But there is one more remark that I wish to make in reference to this constraining love of Jesus Christ, and that is, that in order to see and feel it we must take the point of view that this Apostle takes in my text.  For hearken how he goes on.  ’The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died, and that He died for all,’ etc.  That is to say, the death of Christ for all, which is equivalent to the death of Christ for each, is the great solvent by which the love of God melts men’s hearts, and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves me, and thee, and all of us.  If you strike out that conception you have struck out from your Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the world.  What possible meaning is there in the expression, ’He died for all?’ How can the fact of His death on a ‘green hill’ outside the gates of a little city in Syria have world-wide issues, unless in that death He bore, and bore away, the sins of the whole world?  I know that there have been many—­and there are many to-day—­who not accepting what seems to me to be the very vital heart of Christianity—­viz. the death of Christ for the world’s sin, do yet cherish—­as I think illogically—­yet do cherish a regard for Him, which puts some of us who call ourselves ‘orthodox,’ and are tepid, to the blush.  Thank God! men are often better than their creeds, as well as worse than them.  But that fact does not affect what I am saying now, and what I beg you to take for what you find it to be worth, that unless we believe that Jesus Christ died for all, I do not know what claim He has on the love of the world.  We shall admire Him, we shall bow before Him, as the very realised ideal of humanity, though how this one Man has managed to escape the taint of the all-pervading evil remains, upon that hypothesis, very obscure.  But love Him?  No!  Why should I?  But if I feel that His death had world-wide issues, and that He went down into the darkness in order that He might bring the world into the light, then—­and I am sure, on the wide scale and in the long-run only then—­will men turn to Him and say, ‘Thou hast died for me, help me to live for Thee.’  Brethren, I beseech you, take care of emptying the death of Christ of its deepest meaning, lest you should thereby rob His character of its chiefest charm, and His name of its mightiest soul-melting power.  The love that constraineth is the love that died, and died for all, because it died for each.

II.  Now let me ask you to consider the echo of this constraining love.

I said a moment or two ago that Christ’s love to us is the constraining power, and that ours to Him is but the condition on which that power works.  But between the two there comes something which brings that constraining love to bear upon our hearts.  And so notice what my text goes on to adduce as needful for Christ’s love to have its effect—­namely, ‘because we thus judge,’ etc.