A dew-drop and a planet are both spheres, moulded by the same law of gravitation.  The tiny round of our little drops of love may be not all unlike the colossal completeness of that Love, which owns the sun as ‘His sun,’ and rays down light and distils rain over the broad world.  God loves all men apart altogether from any regard to character, therefore He gives to all men all the good gifts that they can receive apart from character, and if evil men do not get His best gifts, it is not because He withholds, but because they cannot take.  There are human love-gifts which cannot be bestowed on enemies or evil persons.  It is not possible, nor fit, that a Christian should feel to such as he does to those who share his faith and sympathies; but it is possible, and therefore incumbent, that he should not only negatively clear his heart of malice and hatred, but that he should positively exercise such active beneficence as they will receive.  That is God’s way, and it should be His children’s.

The thought of the divine pattern naturally brings up the contrast between it and that which goes by the name of love among men.  Just because Christians are to take God as their example of love, they must transcend human examples.  Here again Jesus strikes the note with which He began His teaching of His disciples’ ‘righteousness’; but very significantly He does not now point to Pharisees, but to publicans, as those who were to be surpassed.  The former, no doubt, were models of ‘righteousness’ after a rigid, whitewashed-sepulchre sort, but the latter had bigger hearts, and, bad as they were and were reputed to be, they loved better than the others.  Jesus is glad to see and point to even imperfect sparks of goodness in a justly condemned class.  No doubt, publicans in their own homes, with wife and children round them, let their hearts out, and could be tender and gentle, however gruff and harsh in public.  When Jesus says ‘even the publicans,’ He is not speaking in contempt, but in recognition of the love that did find some soil to grow on, even in that rocky ground.  But is not the bringing in of the ‘reward’ as a motive a woful downcome? and is love that loves for the sake of reward, love at all?  The criticism and questions forget that the true motive has just been set forth, and that the thought of ‘reward’ comes in, only as secondary encouragement to a duty which is based upon another ground.  To love because we shall gain something, either in this world or in the next, is not love but long-sighted selfishness; but to be helped in our endeavours to widen our love so as to take in all men, by the vision of the reward, is not selfishness but a legitimate strengthening of our weakness.  Especially is that so, in view of the fact that ‘the reward’ contemplated is nothing else than the growth of likeness to the Father in heaven, and the increase of filial consciousness, and the clearer, deeper cry, ‘Abba, Father.’  If longing for, and having regard to, that ‘recompense of reward’ is selfishness, and if the teaching which permits it is immoral, may God send the world more of such selfishness and of teachers of it!