Here, then, our text touches upon one of the very profoundest characteristics of Christianity considered as a power in human life.  The contrast between it and all other religions and systems of ethics lies, amongst other things, in the stress which it lays upon love and on the earnestness which comes from love; whereas these are scarcely regarded as elements in virtue according to the world, and have certainly no place at all in the world’s notion of ‘temperate religion.’  Christ gives fervour by giving His Spirit.  Christ gives fervour by bringing the warmth of His own love to bear upon our hearts through the Spirit, and that kindles ours.  Where His great work for men is believed and trusted in, there, and there only, is there excited an intensity of consequent affection to Him which glows throughout the life.  It is not enough to say that Christianity is singular among religious and moral systems in exalting fervour into a virtue.  Its peculiarity lies deeper—­in its method of producing that fervour.  It is kindled by that Spirit using as His means the truth of the dying love of Christ.  The secret of the Gospel is not solved by saying that Christ excites love in our souls. The question yet remains—­how?  There is but one answer to that.  He loved us to the death.  That truth laid on hearts by the Spirit, who takes of Christ’s and shows them to us, and that truth alone, makes fire burst from their coldness.

Here is the power that produces that inner fervour without which virtue is a name and religion a yoke.  Here is the contrast, not only to John’s baptism, but to all worldly religion, to all formalism and decent deadness of external propriety.  Here is the consecration of enthusiasm—­not a lurid, sullen heat of ignorant fanaticism, but a living glow of an enkindled nature, which flames because kindled by the inextinguishable blaze of His love who gave Himself for us.  ’He shall baptize you in fire.’

Then, dear brethren, if we profess to have come into personal contact with Jesus Christ, here is a sharp test for us, and a solemn rebuke to much of our lives.  For a Christian to be cold is sin.  Our coldness can only come from our neglecting to stir up the gift that is in us.  People reproach us with extravagant emotion:  let us confess that we have never deserved that reproach half as much as we ought.  The world’s ideal of religion is decorous coldness—­has not the world’s ideal been our practice?  We are afraid to be fervent, but our true danger is icy torpor.  We sit frost-bitten and almost dead among the snows, and all the while the gracious sunshine is pouring down, that is able to melt the white death that covers us, and to free us from the bonds that hold us prisoned in their benumbing clasp.

No evil is more marked among the Christian Churches of this day than precisely the absence of this ‘spirit of burning.’  There is plenty of liberality and effort, there is much interest in religious questions, there is genial tolerance and wide culture, there is a high standard of morality, and, on the whole, a tolerable adherence to it—­but there is little love, and little fervour.  ’I have somewhat against thee, that thou hast left thy first love.’