purity were not the term which represents the consummation of all other processes!

It is the putting of this heart disposition over against the mere force of knowledge that is declared to be God's method. This the power which will subdue the world. The conditions which are required for it, however, must be complied with.

In the first place, if divine benevolence, divine benignity, divine sympathy, or in other words the great truth of the divine element of love breathed into the human soul, is to redeem men from animalism, and lift them up into the sphere in which they shall be in unison with God, it must be developed with a fervor which has scarcely been known hitherto.

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself."

Men stand shuddering over against that command, and say, "It is impossible to obey it. Nobody can do that. That is metaphorical, and has to be taken in a general way." But there it stands from age to age, and declares that the power of God in this world is to be made known in the development in the human soul of this creative force of love; and every household on earth says, mutely or whisperingly, "Amen." Where is there anything which rises up from the animal so near to the spiritual as father and mother? Where are there schools, where are there parties, where are there sects, where is there anything on earth that does the work of overcoming the lower nature and fortifying it against all temptation, and blossoming out of it the higher, the sweeter, the benignant element of love, like the household, which is the primitive church, and the model of the church? It responds, "Thou shalt love, or thou art not worthy to be child; thou shalt love, or thou art not worthy to be brother; thou shalt love, or thou art not worthy to be sister." And having grown up out of family, having grown through new alliances, "Thou shalt love" stands at every threshold of permission. Over every door leading to amenities and liberties, stands, "Thou shalt love." In the path which leads to the joys and the happiness which belong to wedded souls,

stands "Thou shalt love." Everywhere in the course of the upward development of men, stands this great commandment of the universe: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself," coupling, by its thousand threads, mankind, in every sphere of life, and in every stage of development, from the lowest to the highest, and giving continuity to all human experience.

Now, to call the world to love is a very different thing from calling the world to orthodoxy.

Repent of your sins, and forsake them. Well, that is comparatively easy. To repent of and forsake a man's sins is nothing but to plow under the weeds, and let the ground lie fallow. That is a great deal better than nothing; but it would be poor farming, I take it, if a man were running his farm on that principle. There would be no weeds, but there would be no harvest. We are called to repentance, and we are called to new purposes of life. Well, purposes of life are quite indispensable; but no man ever throve on purposes. Yes, but we are to serve God. What is serving God? You are converted: where is your evidence of conversion? Does it consist in this: that you are born into such a spirit of kindness and love that that is the one controlling element of your nature? Are your pride and your selfishness obliged to lie down at its bidding? Is your taste inspired by it? Is your imagination colored by it? Is your will subordinate to it? Is it the one element that, like the sun, gives light, and lustre, and beauty, and form, and proportion to everything about it? Is it your central experience ? "Thou shalt love "—is that the law by which you are governed? Have you been born into that? Many and many a man has been born into zeal, into faith, into orthodoxy, into partisan church-ship, into aspirations for eternity; but no man is really born that is not born into love. All developments are miscarriages until you are born into that.

Even this love is not sufficient when it is only born as a babe. It must creep before it can walk; and it must creep fast in order to learn how to walk; and it must walk fast in order to learn how to run, and fly, and come into perfect

ascendency. It is the only one thing that has a right to enslave a man. There is nothing else that has a right to crown itself, and say, "I am sovereign in the human soul." It is that which is of God, and goes again to him, in all its tendencies, and bears in itself, more than the conscience does, the right to be a vicegerent of God.

No man preaching righteousness alone, no man preaching rectitude alone, no man preaching virtue alone, no man preaching wisdom alone, no man preaching taste and beauty alone, preaches the whole Gospel. These are but the fringes of the great truth of Christ which lies in this: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." You may have everything but that, and have nothing; and you may have that, and, though everything else is imperfect, that is the recreative force which will make it perfect.

With fervor, then, it must exist. Where it has existed, it has been in single isolated cases; it has been sporadic; it has not been the one central doctrine of the church; nor has it been the public sentiment of Christian communities from the beginning.

