as and must be in the presence of an
unloved Judge; have you not there the naked bones of a very dreadful
thing, which does not need any tawdry eloquence of man to make it
more solemn and more real? The unloving heart is always ill at ease
in the presence of Him whom it does not love. The unloving heart does
not love, because it does not trust, nor see the love. Therefore, the
unloving heart is a heart that is only capable of apprehending the
wrathful side of Christ's character. It is a heart devoid of the
fruits of love which are likeness and righteousness, 'without which
no man shall see the Lord,' nor stand the flash of the brightness of
His coming. So there is no cruelty nor arbitrariness in the decree
that the heart that loves not, when brought into contact with the
infinite Lord of Love, must find in the touch death and not life,
darkness and not light, terror and not hope. Notice that Paul's
negation _is_ a negation and not an affirmation. He does not say
'he that hateth,' but 'he that doth not love.' The absence of the
active emotion of love, which is the child of faith, the parent of
righteousness, the condition of joy in His presence, is sufficient to
ensure that this fate shall fall upon a man. I durst not enlarge. I
leave the truth on your hearts.

II. Secondly, notice the present grace of the coming Lord. 'Our Lord
cometh. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.' These
two things are not contradictory, but we often deal with them as if
they were. And some men lay hold of the one side of the antithesis,
and some men lay hold of the other, and rend them apart, and make
antagonistic theories of Christianity out of them. But the real
doctrine puts the two together and says there is no terror without
tenderness, and there is no tenderness without terror. If we
sacrifice the aspects of the divine nature, as revealed to us in the
gentle Christ, which kindle a wholesome dread, we have, all
unwittingly, robbed the aspects of the divine nature, which warm in
us a gracious love, of their power to inflame and to illuminate. You
cannot have love which is anything nobler than facile good nature
and unrighteous indifference, unless you have along with it aspects of
God's character and government which ought to make some men afraid.
And you cannot keep these latter aspects from being exaggerated and
darkened into a Moloch of cruelty, unless you remember that, side by
side with them, or rather underlying them a