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 Active Love a criterion of Spiritual Life 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PBKACHKD IN SrBSTAXCE AT 
 
 ST. JAMESES CHURCH, PICCADILLY 
 
 BEFORE THH 
 
 C|urc| Ijciiiiciitiaq Association 
 
 THURSDAY, MAY 15, 18G--i 
 
 HENRY PARRY LIDDON, M.A. 
 
 STUDENT OF CIIKIST CHURCH, AND VICB-PEINCIPAL OF ST, EDMUND HALL, OXFOKD 
 
 PRINTED FOR THE .ASSOCIATION DY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE & CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 1862
 
 SERMON. 
 
 1 John, iii. 14. 
 
 * We hioiv that ive have passed from death unto life, because 
 we love the brethren.^ 
 
 St. John is in a peculiar sense the geographer of the 
 Spiritual World ; and his first Epistle is our Chart or Hand- 
 book of the Life of God in the liuman soul. With such a 
 guide it is not difficult for even the least practised traveller 
 to find his way ; since the apostle gives the fullest and most 
 particular description of that beautiful district, so rich in all 
 that moves our interest and our wonder. His is no colourless 
 outline, but a picture wherein hill and valley, light and 
 shade, desert and garden, are each portrayed. The richest 
 pastures, the highest elevations of this marvellous region — 
 its points of contact with and points of unlikeness to the life 
 of Nature — its products and its resources — its outward 
 and fugitive characteristics of surface, and its deep inner 
 unchanging laws, whether of growth or of decay, are here in 
 succession brought before us. There is no mistaking the 
 more prominent features ; they stand out in statements so 
 unlike aught else in human speech, except the very Words of 
 Our Lord Himself, that for a moment we know not whether 
 most to marvel at the simplicity of the language which 
 conveys them, or at the greatness and depth of the truth 
 which it conveys. * If we say that we have no sin, we deceive 
 ourselves ' — 'He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His 
 commandments, is a liar ' — ' All that is of the world, the lust 
 of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is 
 not of the Father ' — * Every man that hath this hope in him 
 purifieth himself — 'Wliatsoever is born of God doth not 
 commit sin ' — ' Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus 
 Christ is come in the Flesh, is not of God ' — ' He that loveth 
 not, knoweth not God ' — ' We know that we are of God, and 
 the whole world lieth in wickedness.' 
 
 Each truth, taken apart from its context, seems perfect and 
 complete in itself. Each truth, when first encountered, 
 meets us, as if, filled with life, it sparkled in the liglit like a 
 precious stone, that the soul's eye may seek to discover its 
 
 A 2
 
 hidden meaning.* Each is presented to us without limita- 
 tions, without toning doAvn or shading off, without balance 
 of truth against truth, without the conditions wliich we know 
 must affect our final estimate. As we gaze, each seems 
 gradually to rise before us, like a mountain-peak, bold and 
 clear against the sky of heaven — for the time narrowing 
 up the horizon of the soul, and occupying its whole field of 
 vision ; that, contemplating with undistracted sight the force 
 and beauty of each separate truth, the soul may }deld itself 
 to each, first to one and then to another, and may thus be 
 successively fascinated, possessed, transfigured, changed by 
 each from glory to glory. 
 
 This character of teacliing — always most forcible — is 
 especially needful for those who are recent converts to the 
 Faitli of Christ. To them, the lines which separate truth and 
 falsehood, sin and holiness, are not as yet so clear that the 
 sight of these bold and prominent landmarks can be dis- 
 pensed with. Such persons are still, to a great extent, feeling 
 tlieir way. That which may be a platitude or an axiom to 
 others, has for them all the welcome freshness of a newly- 
 discovered and original truth. Writing for such as these, ' 
 who sit on the lower forms in the school of Our Blessed 
 Saviour, the Apostle of Love makes himself at once under- 
 stood by them ; while yet his words, that seem so simple, 
 reveal an unfathomable depth of truth to those who have 
 known Our Lord best and longest. In mapping out the 
 New Life for beginners, he does not forget the needs of the 
 most advanced. The New Life, which Oiu Lord has by His 
 Spirit shed upon the Church, is in this epistle drawn out 
 from the recesses of the soul into the public highway of 
 human language. Here we note the essence of this life — 
 communion with the Father and His Blessed Son. Here we 
 see its ideal — notliing less than perfection in the ways of 
 God. Here we study its calm yet firm grasp of revealed 
 dogma, its sense of remaining inner sin, yet of abounding 
 light, streaming from the Unction of the Holy One, its pro- 
 found opposition to the spirit and maxims of corrupt 
 human society, which is called the ' world.' Here, above all, 
 we are taught to understand that which is, in some respects, 
 its most characteristic feature, and the certain secret of its 
 attractive power over the hearts of men. The ' love of the 
 brethren ' is unfolded to us as being the shadow of that 
 Heavenly Love which shone in Its brightest splendour upon 
 the Cross. 
 
