III.  Lastly, what follows from all this?

First, let us be quite sure that we understand what this abiding love is.  I dare say you have heard people say ’Ah!  I do not care much about Paul’s theology.  Give me the thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.  That is beautiful; that praise of Love; that comes home to men.’  Yes, very beautiful.  Are you quite sure that you know what Paul means by ‘love’?  I do not use the word charity, because that lovely word, like a glistening meteor that falls upon the earth, has a rust, as it were, upon its surface that dims its brightness very quickly.  Charity has come to mean an indulgent estimate of other people’s faults; or, still more degradingly, the giving of money out of your pockets to other people’s necessities.  These are what the people who do not care much about Paul’s theology generally suppose that he means here.  But these do not exhaust his meaning.  Paul’s notion of love is the response of the human love to the divine, which divine is received into the heart by simple faith in Jesus Christ.  And his notion of love which never faileth, and endureth all things, and hopeth all things, is love to men, which is but one stream of the great river of love to God.  If we rightly understand what he means by love, we shall find that his praise of love is as theological as anything that he ever wrote.  We shall never get further than barren admiration of a beautiful piece of writing, unless our love to men has the source and root to which Paul points us.

Again, let us take this great thought of the permanence of faith, hope, and love as being the highest conception that we can form of our future condition.  It is very easy to bewilder ourselves with speculations and theories of another life.  I do not care much about them.  The great gates keep their secret well.  Few stray beams of light find their way through their crevices.  The less we say the less likely we are to err.  It is easy to let ourselves be led away, by turning rhetoric into revelation, and accepting the symbols of the New Testament as if they carried anything more than images of the realities.  But far beyond golden pavements, and harps, and crowns, and white robes, lies this one great thought that the elements of the imperfect, Christlike life of earth are the essence of the perfect, Godlike life in heaven.  ‘Now abide these three, faith, hope, love.’

Last of all, let us shape our lives in accordance with these certainties.  The dropping away of the transient things is no argument for neglecting or despising them; for our handling of them makes our characters, and our characters abide.  But it is a very excellent argument for shaping our lives so as to seek first the first things, and to secure the permanent qualities, and so to use the transient as that it shall all help us towards that which does not pass.