But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such
stress on God's gift of peace, or is so sure of it. He uses Hosea's
great saying about God--"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea
6:6), as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents him as
quoting it twice (Matt. 9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he
found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it. His own
heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old
Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets. "Love your
enemies," he says (Matt. 5:44); yes, for then you will be the real
children of God. Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God
gives every man all the time and all the chance that he
needs--sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more. Look at the
parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs
and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God,
says Jesus.

It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God. But
the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little
content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an
abstract, a concept. But that God loves individual men is very
difficult for us to believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the
question rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?" Jesus says
that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company
of Jesus and under his influence. Jesus throughout asserts and
reasserts the value of the individual to God. Look, for example, at
the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost
Sheep, and brings out the analogy. At the end of the Book of Job
(ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a
world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and
creator--we might not have thought of all this, but the poet
did--loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it
with him. He calls them; he shows them the world he has made--"the
beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning says. The poet
tells us that what followed was that "the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." The sight was so
good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily.
Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven in
the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth"?
We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we
believe that there