 1. The text, then, is addressed to a state of mind in which 
 
 * Ebrard. Johannisbriefe Einl. p. 40. ^^*"\. 
 
 uRic; 
 
 v./
 
 there is still more or less of anxiety as to whether the soul has 
 indeed and really passed, at its conversion, from the sphere 
 of death to the sphere of life. It cannot be difficult for many 
 here to enter with at least some sympathy into that very dis- 
 tressing yet not uncommon trial of the soul. We know how, 
 when a great joy or a great sorrow comes upon us, all seems 
 at first unreal and phantom-like. In its rapture or its 
 agony, the soul loses its hold even of the every-day certainties 
 of feeling and experience. Life seems for the time a dream, 
 and, like night-sentinels, we challenge each duty and each 
 friend to answer to their names and purposes. This passing- 
 sense of insecurity is more common in the life of grace than in 
 that of natiu-e, because the former is more entirely removed 
 from the visible things to which our weakness clings than 
 the latter. And so here we have a doubt, produced by the 
 very greatness of the gift of Life, whether Life has been given 
 after all. The vision seems too blessed to be more than 
 a vision — too glorious to be literally true. Is there any one 
 symptom or fact upon which the mind can fall back as upon 
 a decisive proof that all is not a dream ? Can we be con- 
 vinced that the change is as real and the gift as certain as 
 the promise of God is sure, and that that encompassing 
 presence of doubt and shadow is itself a transient and un- 
 trustworthy illusion ? Can we know that we are standing 
 on the firm ground of the Land of Life, and that the sun is 
 shining on us from its glorious Heaven ? 
 
 Now, it is to this condition of soul, thus craving for a 
 criterion of true Life, that St. John incidentally addresses 
 himself. ' We know,' he says, ' that we have passed from 
 death unto life.' And how ? Before we consider his decision 
 more narrowly, observe what it is that he does not say. He 
 says not, Because we have been baptised. Not that he doubted 
 the regenerating efficacy of the sacrament which he had him- 
 self* traced up to its fountain-head in the Riven Side of the 
 Crucified, but because he knew that it is one thing to have 
 been called into a state of salvation, and another to have per- 
 severed in it. Nor, again. Because we have an assurance that 
 we live. Not that he would question the inner supernatural 
 consolations which God might bestow upon favoured souls, 
 but because, besides cutting off all hope for tliose who did 
 not share in this rare and precarious experience, he might by 
 such a test have encouraged the easy confidence of a dull and 
 torpid conscience, or even of a particular physical tempera- 
 ment. Nor yet does he say, Because God has strewn our 
 path with temporal blessings. The sun, shone and the rain 
 fell as well upon the persecuting empire as upon the perse- 
 
 * 1 John, V. G: S. Jolni. xix. M.
 
 6 
 
 cuted Church ; if temporal prosperity is the blessings of the 
 Older dispensation, adversity, it has been remarked, is rather 
 the bk^ssing of the New ; and the apostle wovdd hardly put 
 forward a criterion which would deny their spiritual vitality to 
 the Martyrs in their agony, while attributing it to the Pagans 
 who shed their blood. Least of all does he sa}^, Because we 
 have made a great intellectual progress — because we have 
 advanced in speculation, and adopted new modes of thought, 
 and exploded many antiquated traditions of our forefathers. 
 Certainly Christianity, as a revelation, was an advance on 
 Judaism ; but to regard God's gift of a higher knowledge as 
 a sort of intellectual decoration, which of itself was a test of 
 life, wo\dd have been to forget that there is a knowledge of 
 truth in hell, and to encourage a tone of self-assertion which 
 is as remote as possible from the true temper of the gospel. 
 No ; St. John points to a deeper test. The grace of sacraments 
 may be forfeited ; the sense of assurance, a delusion ; a 
 worldly prosperity may be the seal of reprobation ; and in- 
 tellectual progress may go hand in hand with the deepest 
 spiritual degradation. But there is a test of life which 
 points as a rule to a sacramental origin, and which warrants 
 a humble assurance of God's favour, and which can use or 
 dispense with temporal well-being, and which encourages an 
 even deeper knowledge of that Truth which is its Object. 
 My brethren, — that test is Love. 
 
 2. Human life, wherever unrenewed by our Lord's blessing 
 and doctrine, has been consistently marked by the manifested 
 presence of unchecked selfishness. Whether coarse and brutal, 
 or polished and refined, selfishness is the moral attitude of 
 uncluistianised man. The society of the old Eoman Empire, 
 rising from the base of its vast slave population, to its apex 
 in the Caesar, was a vast hierarchy of selfishness, in which 
 class preyed on class, and man on man. And what, let us 
 ask, is selfishness ? It is refracted love. It is that perversion 
 of love which fixes it on a false object — viz., self. God has 
 endowed every human being with a fund of love ; and you 
 will find no heart so brutal or so hard as not to retain, in some 
 depth or corner, some portion of this original endowment. 
 God gave to man this love, that by it man might seek Him- 
 self Who gave it; it was to be the moral law of an attraction, 
 whereby the human soul should move around, while gravitat- 
 ing towards its Centre. Certainly the selfish man loves ; but in 
 his case the ray of love, instead of darting upwards from the 
 heart to embrace its One Rightful Object, and then at His 
 bidding to shed its blessed tenderness upon a fellow-creature, 
 is at once, by a perverse and miserable deflection, bent l)ack- 
 wards upon its source. Thus the selfish man becomes, through
 
