presence of the angels with their sword of flame told plainly
of a day when man would be coming back again to the old Eden home of God.
The place must be carefully guarded for him.

This is a <i>love</i> passion, a passion of love. And love itself is the master
passion both of the human heart and of God's heart. Nothing can grip and
fill and sway the heart either of man or God like that.

We would all easily agree that the greatest picture of God's marvellous,
overmastering passion of love is seen in the cross. All men as they have
come to know that story have stood with heads bowed and bared before the
love revealed there. They have not understood it. They have quarrelled
about its meaning. But they have acknowledged its love and power as beyond
that of any other story or picture.

However men may differ as to why Jesus died, and how His dying affects us,
they all agree that the scene of the cross is the greatest revelation of
love ever known or ever shown. All theories of the atonement seem to be
lost sight of in one thought of grateful acknowledgment of a stupendous
love, as men are drawn together by the magnetism of the hill-top of
Calvary.

But there is a wondrously clear foreshadowing of that tremendous cross
scene in the earliest page of this old Book. Nowhere is love, God's
passion of love, made to stand out more distinctly and vividly than in the
first chapter of Genesis. The after-scene of the cross uses intenser
coloring; the blacks are inkier in their blackness; the reds deeper and
redder; the contrasts sharper to the startling-point; yet there is nothing
in the cross chapters of the Gospels not included fully in this first leaf
of revelation. But it has taken the light of the cross to open our eyes to
see how much is plainly there. Let us look at it a bit.

<u>The Love Passion.</u>

What is this greatest of passions called love? There is no word harder to
get a satisfactory definition of. Because, whatever you say about it,
there comes quickly to your mind some one who loves you, or you think of
the passion that burns in your own heart for some one. And, as you think
of that, no words that anybody may use seem at all strong enough, or
tender enough, to tell what love is, as you know it in your own inner
heart.

Yet I think this much can be said--love is the tender, strong outgoing of
your whole being to another. It is a passion burning like a fire within
you, a soft-burning but intense fire wi