If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God.  With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality.  He emphasizes the generosity of God.  God makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45).  God’s flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man’s garden.  God knows what his child needs, and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad one.  The Father is the same great wise Friend in either case.  The peacemakers are recognized as the children of God, because of their family likeness to God (Matt. 5:9).  They come among people, and find them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that; or they come into a man’s life, when it is all in disorder and pain, and they bring peace there.  They may not quite know it, but they do these things almost without meaning to do them.  And Jesus says that this is a family likeness by which men know they are God’s children.  But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God’s gift of peace, or is so sure of it.  He uses Hosea’s great saying about God—­“I will have mercy and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6), as giving the truth about God.  Matthew represents him as quoting it twice (Matt. 9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it.  His own heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets.  “Love your enemies,” he says (Matt. 5:44); yes, for then you will be the real children of God.  Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God gives every man all the time and all the chance that he needs—­sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more.  Look at the parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God, says Jesus.

It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God.  But the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept.  But that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to believe in earnest.  The real crux comes when the question rises in a man’s own heart, “Does God love me?” Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company of Jesus and under his influence.  Jesus throughout asserts and reasserts the value of the individual to God.  Look, for example, at the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost Sheep, and brings out the analogy.  At the end of the Book of Job (ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and creator—­we might not have thought of all this, but the poet did—­loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it with him.  He calls them; he shows them the