 this refraction of his love, liis own centre, his own end — it 
 is an awful thought, — his own Grod.* His life is not neces- 
 sarily inactive ; but his activity is simply the measure of his 
 love of self. All that play of thought and feeling, all that 
 energy and passion of movement, all that incessant and 
 exacting routine of public labours and of private duties, all 
 turns out, upon ultimate analysis, to be nothing higher than 
 a life-long, processional worship, which the man offers to the 
 divinity of self. It may be tliat he will even admit this to 
 be so. He has erected his own miserable experience into 
 a theory. He will tell you that he has seen a great deal of 
 life, and that he does not believe in the existence of a really 
 unselfish or disinterested character. His doctrine is broadly 
 this — that every man has his price if you can succeed in dis- 
 covering it ; and that the only real diff'erence is that which 
 lies between those who acknowledge the empire of self over 
 the conduct of human life on the one hand, and those who 
 vainly endeavour to disguise it, whether from themselves or 
 from mankind at large, on the other. 
 
 Yet, let us recognise the truth — selfishness is death. Not 
 always social death : a selfish man may succeed in pushing 
 his way in the world. Not always political death : a selfish 
 policy may, at least temporarily, win for a people wealth or 
 power, or some form of merely material greatness. But moral 
 death ; — aye, always and everywhere. For in the moral world 
 love is analogous to those mighty forces in nature whereby 
 planets are kept true to the orbit in which they move around their 
 central suns. If this regulating love be diverted from its true 
 object — if the planet aspires to become its own sun — what can 
 ensue but disaster and ruin ? And yet a selfish life, however 
 full of annoyance and distress to others, is most ruinous, after 
 all, to the man who lives it. One by one the tendrils which the 
 character would throw out around other lives are withered and 
 killed ; one by one the finer sensibilities of the soul are deadened ; 
 one by one the symptoms of the moral life become fainter and 
 less distinct. In time, love, centring more and more in- 
 tensely upon self, loses the proper character of love, and dies 
 outright. The heart of the moral life has ceased to beat ; 
 the senses of the soul no longer feel ; the selfish man is a 
 moral corpse. Living in a world of suff'eriug, he is blind to 
 the wounds and deaf to the entreaties of his fellow-men : 
 they crave sympathy, and he is dumb ; they implore relief, 
 and he is motionless. Aye, he infects the very air of society 
 around him ; the contagion of his example spreads like 
 a pestilence ; and the moral constitution must be strong in 
 holiness and love to resist the infection of that noisome 
 
 * riiil. iii. 19, where St. Paul applies this moral doctriue to gluttony.
 
 8 
 
 atmosphere which he has generated, and which hangs heavily 
 aroimd him. ' Bnt then he is a man of letters ? ' It may be, 
 ' Influential and stirring ? ' Possibly. ' So refined, so accom- 
 plished, so religious ? ' Brethren, I really cannot help it. St. 
 John has already described his real condition: 'He that 
 loveth not his brother abideth in death.' Mark that — 
 ' abideth.' It is a state of moral death, which lasts. The 
 selfish activity of his natural life is but a foil which shows forth 
 more plainly the abiding death of his spirit. His powers of 
 business, of discussion, of administration, of criticism, stand 
 in ghastly contrast with the absence of true, self-forgetting 
 sympathy for any single human being. It is not a trance 
 that we witness ; it is not epilepsy or paralysis ; it is the 
 grave. Dark is that soul in which God's light shines not ; 
 cold, in which God's love burns not ; corrupt, for already the 
 worms of self-indulgence and conceit, and envy and disap- 
 pointment, are gnawing out the cold and fetid heart, which has 
 preceded the body that encases it in its passage to the tomb. 
 Speaking for the God of Love, I might well be expected to 
 bear no malice or hatred in my breast. Yet I am con- 
 strained to confess to you, brethren, that I do hate selfishness. 
 Not selfish men ; God forbid, they are my brothers ; but 
 selfishness, that plague-spot of human life — that parent 
 of its errors and its misery. Surely it is hateful, when we 
 look hard at it. Hateful when incarnate in an opinion, a 
 mere human speculation, which yet dares to say to the con- 
 sciences of men. Believe me : I am the Truth. Hateful when 
 seated upon a throne and crowned, not to nde for the good 
 of the many, but to cry to the peoples, I am Power : obey me. 
 Hateful when its mouthpiece is a demagogue, who seems to 
 say to a deluded populace. Claim your rights, but who in 
 truth whispers. Carry me to power. But never so intensely 
 hateful as when, crouching behind a lustful passion, reckless of 
 shame and cost, it mutters aloud, Gratify me. And we are 
 on this occasion led inevitably to reflect on this the most 
 odious and repulsive of all the known forms of selfishness. 
 Nowhere, you will observe, are the ravages of selfishness so 
 dreadful as in the sphere which is traversed by the Church 
 Penitentiary Association on its blessed errand of mercy. 
 Nowhere else is self worshipped with sacrifices of such price 
 and beauty. Here, like another Moloch, it is appeased by 
 the agony of human victims : here its altars are indeed 
 reddened with human gore. Elsewhere it may content itself 
 with wealth, or incense, or supremacy, or pleasure ; here it 
 must have the bodies and the souls of women and of men. 
 It feeds upon the bloom and health and life-strength of its 
 victim's body, after contemptuously snatching and casting to 
 the wdnds the peace and joy, and conscience and salvation
 
 9 
 
 of that victim's soul. What, I would ask, is this selfishness 
 of sensuality, when really reigning in a man, but the very 
 abomination of desolation in the temple of Grod ? What is 
 this stamp of moral and physical degradation, which proclaims 
 the reign of sensualised self, but the genuine mark of the 
 Beast ? 
 
