would have been long ago
exhausted by your sins and mine, and our brethren's. But the pitying
Christ, the eternal Lover of all wandering souls, looks down from heaven
upon every one of us; goes with us in all our wanderings, bears with us
in all our sins, in all our transgressions still is gracious. His
pleadings sound on, like some stop in an organ continuously persistent
through all the other notes. And round His throne are written the divine
words which have been spoken about our human love modelled after His:
'Charity suffereth long and is kind; is not easily provoked, is not soon
angry, beareth all things.' The length of the love of Christ is the
length of eternity, and outmeasures all human sin.

III. Then again, what is the depth of that love?

Depth and height, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, are but
two ways of expressing the same dimension. For the one we begin at the
top and measure down, for the other we begin at the bottom and measure
up. The top is the Throne; and the downward measure, how is it to be
stated? In what terms of distance are we to express it? How far is it
from the Throne of the Universe to the manger of Bethlehem, and the
Cross of Calvary, and the sepulchre in the garden? That is the depth of
the love of Christ. Howsoever far may be the distance from that
loftiness of co-equal divinity in the bosom of the Father, and radiant
with glory, to the lowliness of the form of a servant, and the sorrows,
limitations, rejections, pains and death--that is the measure of the
depth of Christ's love. We can estimate the depth of the love of Christ
by saying, 'He came from above, He tabernacled with us,' as if some
planet were to burst from its track and plunge downwards in amongst the
mist and the narrowness of our earthly atmosphere.

A well-known modern scientist has hazarded the speculation that the
origin of life on this planet has been the falling upon it of the
fragments of a meteor, or an aerolite from some other system, with a
speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever
may be the case in regard to physical life, that is absolutely true in
the case of spiritual life. It all originates because this
heaven-descended Christ has come down the long staircase of Incarnation,
and has brought with Him into the clouds and oppressions of our
terrestrial atmosphere a germ of life which He has planted in the heart
of the race, there to spread for ever. That is the meas