Suppose some great martyr who dies for his fellows.  Well, all honour to him, and the race will come to his tomb for a while, and bring their wreaths and their sorrow.  But what bearing has his death upon our knowledge of God’s love towards us?  None whatever, or at most a very indirect and shadowy one.  We have to dig deeper down than that.  ‘God commends His love ... in that Christ died.’  ’He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’  And we have the right and the obligation to argue back from all that is manifest in the tender Christ to the heart of God, and say, not only, ‘God so loved the world that He’ sent His Son, but to see that the love that was in Christ is the manifestation of the love of God Himself.

So there stands the Cross, the revelation to us, not only of a Brother’s sacrifice, but of a Father’s love; and that because Jesus Christ is the revelation of God as being the ’eradiation of His glory, and the express image of His person.’  Friends! light does pour out from that Cross, whatever view men take of it.  But the omnipotent beam, the all-illuminating radiance, the transforming light, the heat that melts, are all dependent on our looking at it—­I do not only say, as Paul looked at it, nor do I even say as Christ looked at it, but as the deep necessities of humanity require that the world should look at it, as the altar whereon is laid the sacrifice for our sins, the very Son of God Himself.  To me the great truths of the Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ are not points in a mere speculative theology; they are the pulsating vital centre of religion.  And every man needs them in his own experience.

I was going to have said a word or two here—­but it is not necessary—­about the need that the love of God should be irrefragably established, by some plain and undeniable and conspicuous fact.  I need not dwell upon the ambiguous oracles which—­

  ’Nature, red in tooth and claw,
  With rapine’

gives forth, nor on how the facts of human life, our own sorrows, and the world’s miseries, the tears that swathe the earth, as it rolls on its orbit, like a misty atmosphere, war against the creed that God is love.  I need not remind you, either, of how deep, in our own hearts, when the conscience begins to speak its not ambiguous oracles, there does rise the conviction that there is much in us which it is impossible should be the object of God’s love.  Nor need I remind you how all these difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based on the contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of providence, and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved to have been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find mythologies and religions of all types and gods of every sort, but nowhere in all the pantheon a God who is Love.