 3. Let us turn to St. John's account of the symptom by 
 which we Christians may know that we have passed from 
 death unto life. The Alpine climber, who has no instrument 
 at hand by which to ascertain his exact elevation, yet can 
 observe that the vegetation has altered its character, or that 
 it is disappearing, or that the air he breathes is sensibly 
 more rare and more exhilarating, or that the line of snow is 
 just above him. The traveller who crosses by night the 
 frontier which divides two empires, unable to detect the exact 
 line of the boundary, yet can note the change of language, 
 the change of uniform, the altered character of the general 
 culture, and deportment, and civilisation of the people. The 
 moral world, too, has its indistinct frontier lines, and yet also 
 its broad distinctions, which prove that the frontiers are real. 
 How, then, can we know that we are on the mountain-side with 
 our Heavenly Guide, high above the mists of the vale of 
 selfishness ? How can we be sure that the spiritual frontier 
 has been really passed, which separates the Kingdom of the 
 Living from the Realm of Death ? St. John replies. Because 
 we love the brethren. Spiritual privileges, a confident 
 temper, worldly prosperity, or intellectual movement, do not 
 prove what is proved by the presence of love. For ' God is 
 love ; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God 
 in him.' * When we feel our heart beat with these divine 
 pulsations of a Higher Life, we know that we have passed the 
 Ru.bicon, and that we are in our True Country. For beyond 
 the frontier of the Kingdom of the Incarnation, there is no 
 such thing as this New Love of the brethren. There is much 
 that seems like it, although in truth profoundly distinct. 
 There is the love of relations, friends, and country ; the love 
 of those whom we benefit or who do us good ; the love which 
 is secure of its return, whether of service or affection. But 
 this love of those whom we like, or who like us, is obviously, 
 and from the nature of the case, a narrow love. It is always 
 bounded, and you need not travel far to discover its range. 
 It follows in the wake of a family influence, or of a national 
 flag, or of the traditions of a school, or of a political party, or of 
 a philosophical system. Moreover, on a closer examination, it 
 turns out to be only a disguised form of the love of self. The 
 truth must be spoken : in a state of nature man does not love 
 
 * 1 John, iv. 16.
 
 10 
 
 liis fellow-man. The civilised man does not love the savage, 
 nor the savage the civilised man, nor the civilised man the 
 man who is equally civilised -with himself. Contempt, fear, 
 and rivalry are the natui'al relations of fallen man with his 
 brother man ; and they are incompatible -svith love. Nature 
 does not teach the rich to love the poor, nor the high-born 
 to love the lower orders, nor the intelligent to love the stupid, 
 nor the respectable to love those who have lost their cha- 
 racter. If natural men help each other, it is from a motive 
 of fear or of interest, or, at best, of duty — but with a secret 
 repulsion that forbids the growth of love. In the natural 
 order of life, man fears, suspects, envies, despises, contemns 
 his brother : he does not love him. Human life is made up 
 of a tissue of personal feuds, of family quarrels, of class 
 hatreds, of professional hatreds, of national hatreds ; and 
 these are carefully hoarded up and decked out by those who 
 wTite human history as being forsooth its time-honoured tradi- 
 tions, and then they are passed on as heirlooms from generation 
 to generation. Jesus Christ our Lord and Sa\iour came 
 doAvn from heaven that He might banish from the hearth of 
 the human family its old antipathies, and introduce the reign 
 of good\\'ill amongst men. ' A new commandment,' He said 
 to His generation — ' a new commandment I give imto you, that 
 ye love one another.' Xew as it was, that commandment 
 was obeyed. Jesus Christ shone in His perfection upon the 
 human heart, and, like the closed bud, it opened at the bidding 
 of the shining sun. In lo^dng Our Blessed Savioiu", men were 
 trained to the love of Grod : in learning to love the Unseen 
 and Incomprehensible Grod, the heart opened sufficiently to 
 love the human brotherhood. To the Christian, every human 
 being became an object of interest and of affection. The 
 love of the Christian was to follow in the track of the Love 
 Which had created and redeemed the world. Had not God 
 made each separate human life ? Had not Jesus Christ died 
 for each separate human life ? Then surely each human 
 life must be fidl of dignity and of mystery. Just as the 
 botanist finds interest in that which to others is but as a 
 worthless weed, so, beneath the shadow of the Cross, the 
 Christian sees in every human being a mind that can know 
 the Very and Eternal Trutli — a heart that can make 
 answer to the Heart of God — a vast unexplored inner world of 
 thought, feeling, resolve, desire, hope, grief, anguish, passion. 
 To tlie Christian, every separate life is seen to be no mere 
 specimen of a class : for has it not its own special work ? does 
 it not, like a meteor across the heavens, pursue its own path 
 in time — a path which none other can share — a path which 
 has its own length, its o^vn brightness, its o^vn darkness, its 
 own end ? Is not every living man in one of two states, and
 
