ure of the depth
of the love of Christ.

And there is another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless
miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that
goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is
deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns
away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face
from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be
aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's
love comes down to the most sunken. However far in the abyss of
degradation any human soul has descended, beneath it are the everlasting
arms, and beneath it is Christ's love. When a coalpit gets blocked up by
some explosion, no brave rescuing party will venture to descend into the
lowest depths of the poisonous darkness until some ventilation has been
restored. But this loving Christ goes down, down, down into the
thickest, most pestilential atmosphere, reeking with sin and corruption,
and stretches out a rescuing hand to the most abject and undermost of
all the victims. How deep is the love of Christ! The deep mines of sin
and of alienation are all undermined and countermined by His love. Sin
is an abyss, a mystery, how deep only they know who have fought against
it; but

'O love! thou bottomless abyss,
My sins are swallowed up in thee.'

'I will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.' The depths of
Christ's love go down beneath all human necessity, sorrow, suffering,
and sin.

IV. And lastly, what is the height of the love of Christ?

We found that the way to measure the depth was to begin at the Throne,
and go down to the Cross, and to the foul abysses of evil. The way to
measure the height is to begin at the Cross and the foul abysses of
evil, and to go up to the Throne. That is to say, the topmost thing in
the Universe, the shining apex and pinnacle, glittering away up there in
the radiant unsetting light, is the love of God in Jesus Christ. Other
conceptions of that divine nature spring high above us and tower beyond
our thoughts, but the summit of them all, the very topmost as it is the
very bottommost, outside of everything, and therefore high above
everything, is the love of God which has been revealed to us all, and
brought close to us sinful men in the manhood and passion of our dear
Christ.

And that love which thus towers above us, and gleams like the shi