ed last when you come to
dig, and the essence is grasped last in the process of analysis.

So one of the old psalms, with wondrous depth of truth, traces up
everything to this, 'For His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there
was time; therefore, there were creatures--'He made great lights, for
His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there were judgments--'He slew
famous kings ... for His mercy endureth for ever.' And so we may pass
through all the works of the divine energy, and say, 'He first loved
us.'

It is no accident that there are but foregleams of this great thought
brightening the words and the thoughts of psalmist and prophet, saint
and sage, from the beginning onwards, while the articulate utterance of
the simple sentence was first heard from the lips of Him who declared
the Father, and stands in that part of the Book which, both in its
position there, and in its date of composition is the last of the
Apostolic utterances. 'God is love';--that is in one aspect the
foundation of His being, and in another aspect the shining ruby set on
the very sky-piercing summit of the completed process of the revelation
of that Being to man. 'He first loved us'; and thence, from that centre
and germinal point, streams out the whole train of consequences in the
divine activity, and in the divine self-revelation.

I need not ask you to contrast with this infinitely simple and
infinitely deep utterance all other thoughts of a divine Being--the cold
abstractions of Theism, the dim dreads of popular apprehension, the
vague utterances of any mythology, the clouds that men's thoughts have
covered over the face of this great truth--and then, to set by the side
of all these groping, these peradventures, these fears, these narrow,
unworthy ideas, the clear simplicity, the infinite depth of 'He first
loved us.'

But I may ask you to consider, but for a moment, the relation which all
the other perfection of the divine nature have to this central and
foundation one. There are all those pompous names, 'Omnipresence' and
'Omniscience' and the like, which are but the negations of the
limitations of humanity or of finite creatures. There are the more
spiritual and moral thoughts of Wisdom and Righteousness and the like.
These are but the fringes of the glory: I was going to venture to say
that the divinest thing in God is love. There is the central blaze; the
rest is but the brilliant periphery that encloses it. And that infinite
l