 u 
 
 has he not one of two eternal destinies before him, and is 
 there not some one special work which he alone was meant to 
 do ? Who can refuse interest to human life, when in the school 
 of Jesus Christ he has learnt its value ? And yet this interest 
 may be merely speculative ; it is not necessarily love. But 
 then, in every soul the Christian beholds the image of the Great 
 Object of his true affection : every soul speaks to him of the 
 handy-work of the Creator, and of the Tears and Blood of the 
 Redeemer, and of the toil and Breath of the Sanctifier. The love 
 of Grod lavished in profusion upon the unthankful and the evil 
 obliges the Christian not merely to love his Christian brother, 
 but to love his brother man as man. It was wonderful, that 
 first awakening of this perception in the human heart, at our 
 Blessed Saviour's bidding. That primitive love had all the 
 charm of a newly-discovered accomplishment, unknown to 
 previous generations ; and it was practised by the missionaries 
 and martyrs of early Christendom as if with the buoyant delight 
 that is moved by recent discovery. It was like a new sense 
 developed from within, opening indeed upon familiar objects, 
 but perceiving in them a revelation of unsuspected beauty ; 
 it had all that keenness of appetite and fresh vigour of appre- 
 ciation which no impaired health or spirits had as yet blunted 
 or enfeebled. Here was a heaven-sent faculty, capable of 
 breasting the devastating forces of selfishness, and of renew- 
 ing the face of the earth. Human thought had dared to 
 dream of a love that should be absolutely humanitarian — 
 that should be bounded only by the limits of the race ; and 
 lo ! Christ our Lord had realised it ! 
 
 4. We need not to linger on this attractive topic, for again and 
 again the world has done homage to this feature of our Lord's 
 work. It has admired the largeness, the disinterestedness, 
 the tenderness, the depth, the gracefulness of the love which He 
 has shed on human hearts. It has even acknowledged in this 
 love a power which might regenerate society — a panacea for its 
 own manifold woes. And it has gone on to ask, ' Cannot we, 
 too, cultivate this love, apart from that belief which accompa- 
 nies it in the Church ? Cannot we utilise it in our camps 
 and hospitals — cannot we make it the stay and the embellish- 
 ment of our human life, without at the same time accepting that 
 system of dogma, that high moral ideal, that priesthood, those 
 historical Scriptures and those mystical Sacraments ? Surely,' 
 it has proceeded to insinuate, ' these things are but the outer 
 husk and form, while love is the imperishable spirit and life ; 
 we will sever the spirit from the letter, the essence from the 
 accidents ; creeds and doctrines have done their work ; they 
 belong to past ages, when thought was fixed and enquiry 
 impossible : but love shall remain among us when these
 
 12 
 
 are gone, as at least one legacy of the Christ, to make life 
 l)righter and death less full of gloom than nature has made 
 them.' 
 
 To this proposal to sever the gift of love from the gift of 
 truth, the Clmrch of Grod has ever said, and will say unto the 
 end, ' It is impossible.' ' What God hath joined together 
 let not man put asunder.' It were just as reasonable for 
 the sick man to hope that he might enjoy the blessing of sound 
 health while yet lie persisted in declining to be regular in 
 exercise, and moderate in diet, and observant of those laws 
 which regulate the healthful developement of the body. 
 There is a fundamental error abroad as to the connection that 
 exists between this repudiated doctrine and that welcomed 
 love. They are not thrown together by an accident : the creed 
 is not the shell or clothing of a moral life within it ; on the 
 contrary, we must say to our latitudinarian critics, ' That love 
 which you admire is the direct result of that creed which you 
 condemn. We Christians love, because we believe : our 
 belief is the motive and the measure of our love. Because 
 we believe in the Incarnation of Grod, descending from His 
 throne, out of pure love, to the lowliness of Bethlehem and to the 
 ignominy and anguish of Calvary — therefore there arises in our 
 hearts a responsive love, evoked by His transcendant charity. 
 We love Him because He first loved us. Because He bade 
 us love one another as He had loved us, therefore ours may 
 be no narrow love. He died for us and for all poor sinners, 
 that we might embalm the memory of His precious death 
 in a love wliich shrinks not from opening its arms to all for 
 whom He died. This self-sacrifice, the social fruits of which 
 you covet, is the true, the highest expression of our love to Him 
 Whom our creed reveals to us. ' As He laid down His life 
 for us, we ought also to lay down our lives for the brethren.'* 
 
