The Love of God
Matt. iv. 4, 7, io; v. 33-37; vi. g, io; vii. 21; xii. 50; xvi. 23;
xxii. 21, 37, 40.
Mark viii. 33; xii. 28-34.
Luke vii. 40-50; x. 28; xi. 42; xii. 5; xvii. 17-19; xviii. 2, 4; xx. 25;
xxi. 1-4.
Matt. v. 8, 9, 16, 45, 48; vi. 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, n, 13, 14, 15, 18, 24, 26, 30, 32; vii. II, 21; ix. 38; x. 20, 28, 29, 32, 33, 40; xi. 25-27; xii. 4, 28, 31, 32, 50; xiii. 43; xv. 3, 4, 6, 13; xvi. 17, 27; xviii. 10, 14, 19, 23-35; xix. 4-6, 17, 24, 26; xx. 23; xxi. 13, 42;
xxii. 29-32, 42-45; xxiii. 9, 21, 22; xxiv. 36; xxvi. 29, 39; xx viii. 19.
Mark i. 14, 15; ii. 26; vii. 8, 9, 13; viii. 33, 38; ix. 37; x. 6, 9, 23, 24, 27; xi. 22-26; xiii. 19, 20, 32; xiv. 25, 36; xv. 34- Luke iv. 4, 8, 12; vi. 20, 35, 36; viii. 10, 11, 39; x. 2, 21, 22; xi. 2-4, 13, 20, 28, 42, 49; xv. 1-32; xviii. 2, 4, n, 13, 16, 17, 19, 24, 25, 27, 29; xx. 25, 36-38, 41-44; xxi. 1-4; xxiii. 34, 46.
ESUS has Himself made it easy to render an
account of His teaching on the subject of Duty
—or rather Duties, for which the term employed by Him was Commandments — by His answer to the question, once propounded to Him, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” “Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God,” was His reply, “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” *
As is well known, Jesus did not Himself invent these two commandments. He found them both in the Law of Moses, the one occurring in Deut. vi. 5 and the other in Lev. xix. 18. Whenever it was possible, He preferred, instead of inventing new
* Some hold that in this great saying a third kind of love is included — that of self. So Harless, Syste?n of Christian Ethics, p. 1 7: “Self-love is presupposed as the natural basis by which man is enabled to understand the manner and measure of love for his neighbour also.”
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forms, to make use of the materials furnished to His hand in the ancient Scriptures and institutions of His race; and there is sometimes more originality displayed in thus recovering an old thing, translating it, and stamping it with fresh honour, than in inventing one absolutely new.
To these two precepts He gave an entirely novel significance when, picking them out of the mass of Old Testament precepts in which they were em¬ bedded — and, one may even say, lost — He elevated them to shine forever as the sun and the moon of the firmament of duty. And, at the same time, He immensely simplified morality. In the Old Testament there were such multitudes of commandments that the conscience was perplexed among them; and the confusion was worse confounded by the subtleties of the rabbis, who, in their zeal to put, as they phrased it, a hedge about the Law, had split up every commandment into a dozen or a score. Then they exercised their ingenuity in determining which of these belonged to the first, which to the second rank of importance, and so on. It is not certain whether it was in this logic-chopping spirit that the scribe came to Jesus who asked which was the greatest of all the commandments. The question may be a very trivial, but it may also be a very solemn one. If prompted not by curiosity but by conscience, it may be an inquiry as to what it is that really matters in the eyes of God — approaching near to what is intended when in our own day it is asked what it is that makes a Christian, and not differing much from the most earnest of all questions, “What must I do to be saved?” Perhaps we ought to do the man the honour of attributing to him the deeper intention, although he came on the scene at first as an interrupter and enemy of Jesus; because it is manifest that the reply of Jesus lifted him completely off his feet, causing him to dissociate himself from his comrades and to acknowledge, in a tone of irrepressible enthusiasm, “Well, Master, Thou hast said the truth; for there is one God; and there is none other but He; and to love Him with all the heart, and with all the under¬ standing, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.” As Jesus said about him, he was “not far from the kingdom of God”: he was a man of sense, accessible to conviction; and the moral grandeur of the law of duty, as it was placed before him by Jesus, converted him into a confessor of the truth. The confusion in which he had been involved by the logomachies of his tribe melted away, and he rose up to embrace the moral idea in its simplicity: not only all duty being reduced to two commandments, but these two hemispheres being shown to have a common centre; for the centre of both is love. Yet, though simple, thif “«nciple is perfectly sufficient: every wrong
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done to our neighbour is obviously due to lack of love; for, if we loved him enough, how could we wrong him? and, in like manner, every sin against God is a wrong done to Him of which we could not be guilty if we loved Him sufficiently. On the other hand, without love, what are duties worth? As the Teacher said, “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Duty is a chain of many links, suspended from these two opposite staples.
