Love Constraining

“The love of Christ constrai?ieth us” — 2 Cor. v. 14.

Strange gift this to come from love — constraint, narrowing, imprisonment. I can understand love enlarging, love liberating, love bringing out into the boundless expanse and crowning with the mercies of freedom; but love constraining! — it is a startling, a repelling thought. I have asked myself a thousand times how the constraints of this world are to be explained consistently with the love of God. I have tried a hundred solutions of the problem how Divine love can co-exist with so many human limitations, but no solution of mine ever reached the boldness of this. I am here told that there is no need of reconciliation at all, that there is nothing to be reconciled, that between love and constraint there is no ground of controversy. I am told that constraint is itself the gift of love, — God’s first gift to my soul. I am told to see a friend in that which I held to be an enemy, to claim as an ally the imagined foe of my human happiness. Love comes to me with a bitter cup in her hand and says, “This cup is my gift to thee: drink thou and be refreshed.”

My soul, marvel not that the love of God should first manifest itself in thy pain. Constraint is the first gift of all love — even of human fatherhood. Was not thine earthly childhood developed by sacrifice, by obedience to a law whose meaning thou couldst not see? Did not thine early intelligence expand through a path of tears, expand through the crushing of thine individual will and the constraint of thine impetuous passions? Thy path of tears was an unconscious rainbow; it led thy soul aloft on an arch of triumph. It was only from the summit of the arch that thou couldst tell how really glorious was thy path of tears. So shall it be with thy largerretrospect. When from the summit of a completed experience thou shalt look back, thou shalt marvel at the glory of the way. The most glorious spots of that way shall just be the spots that, when thou wert passing by, appeared to have no glory. The places which shall be most filled with light shall be thy dark places — the scenes that seemed to thee thy blots on the page of life. Thou shalt see that in these were thy true gifts of fortune. Thou shalt learn that the days called adverse were the making of thee, that the seasons of thy spiritual growth were the hours of thy night. And when thou countest up the gifts of Divine love, thou shalt class amongst the brightest of them all those that, in the course of the journey, came to thee as denials of thy prayer; thou shalt look upon the crosses of thy life and say, “The love of Christ constrained me.”