 ' The brethren.' Who are they ? Are they fellow-Chris- 
 tians — our peers or oiu* superiors in the sympathies and 
 graces of the divine life ? If so, where is the parallel be- 
 tween this love of ours for equals or superiors, and that love 
 of His ? Did He, then, reserve His love for a race of beings 
 who were worthy of it, and who would at once return it ? 
 Did He not rather love us in our sins, in our perverseness, 
 in our folly ; did He not love us in spite of our being what 
 we were, that we might reflect something of this His love 
 upon tliose who are less indebted than we to His mercy and 
 His loving kindness ? The ' brethren ' of this Epistle are 
 the whole liuman family ; because the love of the Christian 
 is to be as the love of Christ — world-embracing, and regard- 
 less of acknowledgement and return.f Too often, we His 
 followers love those who give something back — sympathy of 
 spirit, or bright example, or consolation, or assistance — and 
 
 • 1 Jolni, iii. 10 ; iv. 10. 
 t This point is well developed by Ebiard. Dielhiefe Jolianuis. p. 263, sqq.
 
 13 
 
 we only patronise the poor, and the ignorant, and the 
 heathen; we do not profess to love them. But 'God com- 
 mendeth His love to us in that while we were yet sinners 
 Christ died for us,' * and we are to ' know that we have passed 
 from death unto life because we love the brethren.' 
 
 5. In this way we are enabled to grasp a great law of the 
 Christian life. It is this. The wider the moral and spiritual 
 interval between the heart which loves and the object of its 
 affection, the nearer does this human love approach to the 
 standard of Mount Calvary. 
 
 We may not undervalue the love of friend for friend, of 
 brother for brother in Christ. This love is an earthly shadow 
 of the love of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity for Each 
 Other in heaven. It is a fulfillment in measure of that divine 
 intercession, ' As Thou Father art in Me and I in Thee, that 
 They also may be one in Us.' f But more like to that ' love 
 of Christ which passeth knowledge,' is the love which fastens 
 on an ungrateful, repulsive object — an object that invites 
 no sympathies, and that proffers no recompense. Such love is 
 Christ-like in proportion to the absence of anything that 
 would naturally provoke it. It carries our thoughts up 
 towards the Great Sacrifice ; the Spirit of Jesus, we feel, 
 lives in His members. Certainly no interval that may exist 
 between the most true-hearted saint and the most reckless 
 sinner can compare with the abyss that assuredly severs the 
 least sinful of His creatures from the sinless Christ. Cer- 
 tainly no eye of man bending in tender love from an eleva- 
 tion of peace and purity over a fellow-creature imbruted by 
 the most degrading sin, can for a moment represent to us 
 that last gaze which the Great Victim for human errors cast 
 from His Cross — I will not say upon the blaspheming mul- 
 titude, but — on the loved and saintly forms beneath Him. 
 No human ministry can, like His, be expiatory and redemp- 
 tive ; no mere man can deliver his brother, or make agreement 
 unto God for him; none, save One, can atone, although 
 we may plead and administer a finished Atonement. But 
 whenever the object of love is most perfectly removed from 
 the character and sympathies of the soul which loves, there 
 the approach to Our Holy Lord is nearest. The Churcli 
 abounds in shadows, more or less clear in outline, of That Love 
 Which redeemed her. The parent, loving perseveringly an 
 ungrateful son ; the teacher, devoting himself to scholars who 
 see in his sacrifice of time and strength only an interference 
 with their liberty ; the landlord, wlio spends capital, thought, 
 energy, for a tenantry that will not do justice to his inten- 
 tions ; the statesman, who legislates for the ultimate good of 
 
 * Rom. V. 8. t S. Joliu, xvii. 21.
 
 u 
 
 N 
 
 a people, to tlie ruin uf his present popularity ; the missionary 
 who carries the greatest of all blessings to a pagan tribe that 
 will presently put him to a cruel death for doing so — all of 
 them, in very different degrees, carry the principle of the 
 Eedt'mption into human life. But if you press me to point 
 out to you the one form of love whicli at the present day 
 most powerfully recalls to me the Good Shepherd seeking 
 His lost ones, I am constrained to point to the Sister of 
 Mercy, so ennobled by her love of the degraded and fallen 
 woman whom she tends, for Christ's sake, in a penitentiary. 
 The parent, the teacher, even the missionary, have motives 
 to exertion which are denied to the Sister of Mercy ; in the 
 penitentiary you have the greatest interval between minister- 
 ing love and its object, and therefore in the penitentiary the 
 moral triumph seems most complete. For, on the one hand, 
 there is education, refinement, a sensitive modesty, a fearless 
 purity, a combination of all that makes a woman's character 
 most beautiful and attractive, consecrated by the piety which 
 has freely given a life to this uninviting service. On the other, 
 love, reverence, modesty, faith, religion, character, intelligence, 
 all have perished ; and there remains only an emascidate will, 
 a corrupt imagination, a memory that is yet a charnel-house of 
 evil, an expression that witnesses to the despotism of lust, a 
 worn and haggard form which bespeaks the autumn of life, and 
 which seems to tell of years that have never been lived. You 
 must descend to that lower region of animalisedlife to under- 
 stand the misery of its imspeakable humiliation — to estimate 
 the hardness, the coarseness, the cruelty, the disgust at all tliat 
 leads up to or that reflects God — the recklessness, the self- 
 assertion, the immodesty, the want of principle and the want of 
 heart, the absence of all that elevates, the presence of all that 
 degrades and repels, in the victims of sin. Vast is the love 
 which spans that chasm : it is the vastness of the love which 
 ensures its success. Here, if anywhere, is tlie knowledge of 
 having passed from death to life warranted. No transient, 
 feeble sentiment could endure that inevitable toil — could 
 bear up against those crushing disappointments — could 
 enwrap as with a wreath of fire that earthly being whom 
 sensuality has defiled, and whom love must purify. 
 
