'come to mean an indulgentestimate of other people's faults or the givingof (continued)
; What Lasts
_C. Love.
I. The abiding nature of love. | need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought which nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human 'relation to God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, "endureth forever"
2. The reason love is greatest. It is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst faith and hope belong only to a creature and are dependent and ex- -pectant of some good to come to themselves and correspond to something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from faith and hope not. only corresponds to, but resembles that from which it comes and by which it lives. The love that is in man is like the love that is in God.
Il]. THE THINGS THAT FOLLOW FROM ALL THIS.
A. The True Understanding of Abiding Love.
1. A false notion of love. 1 do not use the word charity. Charity has 'come to mean an indulgent estimate of other people's faults or the giving of money to other people's necessities. These are what the people who do not care much about Paul's theology generally suppose that he means here. But these do not exhaust his meaning.
2. The true idea of love. Paul's notion of love is the response of the human love to the Divine, which Divine is received into the heart by faith in Re notion of love which never fails is love to men, which | stream of the great river of love to God.
B. The Highest Conception of the Christian's Future Condition.
1. A danger to be avoided. It is very easy to bewilder ourselves with speculations and theories of another life. It is easy to let ourselves be led away by turning rhetoric into revelation and accepting the symbols of the New Testament as if they carried anything more than images of the realities.
2. The essence of life in heaven. The elements of the imperfect, Christ- - like life of earth are the essence of the perfect, Godlike life in heaven. "Now abide these three: faith, hope, love."