who loved God
more than others did. We all know who they have been and gladly pay
tribute to the depths and sincerity of their devotion. We have but to
pause for a moment and their names come trooping past us smelling of
myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.

Frederick Faber was one whose soul panted after God as the roe pants
after the water brook, and the measure in which God revealed Himself to
his seeking heart set the good man's whole life afire with a burning
adoration rivaling that of the seraphim before the throne. His love for
God extended to the three Persons of the Godhead equally, yet he seemed
to feel for each One a special kind of love reserved for Him alone. Of
God the Father he sings:

Only to sit and think of God,
Oh what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name;
Earth has no higher bliss.

Father of Jesus, love's reward!
What rapture will it be,
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on Thee!

His love for the Person of Christ was so intense that it threatened to
consume him; it burned within him as a sweet and holy madness and flowed
from his lips like molten gold. In one of his sermons he says, "Wherever
we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning,
middle and end of everything to us.... There is nothing good, nothing
holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous which He is not to His servants.
No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his
own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the
joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts. We can
exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation
to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All
our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to
an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not
be long enough to learn all He is, or to praise Him for all He has done,
but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we
desire nothing more." And addressing our Lord directly he says to Him:

I love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control;
Thy love is like a burning fire
Within my very soul.

Faber's blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his
theology did he acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father
and the Son, but he celebrate