self first to Love. Hold things in
their proportion. _Hold things in their proportion._ Let at least the
first great object of our lives be to achieve the character defended
in these words, the character--and it is the character of
Christ--which is built round Love.

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually
John associates love and faith with eternal life? I was not told when
I was a boy that "God so loved the world that He gave His
only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should have
everlasting life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved
the world that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called
peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have
safety. But I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in
Him--that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to
Love--hath

EVERLASTING LIFE.

The Gospel offers a man a life. Never offer a man a thimbleful of
Gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest,
or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more
abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore
abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the
alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the Gospel take
hold of the whole of a man, body, soul and spirit, and give to each
part of his nature its exercise and reward. Many of the current
Gospels are addressed only to a part of man's nature. They offer
peace, not life; faith, not Love; justification, not regeneration. And
men slip back again from such religion because it has never really
held them. Their nature was not all in it. It offered no deeper and
gladder life-current than the life that was lived before. Surely it
stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of
the world.

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to
live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.
We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live
to-morrow. Why do we want to live to-morrow? Is it because there is
some one who loves you, and whom you want to see to-morrow, and be
with, and love back? There is no other reason why we should live on
than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love
him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love
him and whom he loves, he will li