s you all things.

MORE THAN CONQUERORS

'Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him that loved us.'--ROMANS viii. 37.

In order to understand and feel the full force of this triumphant
saying of the Apostle, we must observe that it is a negative answer
to the preceding questions, 'Who shall separate us from the love of
Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or peril, or sword?' A heterogeneous mass the Apostle here
brigades together as an antagonistic army. They are alike in nothing
except that they are all evils. There is no attempt at an exhaustive
enumeration, or at classification. He clashes down, as it were, a
miscellaneous mass of evil things, and then triumphs over them, and
all the genus to which they belong, as being utterly impotent to drag
men away from Jesus Christ. To ask the question is to answer it, but
the form of the answer is worth notice. Instead of directly replying,
'No! no such powerless things as these can separate us from the love
of Christ,' he says, 'No! In all these things, whilst weltering
amongst them, whilst ringed round about by them, as by encircling
enemies, "we are more than conquerors."' Thereby, he suggests that
there is something needing to be done by us, in order that the foes
may not exercise their natural effect. And so, taking the words of my
text in connection with that to which they are an answer, we have
three things--the impotent enemies of love; the abundant victory of
love; 'We are more than conquerors'; and the love that makes us
victorious. Let us look then at these three things briefly.

I. First of all, the impotent enemies of love.

There is contempt in the careless massing together of the foes which
the Apostle enumerates. He begins with the widest word that covers
everything--'affliction.' Then he specifies various forms of
it--'distress,' _straitening_, as the word might be rendered,
then he comes to evils inflicted for Christ's sake by hostile
men--'persecution,' then he names purely physical evils, 'hunger' and
'nakedness,' then he harks back again to man's antagonism, 'peril,'
and 'sword.' And thus carelessly, and without an effort at logical
order, he throws together, as specimens of their class, these salient
points, as it were, and crests of the great sea, whose billows
threaten to roll over us; and he laughs at them all, as impotent and
nought, when compared with the love of