of his Father’s glory. I know (for the
Gospel tells me), that he dared all things, endured
all things, in the depth of his great love, for the
sake of sinful men. I know that when he knew
what was going to happen to him; when he knew that
he should be mocked, scourged, crucified, he deliberately,
calmly, faced all that shame, horror, agony, and went
up willingly to Jerusalem to suffer and to die there;
because he was full of the Spirit of God, the spirit
of charity and love. I know that he was so
full of it, that as he went up on his fatal journey,
with a horrible death staring him in the face, still,
instead of thinking of himself, he was thinking of
others, and could find time to stop and heal the poor
blind man by the way side, who called ‘Jesus,
thou Son of David, have mercy on me.’ And
in him and his love will I trust, when there seems
nothing else left to trust on earth.
Oh, my friends, believe this with your whole heart.
Whatever happens to you or to your friends, happens
out of the eternal charity of God, who cannot change,
who cannot hate, who can be nothing but what he is
and was, and ever will be—love.
And when St. Paul tells you, as he told you in the
Epistle to-day, to have charity, to try for charity,
because it is the most excellent way to please God,
and the eternal virtue, which will abide for ever
in heaven, when all wisdom and learning, even about
spiritual things, which men have had on earth, shall
seem to us when we look back such as a child’s
lessons do to a grown man;—when, I say,
St. Paul tells you to try after charity, he tells
you to be like God himself; to be perfect even as
your Father in heaven is perfect; to bear and forbear
because God does so: to give and forgive because
God does so; to love all because God loves all, and
willeth that none should perish, but that all should
come to the knowledge of the truth.
How he will fulfil that; how he fulfilled it last
summer with those poor souls in India, we know not,
and never shall know in this life. Let it be
enough for us that known unto God are all his works
from the foundation of the world, and that his charity
embraces the whole universe.
James i. 17.
Every good gift, and every perfect gift is from above,
and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom
is neither variableness, nor shadow of turning.
It seems an easy thing for us here to say, ‘I
believe in God.’ We have learnt from our
childhood that there is but one God. It seems
to us strange and ridiculous that people anywhere should
believe in more gods than one. We never heard
of any other doctrine, except in books about the heathen;
and there are perhaps not three people in this church
who ever saw a heathen man, or talked to him.