How original the commandment to love God is may be illustrated by a remark of Aristotle. “Love to God,” he observes, “does not exist: it is absurd to talk of such a thing; for God is an unknowable being.” * Such was the extent of the insight in such matters of even so wise a heathen; and to the present day philosophy has adhered too faith¬ fully to this tradition, the love of God being a duty of which most systems of Moral Philosophy have not the faintest inkling, f In this respect philosophy has remained pagan, at least in our own country, not rising above the sentiment of the man in the street, who would treat the suggestion of any such duty as an hallucination and a banality. J
* Mag?i. Moral. ii. 1 1.
t Compare the closing pages of Kant’s Kritik der firaktischen Vernunft.
J Of this there is a well-known instance in a saying preserved of the English statesman Pitt. Chancing to visit a church in which a sermon had been preached by one of the apostles of When the statesman Wilberforce, in his book entitled A Practical View, was contrasting the religion pre¬ valent among the higher ranks of society with the religion of the Bible, he fastened on this as the point at which he could most easily demonstrate how far fashionable religion came short of the standard; and he could appeal to what was a fact of general knowledge when he stated that, in the circles for whose benefit he was writing, any expressions of love to God would be regarded as symptoms of odious fanaticism; multitudes of the most cultivated people in England believing themselves to be religious enough, though ready to confess that they possessed nothing of the kind.* * In opposition to these prejudices he proved, in this epoch-making work, that love to God holds a prominent place in Scripture, and especially in the teaching of Jesus; and he went on to plead for what he called the presence of the passions in religion on two grounds - — first, because the passions require the control of
the Evangelical Revival, the doctrines of which were then only beginning to be heard of, he bounced out, at the close of the service, exclaiming in high dudgeon, i( Why, the fellow expects us to love God!”
* Observe with what timidity Bishop Butler, a representative of the preceding generation, in his Two Sermons on the Love of God, approaches anything which might be characterized as enthusiasm, and how soon he sinks down from any warmth of feeling towards the Deity into contentment with the course of Providence, putting off to a future state all demonstrations of anything like lively affection.
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religion, and, secondly, because religion requires the glow and the force which only the passions can supply, to enable it to carry out its difficult tasks. Since the time of Wilberforce, sentiment on this subject has greatly altered. Emotional fervour in religion is now cultivated by the most fastidious; the spirit of prayers and hymns has become warmer; and the level of feeling above which the tone of the pulpit was never formerly allowed to rise would in our day be considered intolerably frigid. Above all, we now possess a far better psychology of religion. In the highest philosophical circles it is beginning to be recognised that man is a religious being, and that without the cultivation of his religious nature his development is stunted and mutilated.* Hence it is coming to be not only a dictum of religion but a postulate of philosophy, that, as the human heart is capable of putting forth divers blossoms of love towards human beings, each of which makes life richer and society more humane, so love to God is a capability of the heart the influence of which, when it comes to fruition, cannot but be deep and transforming; whereas a member of the human family who does not love God is lacking in one of the functions of a complete humanity.
From the nature of the case it follows that, if
* In the recognition of this, American thinkers, like Royce and James, have given a praiseworthy lead. the love of God is natural to man, it ought to be a supreme passion; for not only is God the supreme good, the source of all beauty and excellence, but vve ourselves are of Him; He is our Creator, our Providence and our Saviour. With this corresponds the sweeping demand made in the commandment adopted by Jesus as His own: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.”
In these terms some interpreters have recognised the language of a primitive psychology, an attempt at a threefold or a fourfold division of human nature; “soul” referring to emotion, “mind” to intellect, and “strength” to will. But, whatever may be thought of this suggestion, it is manifest that the words are intended to claim for God the affection of human nature in all its extent and in all its intensity.
