Only let me press upon you that that conviction of the love of God, which is found now far beyond the limits of Christian faith, and amongst many of us who, in the name of that conviction itself, reject Christianity, because of its sterner aspects, is historically the child of the evangelical doctrine of the Incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  And if it still subsists, as I know it does, especially in this generation, amongst many men who reject what seems to me to be the very kernel of Christianity—­subsists like the stream cut off from its source, but still running, that only shows that men hold many convictions the origin of which they do not know.  God is love.  You will not permanently sustain that belief against the pressure of outward mysteries and inward sorrows, unless you grasp the other conviction that Christ died for our sins.  The two are inseparable.

And now lastly—­

III.  What kind of love does Christ’s death declare to us as existing in God?

A love that is turned away by no sin—­that is the thing that strikes the Apostle here, as I have already pointed out.  The utmost reach of human affection might be that a man would die for the good—­he would scarcely die for the righteous.  But God sends His Son, and comes Himself in His Son, and His Son died for the ungodly and the sinner.  That death reveals a love which is its own origin and motive.  We love because we discern, or fancy we do, something lovable in the object.  God loves under the impulse, so to speak, of His own welling-up heart.

And yet it is a love which, though not turned away by any sin, is witnessed by that death to be rigidly righteous.  It is no mere flaccid, flabby laxity of a loose-girt affection, no mere foolish indulgence like that whereby earthly parents spoil their children.  God’s love is not lazy good-nature, as a great many of us think it to be and so drag it in the mud, but it is rigidly righteous, and therefore Christ died.  That Death witnesses that it is a love which shrinks from no sacrifices.  This Isaac was not ‘spared.’  God gave up His Son.  Love has its very speech in surrender, and God’s love speaks as ours does.  It is a love which, turned away by no sin, and yet rigidly righteous and shrinking from no sacrifices, embraces all ages and lands.  ’God commendeth’—­not ‘commended.’  The majestic present tense suggests that time and space are nothing to the swift and all-filling rays of that great Light.  That love is ‘towards us,’ you and me and all our fellows.  The Death is an historical fact, occurring in one short hour.  The Cross is an eternal power, raying out light and love over all humanity and through all ages.