I suppose that I may venture to use these expressions with a somewhat
different purpose from that for which the Apostle employs them; and to
see in each of them a separate and blessed aspect of the love of God in
Jesus Christ our Lord.

I. What, then, is the breadth of that love?

It is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so
all creatures rest in the heaven of His love. Mankind has many common
characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all
aspire, hope, and die; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the
same relation to the divine love which lies in Jesus Christ. There are
no step-children in God's great family, and none of them receives a more
grudging or a less ample share of His love and goodness than every
other. Far-stretching as the race, and curtaining it over as some great
tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ's
love is the breadth of humanity.

And it is universal because it is divine. No human mind can be stretched
so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human
heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute
universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual
difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our affections, and
the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and
forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which
is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness
and clingingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and
passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness
and eternity of a divine heart.

And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is
broad. Our love is too often like the estuary of some great stream which
runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as
soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity
of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal
philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ's love is deep
though it is wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared
amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread
for five thousand men, women, and children, all seated on the grass,
'and they did all eat and were filled.'

The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. He does not love
as we do, who give a part of our heart to this