 6. And this leads us to observe incidentally the powerless- 
 ness of society to deal with this gigantic evil. Society 
 confesses herself unequal to the task. She protests, she 
 deplores, she condemns ; but she does not command the 
 moral resources which are necessary if she is to grapple "with 
 .her enemy. Society can only banish the sinner who lias 
 outrajred her conventionalisms. And the banished sinner 
 sinks as they sink who are drowned not in free water, but
 
 15 
 
 beneath the ice of winter. After the first descent, the sinner 
 instinctively rises ; but it is to discover that everywhere the 
 surface is coated by a barrier — hard, impenetrable, merciless 
 — which denies to her a return to the upper atmosphere. The 
 iron has entered into her soul : she has no choice. She must 
 sink again. Think you not, brethren, that those daughters of 
 shame, when, at the intervals of their delirium, they would fain 
 return to the purity and peace of former years, and when they 
 find all the avenues of pure life blockaded against them with 
 a jealous vigilance which nothing can escape — think you not 
 tliat they scorn, with a sharp, joyless laugh, the claim of that 
 society which condemns them, to bear the name of Him whom 
 they have themselves openly rejected ? Aye, depend upon it, 
 as they scan that social life from which they are excluded ; as 
 they sullenly watch it while it contemptuously ignores them 
 in the highway or the public assembly ; as they review with a 
 sinister and bitter sneer its respectable economy or its waste- 
 ful magnificence, they ask themselves if it has aught to do 
 with One Who sat on the curb-stone of the well during the 
 weary hours of an Eastern day, pleading with the Samaritan 
 woman for her soul — Who absolved the adulteress taken in 
 the very act of sin — Who undertook the cause of the penitent 
 Magdalene against the self-righteousness of the Pharisee. 
 
 Are we, then, to make it a charge against society that she 
 thus banishes the fallen woman from her precincts ? Cer- 
 tainly not. Society cannot do otherwise. She may not 
 trifle with those fundamental laws, upon an adherence to 
 which her very existence is based. Society is an expansion 
 of tlie life of the family, and that crime which is destructive 
 of the pure family life is ultimately and no less certainly 
 subversive of the social fabric. In a Christian society, Our 
 Lord has shed a peculiar blessing upon the family, as the 
 foundation-stone of organised human life : His authority is 
 represented by the father, His love by the mother, His 
 obedience by the child; and to weaken this consecrated 
 foundation is to endanger the pile which rests upon it. 
 Destroy the family, and you sap our Christian civilisation, and 
 the greatness and happiness of our country. Better far that 
 society should seem hard and merciless than that she should 
 patronise vice, only because it happens to affect an outward 
 guise which does not ordinarily belong to it, and endeavours 
 to veil its inherent grossness beneath an exterior of conven- 
 tional refinement. Pardon me, my brethren, if I make 
 allusion to reports which may well fill the mind of a 
 thoughtful Christian with dark forebodings for the future of 
 our country ; but it is said that, at least in this metropolis, 
 society has of late seemed to condone that which is treason 
 against her very exist^ince, by breaking down the sacred and
 
 16 
 
 exclusive barrier which fences in the pure family life on 
 which she is based. This is a leniency wliich imperils the 
 innocent without saving the sinful. This is not an absolu- 
 tion from sin : it is a co-partnership with guilt. No. Let 
 society mark well her bulwarks and set up her houses. Let 
 her at least be true to the instinct of self-preservation. It is 
 one thing to treat tlie sinner as the Pliarisee treated her : it 
 is another to tell sin that it is innocence. Certainly society 
 cannot emulate those supernatural efforts which the Church 
 puts forth for the recovery of the lost ; but this is no reason 
 for making a compact witli sin, since such a compact woidd 
 involve no less than a social return to barbarism — nothing less 
 than the gratuitous defilement and ruin of multitudes of souls. 
 
