those of us who are naturally inclined to kindly relations with our fellows, the tendency to use language just a little in excess of our feelings.  The glove is slightly stretched, and the hand in it is not quite large enough to fill it.  There is such a thing, not altogether unknown in Christian circles, as benevolence, which is largely cant, and words of conventional love about individuals which do not represent any corresponding emotion.  Such effusive love pours itself in words, and is most generally the token of intense selfishness.  Any man who seeks to make his words a true picture of his emotions must be aware that few harder precepts have ever been given than this brief one of the Apostle’s, ‘Let love be without hypocrisy.’

But the place where this exhortation comes in the apostolic sequence here may suggest to us the discipline through which obedience to it is made possible.  There is little to be done by the way of directly increasing either the fervour of love or the honesty of its expression.  The true method of securing both is to be growingly transformed by ‘the renewing of our minds,’ and growingly to bring our whole old selves under the melting and softening influence of ‘the mercies of God.’  It is swollen self-love, ’thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think,’ which impedes the flow of love to others, and it is in the measure in which we receive into our minds ‘the mind that was in Christ Jesus,’ and look at men as He did, that we shall come to love them all honestly and purely.  When we are delivered from the monstrous oppression and tyranny of self, we have hearts capable of a Christlike and Christ-giving love to all men, and only they who have cleansed their hearts by union with Him, and by receiving into them the purging influence of His own Spirit, will be able to love without hypocrisy.

II.  Let love abhor what is evil, and cleave to what is good.

If we carefully consider this apparently irrelevant interruption in the sequence of the apostolic exhortations, we shall, I think, see at once that the irrelevance is only apparent, and that the healthy vehemence against evil and resolute clinging to good is as essential to the noblest forms of Christian love as is the sincerity enjoined in the previous clause.  To detest the one and hold fast by the other are essential to the purity and depth of our love.  Evil is to be loathed, and good to be clung to in our own moral conduct, and wherever we see them.  These two precepts are not mere tautology, but the second of them is the ground of the first.  The force of our recoil from the bad will be measured by the firmness of our grasp of the good; and yet, though inseparably connected, the one is apt to be easier to obey than is the other.  There are types of Christian men to whom it is more natural to abhor the evil than to cleave to the good; and there are types of character of which the converse is true.  We often see men very earnest and entirely sincere in their detestation of meanness and wickedness, but very tepid in their appreciation of goodness.  To hate is, unfortunately, more congenial with ordinary characters than to love; and it is more facile to look down on badness than to look up at goodness.