1 Corinthians 13:2

THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY

‘And though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.’

1 Corinthians 13:2

The spirit of love is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Is there any test by which as you search the Gospels you will find our Lord so constantly measuring what men are and do as by the test of love? That is the point to which He penetrates always. One man is perplexed about duty, about a possible conflict of duties perhaps, and he is reminded that on the love of God and our neighbour alone hang alike the obligations and the hopes of mankind. Another, putting a similar question, is shown to his dismay that he loves his income more than his ideals. And a woman who has wasted her life in wilful wrong is welcomed back to God, and her account clean written off, because there is something still in her which can feel and echo the generosity of the love of God.

I. St. Paul had learnt this lesson from our Master Himself.—Everything matters, no doubt; but what matters most, what gives most character and value to our moments as they pass and to ourselves as they grow, is what we really care for, and whether we are governed by impulse, instinct, preference, on the one hand, or by the sacred grace of love on the other. The Christian law and gospel may be packed into a small sentence. If we have once apprehended the love of God drawing out man’s power of love, Divine self-sacrifice making human unselfishness possible, we have found something which will make life at its hardest worth living. To give one’s best! Reverently, one may say that our Lord Himself could do no more. ‘For their sakes I consecrate Myself.’ But if we win faith, or knowledge, or energy, or personal power, or all these together, and yet have never found out the humbling secret that we must set the sign of the Cross upon the heart, we have but found our life to lose it in the finding.

II. The word ‘love’ is one that has suffered from usage.—It may connote anything, from sensual instinct to ideal devotion, from sentimentality to self-oblation. But find out what it really means to a man, and you have the key to his real self, you have the form of his true and inner creed. You will also know whether he possesses happiness in himself, and whether the contagion of his character is of the kind that creates happiness or not. Or scrutinise an unhappy or half-happy family, and you are sure to find that the secret of the trouble is that some one there, or everybody there, has a poor idea of love; they have never found out how much can be done by generosity, by making room for other people, by effacing oneself, by opportune reticence, by kindly imagination and forethought, all of which are just forms or fruits of the very same force which drew the incarnate Lord to our world and to His Cross.

III. Thou shalt love, with heart, soul, and mind—love God and thy neighbour, says the essence of the law. And to answer that love cannot be made to order does not divert the force of the commandment in the least. You cannot command instinct or involuntary preference, but you can school the heart and train the will towards the giving out of your best. ‘That which is perfect’ is not to be had cheaply; it does not belong to the lucky temperament. It is to be had by striving and won by obedience. God says to the selfishness which will not give way, ‘Thou shalt’; and something within us answers, however reluctantly, ‘Love may be, hath been, indeed, and is.’ There it was, in His condescension; there it is, in His glory; here it may be, in all who will follow Him along the ‘royal road of the Holy Cross.’

Rev. H. N. Bate.

Illustration

‘If we required conviction and the truth that something new and strong, incredibly new, supernaturally strong, came into being with the birth of the Church in the Jewish and the Gentile worlds, we need read the Pauline Epistles no further than this. Artlessly, with undesigned simplicity, by way of allusion merely, St. Paul bears his testimony to the powers whose instrument he was commissioned to be. Yet something stronger, more striking, remains behind. As it was with the miracles of the Gospel, so it is with those of the Church. We are not to rest in them. The seeing of signs and wonders is not the faith toward which it points. “I show you,” says St. Paul, “a more excellent way.” The gifts have their place and are to be desired earnestly. Yet here is the greatness of the Apostle, or rather of the creed which inspired him, that all his sense of the signs of his apostleship begets in him no disproportion. The greater thing remains behind.’