 7. But this consideration of the powerlessness of society in 
 the matter must convince us tliat whoever would deal with it 
 successfully must bring to the work that wliich society lacks — 
 a high type of organised religious life. Such a life not only can 
 act with certain effect upon the fallen by means of the prodigal 
 self-sacrifice which it fosters and embodies, but it is also a pro- 
 tection against that corruption which might elsewhere ensue 
 from such intimate contact with the impure. Sucli a life is 
 emphatically a creation of the Church. A past generation 
 endeavoured to restore the victims of sin by a less costly effort 
 than the modern penitentiary. The programme was simple : 
 it involved — first, a subscription list ; then, a site ; next, some 
 kind of fortified building ; after that, a paid resident matron, 
 and the occasional services of a cliaplain. The aim of so 
 feeble a type of institution could hardly reach beyond the 
 restoration of an external respectability. We, brethren, 
 labouring through the agencies of this Association, content 
 ourselves with nothing less than the salvation of perisliingsouls 
 as the object of our efforts. And because we understand the 
 dignity, and resource, and mystery that belong- to every soul, 
 therefore we do not expect to compass by a mere machinery, 
 results which call for the exercise of the most discerning 
 penetration, and the warmest affection, and the most intrepid 
 and persevering will that is discoverable in the Church. To 
 restore principle, where the sense of fixed truth has perished 
 outright ; to unfold a lieart wliich has long closed against all the 
 finer human sympathies ; to teacli obedience, and submission, 
 and consistency of purpose, and reverence for truth and 
 goodness, and purity of act and word and thought; — this is 
 no light labour for those who can do it best. It demands an 
 incessant effort ; and sucli an effort will fail if it be only a 
 perpetual and conscious repetition of acts — if it be anything 
 less than an instinct — if it proceed not from a well-spring of 
 love, ever gushing up freely from the depths of the heart.
 
 17 
 
 And you must feed that love, by a life whicli perpetually 
 directs it upon its Great Object. This is the meaning of the 
 constant communions and services, of the meditations and 
 retreats, of the religious atmosphere and devotional accompani- 
 ments of the sisterhood. It is a shallow appreciation which 
 would view these things as a concession to a taste which you 
 consent to gratify in consideration of the work done. On 
 the contrary, these features are the mainspring of the whole. 
 In her sphere, each sister is ' a prophet of the Highest, going 
 before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, to give 
 knowledge of salvation unto His people for the remission of 
 their sins.' Fresh from the Divine Presence, she reflects 
 unconsciously upon the degraded soul something of God's jus- 
 tice, of His purity, of His mercy, of His love ; she proclaims by 
 her very temper and bearing that ' the Dayspring from on high 
 hath visited us to give light to them that sit in darkness and 
 the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of 
 peace.' It is from these precious channels of communion 
 with the Source of life that her vigour is drawn : it is 
 because she lives above the world and apart from it, in the 
 tabernacle of her God, that her hand is ever so ready, and 
 her smile so bright and so joyous, and her influence so well- 
 nigh omnipotent in that realm of death. 
 
 I venture, then, brethren, to recommend this Association 
 very earnestly to your continued support. It may at least 
 plead the number of souls which it has actually helped to 
 save from a dreadful end. Nor should we forget how healthy 
 is the influence which, by its mere existence, such an Associa- 
 tion exercises upon the national thought. No one can have 
 observed the laws which regulate the formation of opinion 
 without remarking how receptive are most of the streamlets 
 that swell the great flood of jDublic thought, and how gene- 
 rally they take coloiu and direction, not from the inner 
 reasons of things, but from the verdict which is implied in 
 the existence of facts and institutions around them. To 
 many persons, who are, from whatever circumstances, unable 
 to fall back upon a deeper conviction, the existence of this 
 Association is of itself a condemnation of impurity. It is a 
 means of bringing before their minds the ghastly evils of 
 unchecked sensuality, and the sentiment with which it is 
 regarded by thoughtful Christians.* But, further, such an 
 
 * Of late years, legislation on the qiiestions of divorce and marriage, and 
 other causes, have contributed to weaken the strength and purity of 
 national opinion (as distinct from religions belief) on this class of subjects, 
 and to make it desirable that nothing should be neglected which can 
 keep the broad principles of the law of (lod clear and plain before tha 
 conscience and intellect of England.
 
 18 
 
 Association is a fresh call to the highest purity in all those 
 who are led to support it. St. Paul's rebuke to tlie Pharisee, 
 * Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost 
 thou commit adultery?'* must nerve us, my Christian 
 brethren, to the culture of a purity of thought and spirit 
 such as the gospel indeed contemplates. In aiding this 
 work of mercy, we shall find that our English sense of 
 honom-, our mere natural hatred of h}^ocrisy, comes to the 
 support of our loyalty and devotion to the lofty teaching of 
 Our Lord and Saviour. More might be said on these and 
 kindred topics ; but I content myself with falling back on 
 that aspect of our Association which the text has suggested. 
 This work em))odies the noble and generous idea of rolling 
 back the mighty tide of selfishness by the unconquerable 
 strength of love. While fostering and marshalling the 
 activities of love for the restoration of the fallen, this Asso- 
 ciation developes before Christendom and mankind one of 
 the highest evidences of our corporate and Christian life. 
 The cause of Penitentiaries, I am persuaded, may be left with 
 perfect confidence in your hands. Support it, that you may 
 be fellow-helpers to the Truth of God by showing how 
 that Truth, and It alone, can still the strongest passions 
 that enslave the soul. Support it by sacrifices that cost you 
 something which you \vill really miss, that you, too, may 
 experience that delicious sense, not of merit, but of moral 
 elasticity and expansion, which ever attends upon a truly 
 self-sacrificing deed — that you, too, may know what it is to 
 have passed from the death of selfishness to the life of love. 
 
 * Rom. ii. 22. 
 
 LONDON 
 PBINIBD DT SrOTTISWOODK AVD CO. 
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