth, that the only victorious antagonist to the
self-regarding temperament of average men, and the only power which will
change philanthropy from a sentiment into a self-denying and active
principle of conduct, is to be found in the belief of the love of God in
Jesus Christ, and in answering love to Him.

That is a lesson for many sorts of people to-day. What they call
altruism is no discovery of Christianity, but its practice is. I freely
admit that there is much honest and self-sacrificing beneficence and
benevolence which are not connected, in the men who practice them, with
faith in Jesus Christ. But I question very much whether these would have
existed if the story of the Cross had been unknown. And sure I am that
the history of non-Christian attempts to promote the brotherhood of man,
and to diffuse a wide and operative love of mankind, teaches us, on the
one side, that the emotion is not strong enough to last, and to work,
unless it is based on God's love in Jesus Christ. And the history of
Christianity, on the other side, though with many defects and things to
be ashamed of, teaches us, conversely, that wherever there is a genuine
love of God, its exterior form, so to say, the outside of it which is
presented to the world, will be true love to man.

C