NO WORSE FATE

can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved.  To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God.  For God is Love.

Now I have all but finished.  How many of you will join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next three months?  A man did that once and it changed his whole life.  Will you do it?  It is for the greatest thing in the world.  You might begin by reading it every day, especially the verses which describe the perfect character.  “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself.”  Get these ingredients into your life.  Then everything that you do is eternal.  It is worth doing.  It is worth giving time to.  No man can become a saint in his sleep; and to fulfill the condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and meditation and time, just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mental, requires preparation and care.  Address yourselves to that one thing; at any cost have this transcendent character exchanged for yours.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.  As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life.  I have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life that has gone four or five short experiences, when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one’s life abide.  Everything else in all our lives is transitory.  Every other good is visionary.  But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about—­they never fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, “How have I believed?” but “How have I loved?” The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not religiousness, but Love.  I say the final test of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life.  Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to.  By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged.  It could not be otherwise.  For the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain.  It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him, to be seized with the spell of His compassion for the world.  It means that—­