The fact that this commandment was fetched by Jesus out of the Old Testament reminds us that between His teaching and that of the Old Testament on this subject there is not the same contrast as be- tween the Gospel and philosophy. It is astonishing to what a warmth and intensity of feeling towards the Divine Being some of the spirits of the Old Testament were able to rise. More than one of the psalmists ’ say in so many words: “I love the Lord”; and there is no reason to doubt that in the centuries of Hebrew history there were many hearts able
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to adopt as their own such passionate appeals to the Deity as, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none on earth whom I desire besides Thee.” Still, the average sentiment of the pious Israelite towards his Divinity was fear; and from the Wisdom Literature it may be gathered that for centuries the commonest name for religion was “the fear of the Lord.” So far from dissociating Himself from this conception of religion, Jesus, as has been already pointed out, distinctly acknowledges its validity in such a saying as this: “Fear Him who, when He hath killed, hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear Him.” There may have been other sentiments towards the Deity, appropriate to an earlier stage of development, which Jesus acknowledged; for it cannot be recalled too often that He came not to destroy but to fulfil. But now all other sentiments were to be subordinate; and love was to take its place both as the force to drive and the wisdom to guide along the pathway of progress and perfection.
Important, however, as was the service rendered by Jesus to Ethics when He rescued the command¬ ment to love God from its obscure place in the Pentateuch and emphasized it in His teaching in the manner described, this was not His weightiest contribution to the subject. Merely to reiterate the commandment to love God, in however imperative or insistent a voice this may be done, does not, after all, help much: it does not make it any easier to fulfil the commandment or make it likely that many will try to obey it. There is only one way of making a commandment to love easier: namely, by exhibiting the object of love in a more attractive light. And this was the great contribution of Jesus to this primary duty of morality: He made God far more lovable than He had ever appeared before. To prove this, it will be necessary to indicate the character of God, as it appears in the teaching of Christ, contrasting it with earlier revelations.
First, the God of Jesus is a God known. The reason assigned by Aristotle for the assertion that God cannot be loved is that He is unknown; and, perhaps, when the knowledge accessible to the heathen philosopher is taken into consideration, this position cannot be condemned as unreasonable. Some, however, at the present day have advanced no further: while not categorically asserting that there is no God, they hold that the knowable is confined to the tangible or sensible, and that what lies beyond is out of reach of our faculties. Even those who acknowledge the existence of God differ among themselves as to the faculty by which He is apprehended, some assuming Him to be an object of immediate intuition, while others infer His existence and attributes as the result of a long and cumbrous process of reasoning. The controversy
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about the value and cogency of the evidences of the divine existence has been prolonged and intricate, and it appears to be interminable. But Jesus makes use of no such proofs. He moves in a region of absolute certainty, speaking of God with the confidence of one who possesses the most intimate relations with Him: “No man knoweth the Son save the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” He never makes the demonstration of the existence of God any part of His vocation; although many occupants of Christian pulpits and chairs have won great renown by such evidences. On the contrary, He assumed that the organ by which God is apprehended is different from intellect, when He said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see their God”; and He confirmed the impression that, according to His view, the knowledge of God is peculiarly the perquisite of the simple and the pure, when He said: “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”
Secondly, the God of Jesus is the God of nature. Of course in this He was not original; but His exhibition of God in this light was singularly attractive. While philosophers jangle about the process by which the knowledge of God is attainable, if He can be known at all, the common man has in all ages been satisfied with the testimony borne to an Almighty Hand by the spectacle of the actual world. That the picture of glory spread out before his eyes in heaven and earth has had no painter is to him incredible. That the gigantic machine of the universe, working so smoothly and uniformly, of which every part is so nicely balanced, has had no contriver seems to him absurd. Lord Bacon uttered the sentiment of the common heart grandly, when he said, “I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend and the Talmud and the Alcoran than that this universal frame is without a mind.” This was the sentiment of Jesus; only it was more with the eye of the poet than of the logician that He looked on nature. His delight in natural beauty was deep and rejoicing; to His mind the energy which pervades nature, working out its ceaseless changes and developing its beauties, was nothing else than the intelligent and loving care of God. We may suppose Jesus, especially in the days of His youth and amid the rural scenery of Nazareth, to have enjoyed a profound felicity in communion with the sights and sounds of the changing aspects of the beautiful country of which He was a child; and it was out of deep wells of observation and experience that He was able to dispense the wisdom thus accumulated when He began to preach. He opened the eyes of His hearers to the vision He had Himself seen; and the lesson which He deduced from the aspects
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of nature was one of childlike and perfect faith in Providence. With what a pomp of glorious words He described the beauty of the flowers of the field! and the conclusion he drew from it was this: “If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” In like manner He described the feeding of the fowls of the air, and then added: “Are not ye much better than they?” Such was the optimistic faith of Jesus, which dropped like dew from heaven on the hearts of His hearers, enabling the sons and daughters of toil to lift up their heads and recognise in the sights and sounds around them the self-revelation of a wisdom and goodness immeasurable.
