rightly than the sun
which, at the brightest, it but reflects. In such a matter we can but
stammer when we try to find words. As our text warns us, we are trying
to utter the unutterable when we seek to speak of God's giving up for
us; but however such a thought may seem to be forbidden by other aspects
of the divine nature, it seems to be involved in the great truth that
'God is love.' Since He is, His blessedness too, must be in imparting,
and in parting with what He gives. A humble worshipper in Jewish times
loved enough to say that he would not offer unto God an offering that
cost him nothing, and that loving height of self-surrender was at the
highest, but a lowly imitation of the love to which it looked up. When
Paul in the Epistle to the Romans says, 'He that spared not His own Son
but delivered Him up for us all,' he is obviously alluding to, and all
but quoting, the divine words to Abraham, 'Seeing thou hast not withheld
thy son, thine only son, from Me,' and the allusion permits us to
parallel what God did when He sent His Son with what Abraham did when,
with wrung heart, but with submission, he bound and laid Isaac on the
altar and stretched forth his hand with the knife in it to slay him.
Such a representation contradicts the vulgar conceptions of a
passionless, self-sufficing, icy deity, but reflection on the facts of
our own experience and on the blessed secrets of our own love, leads us
to believe that some shadow of loss passed across the infinite and
eternal completeness of the divine nature when 'God sent forth His Son
made of a woman.' And may we not go further and say that when Jesus on
the Cross cried from out of the darkness of eclipse, 'My God! My God!
Why hast Thou forsaken me?' there was something in the heavens
corresponding to the darkness that covered the earth and something in
the Father's heart that answered the Son's. But our text warns us that
such matters are not for our handling in speech, and are best dealt
with, not as matters of possibly erring speculation, but as materials
for lowly thanks unto God for His unspeakable gift.

But whatever may be true about the love of the Father who sent, there
can be no doubt about the love of the Son who came. No man helps his
fellows in suffering but at the cost of his own suffering. Sympathy
means _fellow-feeling_, and the one indispensable condition of all
rescue work of any sort is that the rescuer must bear on his own
shoulders the sins or sor