Many have held that in the process of regeneration a man must be brought to a condition of attention; that he must be arrested in his feelings; that he must be serious; that he must be convicted; that then he must be converted; that then he must rejoice; that then he must feel right; that he must have faith; that he must have activity; that he must try to do good; and-oh, yes, that he must have love, too, as one among other things-as one of the graces. But that is just the wrong view; love is the thing, it is the one thing, out of which are to sprout and root all other things good and wholesome.

Nor must it be an occasional exercise. It must have in it continuity and universality. This beneficence of soul must be proof against the soul's own self.

Never a monarch sat on the throne that there were not a dozen others who wanted his crown; and while love sits regent, especially in its minority, the other faculties seek to

asurp its place. Pride comes in a thousand ways, and reaches -out its hand for the crown, saying, "Get thee behind me, Love, and tell me what to do." It has usurped the place of love, and it is the better able to keep that place, because it is pride gilded with love.

Or, there comes Veneration in the same garb, stooping low, twin-brother of Fear, cousin to Superstition, and says, "Love, put off the shoes from off thy feet; this is holy ground; stand thou aside; thy light is too glaring; darken the window; put away all worldly and glittering realities; let men stand in mystic twilight; for I shall control the soul. Love, be thou a trembling star on my horizon, that I may be a hemisphere." So veneration is a usurper.

Beauty also comes, claiming that the universe was made for esthetic elements, for harmony, for innocent pleasures, and joys that spring therefrom; and therefore she, the sense of taste, of fitness, of fineness, assumes to be regnant in the soul.

Yet, after all, the word of the Lord standeth sure. There is but one commandment which is central, and that is love. Sit thou, O Love, on the throne, and rule in the name of God, thy Father. Thy sway must be supreme,-if need be arbitrary, and continuous,-until the very end.

More, there must be an atmosphere created of this feeling. It is not in the power of any individual to develop his faculties to the highest degree until he is brought under the influence of correlated developments, so that he shall have not only the help which comes from his own will-power, or from the strength of his own faculties, but also the stimulation which comes from the magnetic force of like faculties in other men. For no joy of one man alone is like the joy of a thousand men. No single voice is like the voice of a great multitude. No solitary impulse of patriotism is like the impulses of patriotism in a great people. And we can never know what love is, in its highest form, so long as it is like a single wax candle in a saint's shrine burning by itself. You cannot know what is the love of God in this world while it is manifested by one here, and another there, with distances so great that the interstitial spaces between are void. But when

churches are pervaded with the consciousness that the thing which Christ came to develop was the principle of selfsacrifice, of suffering, and of benevolence; when there is a universality and continuity of this spirit of love, so that churches shall feel it, and be filled with it, so that the voice which goes from one church to another shall be the voice of love when they are gathered together in their assemblies, and so that the one crowning experience shall be love, souls yearning for each other, and gleaming light upon each other from the varied shining facets of their lives, this love forever changing, forever growing, and being forever new and fresh-then its effect will begin to be felt. When the atmosphere which is created by love is such in a whole church that every man in it believes that he is what he is, not by his own organization and education and endeavors alone, but by reason of this feeling among the brethren, then you will begin to know what its power is. Love, if it is to subdue the rebellious passions in men, must find those passions weakened under its influence.

But is this the atmosphere of churches? Now and then the light of a revival pours into a church, and men do rise somewhat along the scale of love, and there is fellowship and good-will one toward another, and there is enthusiasm in cooperative labors of benevolence, and all discords die out, and old quarrels are settled, and stubborn hatreds disappear of themselves. The light and warmth of love at times are like the summer sun in March and April, which destroys that snow which all the winds could not blow away. On special occasions all things go down before it; and for moments we have an intermittent experience of what a church would be if all its members were inflamed with a spirit of love.

And suppose that not only one whole church, but all the churches of any one great denomination, had this spirit as a prime element of faith continually burning within them! If you have that spirit of self-sacrifice and love, you are right, and are in affiliation with God. If you have it not, you are so far wrong. You are wrong, not in proportion as you vary from articles of faith, and not in proportion as you go from this heterodoxy toward that orthodoxy. True orthodoxy is rightness of heart. Orthodoxy is nothing if its pervading and