Thus did He teach the lesson of trust and cheer¬ fulness. In nature, however, there are not only sunny skies and golden crops, but storms, earthquakes, pestilences, and many other forms of calamity. Of a hundred seeds only one comes to fruitage; in the depths of the forest and in the depths of the ocean the large and the strong creatures prey on the small and the weak; on a winter’s day the birds lie dead by every hedgerow; so that it is possible to represent nature as a kind of shambles or field of battle, reeking with the gore of never-ceasing slaughter. Still darker are the shadows in human existence, the cries of misery being sometimes so loud and piercing that it is little wonder if sensitive hearts question whether there can really be a divine mind that sees and knows. The view taken of such things by Jesus appears to have been that we know enough of the bright side to be able to trust God with the dark one. The sparrow falls; but God is by, and sees it when it falls. This is enough. Jesus refused to subscribe to the ancient opinion, with which Job had been tortured, that calamity must necessarily be the punishment of special sins. The eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell had not been sinners above all who dwelt at Jerusalem, although they had suffered such things; their fate had, indeed, been obscure; but there is a day of revelation coming when all such mysteries shall be unsealed. Why does the Pharisee, offering up in public his hypo¬ critical prayers, receive the praise of the world and the good things of this life, whereas the saint, praying in obscurity, attracts no notice? “Your Father,” answers Jesus, “who seeth in secret, Himself will reward him openly.” “There are first which shall be last, and the last first.” The calamities of His own life far exceeded the common lot in their mystery and bewilderment; and so far did He succumb as for a moment to cry out, on the cross, that His God had forsaken Him; but the cloud passed, and He died with the serene accents of faith on His lips: “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.”
Thirdly, the God of Jesus is the God of history and of Scripture. The attempt has sometimes been made
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to represent Jesus as a cosmopolitan, to whom nothing human was alien but to whom everything local and national was indifferent, if not despicable. But this is a notion caught out of the air and bearing no relation to facts. Not only did others call Him the Son of David, but He Himself betrayed in many ways His identification with the seed of Abraham. One of His favourite names for God was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He wept over Jerusalem with the ardour of a patriot. He gave as a reason for having compassion on a woman that she was a daughter of Abraham; and He brought salvation to the house of Zacchaeus avowedly on the ground that he was a son of Abraham. So imbued was He with the literature of the Old Testament that He thought in its imagery and spoke in its nomenclature. He identified His own work with that of the prophets, of which it was the continuation and fulfilment; and the names of the heroes and the heroines of Hebrew history were familiar in His mouth as household words. All attempts, in short, to establish an antagonism between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus Christ may without hesitation be pronounced at variance with the spirit of the Great Teacher. To Him all the stages of revelation preceding His own — not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the Jehovah of Moses, the Lord of Hosts of Joshua, the Holy One of Israel of Isaiah, and whatever other designations for the object of human reverence had been produced in the past — were welcome and venerable; and He did not supersede or satirise or oppose them, as has too frequently been done in His name, but cherished them all.
Fourthly, the God of Jesus was the heavenly Father. “My Father” He habitually called Him; “your Father” He denominated Him when speaking to others; and He taught them to pray to Him as “our Father.”
