e He loves, He loves always. It is needless to tell us
that the Divine heart which has enshrined a soul will not forsake it;
that the name of the beloved is never erased from the palms of the
hands, that the covenant is not forgotten though eternity elapse. Of
course Christ loves to the end, even though that end reaches to
endlessness. We do not need to be assured that the Immortal Lover, who
has once taken us up to union with Himself, can never loose His hold.
Therefore it is better to adopt the alternative suggested by the margin
of the Revised Version, "He loved them to the uttermost." There was
nothing to be desired. Nothing was needed to fill out the ideal of
perfect love. Not a stitch was required for the needle-work of wrought
gold; not a touch demanded for the perfectly achieved picture; not a
throb additional to the strong pulse of affection with which He
regarded His own.

It is very wonderful that He should have loved such men like this. As
we pass them under review at this time of their life, they seem a
collection of nobodies, with the exception perhaps of John and Peter.
But they were His own, there was a special relationship between Him and
them. They had belonged to the Father, and He had given them to the
Son as His special perquisite and belonging. "Thine they were, and
Thou gavest them Me." May we dare, in this meaning, to apply to Christ
that sense of proprietorship, which makes a bit of moorland waste, a
few yards of garden-ground, dear to the freeholder?

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own . . .?"

It was because these men were Christ's own, that the full passion of
His heart set in toward them, and He loved them to the utmost bound;
that is, the tides filled the capacity of the ocean-bed of possibility.

_It was bathed in the sense of His Divine origin and mission_.--The
curtain was waxing very thin. It was a moment of vision. There had
swept across His soul a realization of the full meaning of His
approaching triumph. He looked back, and was hardly conscious of the
manger where the horned oxen fed, the lowly birth, the obscure years,
in the sublime conception that He had come forth from God. He looked
forward, and was hardly conscious of the cross, the nail, the
thorn-crown, and the spear, because of the sublime consciousness that
He was stepping back, to go to Him with whom He realized His identity.
He looked on th