do with our power of knowing and possessing the best
wisdom and the highest treasures, but that upon this path the wayfaring
man though a fool shall not err, and all narrow foreheads and limited
understandings, and poor, simple uneducated people as well as
philosophers and geniuses have to learn love by their hearts and not by
their heads, and by a sense of need and a humble trust and a daily
experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in
the love of Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name! The end of all
aristocracies of culture and superciliousness of intellect lies in that
great truth that we possess the deepest knowledge and highest wisdom
when we love and by our love.

II. Now a word in the next place as to the other thought here, that not
even the loving heart can know the love of Christ.

'It passeth knowledge,' says my text. Now I do not suppose that the
paradox here of knowing the love of Christ which 'passeth knowledge' is
to be explained by taking 'know' and 'knowledge' in the two different
senses which I have already referred to, so as that we may experience,
and know by conscious experience, that love which the mere understanding
is incapable of grasping. That of course is an explanation which might
be defended, but I take it that it is much truer to the Apostle's
meaning to suppose that he uses the words 'know' and 'knowledge' both
times in the same sense. And so we get familiar thoughts which I touch
upon very briefly.

Our knowledge of Christ's love, though real, is incomplete, and must
always be so. You and I believe, I hope, that Christ's love is not a
man's love, or at least that it is more than a man's love. We believe
that it is the flowing out to us of the love of God, that all the
fulness of the divine heart pours itself through that narrow channel of
the human nature of our Lord, and therefore that the flow is endless and
the Fountain infinite.

I suppose I do not need to show you that it is possible for people to
have, and that in fact we do possess a real, a valid, a reliable
knowledge of that which is infinite; although we possess, as a matter of
course, no adequate and complete knowledge of it. But I only remind you
that we have before us in Christ's love something which, though the
understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding
led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures.
We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child