Not only is the application of the title Father to the Deity not confined to the New Testament, but it is not even limited to Holy Writ, it being no unusual occurrence in heathen poetry to address the Supreme Being as the Father of gods and men. In the Old Testament, of course, the application to God of this name is common enough; but the difference, it is said, is, that in the Old Testament God is the Father of the nation, whereas in the New He is the Father of the individual; and, speaking broadly, we may recognise this distinction as correct. Yet in the Old Testament a tendency is already discernible to apply the term to the relationship of God to the individual; as when, for instance, in Psalm ciii., it is said, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him; for He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust.” And in the Old Testament Apocrypha we find the transition already completed. Thus, in Ecclesiasticus,* the
* xxiii. i, 4.
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author addresses God as the Father and Master of his life; and in the Wisdom of Solomon * the wicked accuse the godly man of boasting that God is his Father, f It may be assumed that, before the teaching of Jesus began to tell, His countrymen occasionally spoke of God as their Father not only in their collective but in their individual capacity. But Jesus made the practice current and universal. And there was another great difference: if the individual Israelite ventured to call God his Father, it was in the consciousness of being himself a portion of Israel; he never thought of sonship as extending beyond the bounds of the holy nation. But in the teaching of Jesus this distinction disappeared, every human being who chooses being entitled to call God by this name.
The question has, indeed, been raised whether, in the teaching of Jesus, God is the Father of all men as such, or only of those men and women who have been brought into a new relationship to Him through Christ. The latter alternative has been maintained by theologians — that there is no fatherhood of God to any except such as have been reconciled to Him in Christ. But this view seems to be decisively set aside by the parable of the Prodigal Son. Whatever estimate be made of the Prodigal in the far country, he certainly does not stand for those who have
* ii. 16.
t Compare Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, i 6. been reconciled to God through Christ; but just as certainly he is still a son. His father has not for¬ gotten or disowned him but, on the contrary, is more tenderly and keenly conscious of His relationship to him because he is lost. The very point of the parable lies in the fact that the lostness of the son, so far from annihilating the relationship, makes the father more conscious of it than ever: his lost son being far more in his thoughts than the one who has never been lost. This certainly is one of the brightest and most attractive features of the divine fatherhood in the teaching of Jesus, and it must not be sacrificed in deference to any theological prepossession. Nevertheless, we are warned against dogmatizing in the opposite direction by the fact that Jesus not infrequently speaks of divine sonship as something to be only gradually attained even by those who are His own disciples. Thus, these are told by Him to love their enemies, that they may be — or rather that they may become * — the sons of their Father who is in heaven, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Sonship here is a matter not of natural relationship, but of moral attainment, and its development is gradual. Still more significant is the statement that no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and those to whom the Son will reveal Him — where it seems to be
* OTTCOS / VT)(j6c.
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claimed that the power of calling God Father belongs to those alone who have learned it from Christ. And, although it is difficult, in reading our Lord’s sayings, as they have come down to us, to determine always whether, when speaking to His hearers of their heavenly Father, He was addressing the narrow circle of the disciples or the wider one of the multitude, yet, on the whole, the impression produced is that usually, when speaking of God as Father, He was addressing those who had learned from Himself. At all events it is manifest that, the wider the extension of the divine fatherhood, the less deep must be its intention: that is to say, if He is the Father of all, His fatherhood means less to each of them than if He is the Father of those only who cherish towards Him filial affection and resemble Him in character. But there is nothing in what we know of Jesus as a teacher to make us think that He might not have employed the term sometimes in the one sense and sometimes in the other. Jesus made the name of Father current coin, making offer of it to every human being and breaking down the monopoly of the Jew; but the new revelation of the character of God, by which love is to be made easy, does not consist merely in the use of this name, but rather in the consciousness of what, as Father, He has done and is prepared to do for those who are His children.!
