may so darken our perceptions that we cannot see the sun.  Joys need not rob us of His heart, but joys may so fill ours, as that there shall be no longing for His presence within us.  Therefore let us not exaggerate the impotence of these foes, but feel that there are real dangers, as in the sorrows so in the blessings of our outward life, and that the evil to be dreaded is that outward things, whether in their bright or in their dark aspects, may come between us and the home of our hearts, the love of the loving Christ.

II.  So then, note next, the abundant victory of love.

Mark how the Apostle, in his lofty and enthusiastic way, is not content here with simply saying that he and his fellows conquer.  It would be a poor thing, he seems to think, if the balance barely inclined to our side, if the victory were but just won by a hair’s breadth and triumph were snatched, as it were, out of the very jaws of defeat.  There must be something more than that to correspond to the power of the victorious Christ that is in us.  And so, he says, we very abundantly conquer; we not only hinder these things which he has been enumerating from doing that which it is their aim apparently to do, but we actually convert them into helpers or allies.  The ’more than conquerors’ seems to mean, if there is any definite idea to be attached to it, the conversion of the enemy conquered into a friend and a helper.  The American Indians had a superstition that every foe tomahawked sent fresh strength into the warrior’s arm.  And so all afflictions and trials rightly borne, and therefore overcome, make a man stronger, and bring him nearer to Jesus Christ.

Note then, further, that not only is this victory more than bare victory, being the conversion of the enemy into allies, but that it is a victory which is won even whilst we are in the midst of the strife.  It is not that we shall be conquerors in some far-off heaven, when the noise of battle has ceased and they hang the trumpet in the hall, but it is here now, in the hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot death-grapple that we do overcome.  No ultimate victory, in some far-off and blessed heaven, will be ours unless moment by moment, here, to-day,’ we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’

So, then, about this abundant victory there are these things to say:—­You conquer the world only, then, when you make it contribute to your conscious possession of the love of Christ.  That is the real victory, the only real victory in life.  Men talk about overcoming here on earth, and they mean thereby the accomplishment of their designs.  A man has ‘victory,’ as it is phrased, in the world’s strife, when he secures for himself the world’s goods at which he has aimed, but that is not the Christian idea of the conquest of calamity.  Everything that makes me feel more thrillingly in my inmost heart the verity and the sweetness of the love of Jesus Christ as my very own, is conquered