Brethren, if I could impress these words upon your hearts in a way and to a degree that would be adequate to their importance, I would return home in the happy reflection that I had been instrumental in doing a work by which God is glorified and my Brethren saved.  These words encompass the whole ground of salvation.  Inside this compass of brotherly love is salvation, and nowhere else.  Say what you please, love is what saves man after all.  Some say faith saves, and so it does when it is quickened and filled with the warmth of brotherly love.  Otherwise, though it be strong enough to remove mountains, as Paul says, it is nothing.  Faith without love is a dead faith.  Devils have this kind, and tremble.  This dead faith may be compared to ice which is water as to substance, but worthless as to form.  Frozen water may bridge rivers; and a frozen faith may bridge some of the streams of earthly life; but it will never bridge the stream of death and land us safe in heaven.

But what is to be understood by brethren loving one another with a pure heart fervently?  I am afraid that if I attempt to tell what brotherly love is, and how it is to be shown, I will only darken counsel by words without wisdom.  There is not a brother or sister in this house who does not know what it is to love another with a pure heart fervently.  I will, however, venture to say a little under this head, by way of drawing our minds to think more closely upon it.  I will say, first, that when one brother loves another with a pure heart fervently, he tries in all ways and at all times to do his brother good, and no harm.  This love fills the mouth with good things and the hands with blessings.

But the text implies that this love can be increased, that it may grow ardent, burning, by the use of right means, or suffered to grow cold by neglect.  There can be no doubt of the truth of this.  In all man’s relations to this life, experience shows that love may be fostered by kindness, or frozen by unkindness.  This last remark reminds me of a conversation I had with a United Brethren preacher whom I chanced to fall in with in one of the western counties of Virginia.  Speaking of his work, and the number of converts he reported at different meetings he had held, led me to ask how they were doing since then.  He replied that a goodly number appeared to continue faithful; but he added that some had burnt out by unholy fire, and that others had frozen out by unholy frost.  I afterward thought this to myself, that here was the commingled fire and hail which John, in his apocalyptic vision, saw falling from the same cloud.  Ah, Brethren, let us beware of the unholy fire of evil passion, anger, malice, wrath, strife, that would burn and consume our love for one another; and on the other hand avoid all feelings and expressions or other manifestations of contempt, or neglect, or unkindness that would freeze it to death.