t “Mit Recht bemerkt O. Holtzmann, dass der Gottvaterglaube uns nirgends in der Lehre Jesu im Gegentatz gegen einen By modern theologians it is usually taken for granted that the fatherhood of God, being so prominent in the teaching of Jesus, must be the ultimate expression for the divine love. At an earlier stage of revelation, the relation of Jehovah to Israel was represented under a different figure of speech — that of husband and wife — which is to be found in many parts of the Old Testament, but culminates in the prophet Hosea. Both the one representation and the other are tender and significant, yet they differ widely from each other, fatherhood being more absolutely natural and more enduring, whereas the other relationship has in it more of choice and was
anderen Gottesgedanken scharf ausgestaltet entgegentrete, und dass er iiberhaupt dem Judenthum gegeniiber nichts Neues war. Dieser letzteren Behauptung konnte man entgegenhalten, dass die Beziehung der Vaterliebe Gottes auf den einzelnen Menschen doch neu ist. Allein wir vernehmen nicht, dass Jesus in dieser Beziehung einen Unterschied zwischen seiner Weise den Vater zu verkiindigen und der alttestamentlichen hervorgehoben hatte, oder dass seine Zuhorer sich veranlasst gefiihlt hatten, es zu thun. Nicht hier liegt die eigentliche Originalitat der Gottvaterverkiindigung Jesu. Sie liegt vielmehr darin, dass durch die ganze Predigt Jesu sich der Hinweis darauf hindurchzieht, wie fern der Mensch an und fur sich davon ist, das Wesen Gottes als seines Vaters zu verstehen, und wie sehr er es bedarf, dass ihm das Geheimniss desselben erschlossen werde. Deutlich ausgesprochen ist dies Matt. xi. 27... Hier handelt es sich zunachst nur darum, festzustellen, dass wenn Jesus Gott seinen und der Seinigen Vater nennt, er damit auf eine innere, geheimnissvolle, zunachst ihm und durch ihn den Seinigen gewordene Offenbarung zuriickweist.” — Ehrhardt, Der Grund - char ak ter der Ethik Jesu, pp. 78, 79.
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looked upon as dissoluble. It was of no small consequence that, in the earliest times, the relation of Jehovah to His people was considered not as simply natural, but as positive and morally conditioned. The deities of the surrounding peoples were bound to stand by their worshippers, assisting them in war, for instance, under all circumstances; Jehovah, on the contrary, might, for moral reasons, withdraw His support at any time, if obedience failed on the part of His worshippers. The covenant was broken, and obligation ceased. This idea was at the back of all the discipline of the Old Testament, and it educated Israel into ethical monotheism. Yet the principle might be misunderstood, and it was grossly perverted when the Pharisees, confident in the security of their own relation to Jehovah, looked down upon the publicans and sinners, not to speak of the Samaritans and the Gentiles, as being outside the covenant and, therefore, without a share in the care of the divine heart. It was against this dark background that Jesus proclaimed the fatherly love of God — a love which embraces all without distinction and cannot be dissolved by the ill-doing of its objects. Nothing, however, is more certain than that this aspect of the divine love is no less capable of misrepresentation than the other. If the old prophetic view of God proved capable of being construed into Pharisaic arrogance and contempt, the New Testament conception can be perverted into Sadducean laxity. It is probable that both views are requisite to convey a complete conception of the divine love; and that the older view is not antiquated is suggested by the fact that it recurs not only in the Bride, the Lambs wife, of the Book of Revelation, and in St. Paul’s remarkable comparison, in Ephesians, of the union of Christ and the Church with that of husband and wife, but in our Lord’s own appellation of Himself as the Bridegroom, and in the parable of the King who made a Marriage for his Son. Which of the two human relationships is the better fitted to bring out the depth and mystery of the love of God to men, everyone may be left to decide for himself,*
Whether or not, however, fatherhood be the culminating expression in revelation for the love of God, the name of heavenly Father irradiates the teaching of Jesus, and has supplied to the human imagination a plastic and fecund image, from which thoughts of the Deity, just and attractive, have been evolved. Jesus gave to His own conception of what human fatherhood may be peerless expression in the figure of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son; for this is no ordinary father, but one clothed with resources, dignity and wisdom, and, above all, invested with the magnanimity of forgiveness. It suggests the sublime thought of St. Paul, that it is
* This thought is more fully worked out in the third of three Lectures on the Atonement published by the author a year ago.
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not human fatherhood which enables us to comprehend divine fatherhood, but rather the fatherhood of God that begets and shapes the fatherhood of man.* And this may suggest the further reflection that, not only do all pure forms of earthly love point upwards to features of the divine love, but that in the Divine Being there is something great and incomprehensible from which all these earthly fires have been kindled, and which is expressed in the final testimony of revelation that “God is love.”
* Eph. iii. 15, “The Father from whom every fatherhood [R.V. marg.~ in heaven and on earth is named. ,y