us do, and could talk about it and argue about it, and draw inferences
from it, and have the whole system of evangelical Christianity at their
fingers' ends. Ay! It is at their fingers' _ends_, it never gets any
nearer them than that.

There is a knowledge with which love has nothing to do, and it is a
knowledge that for many people is quite sufficient. 'Knowledge puffeth
up,' says the Apostle; into an unwholesome bubble of self-complacency
that will one day be pricked and disappear, but 'love buildeth up'--a
steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge:
the mere rattle of notions in a man's brain, like the seeds of a
withered poppy-head; very many, very dry, very hard; that will make a
noise when you shake them. And there is another kind of knowledge which
goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling
by the name; and that knowledge is the child, as my text has it, of
love.

Now let us think about that for a moment. Love, says Paul, is the parent
of all knowledge. Well, now, can we find any illustrations from similar
facts in other regions? Yes! I think so. How do we know, really know,
any emotions of any sort whatever? Only by experience. You may talk for
ever about feelings, and you teach nothing about them to those who have
not experienced them. The poets of the world have been singing about
love ever since the world began. But no heart has learned what love is
from even the sweetest and deepest songs. Who that is not a father can
be taught paternal love by words, or can come to a perception of it by
an effort of mind? And so with all other emotions. Only the lips that
have drunk the cup of sweetness or of bitterness can tell how sweet or
how bitter it is, and even when they, made wise by experience, speak out
their deepest hearts, the listeners are but little the wiser, unless
they too have been scholars in the same school. Experience is our only
teacher in matters of feeling and emotion, as in the lower regions of
taste and appetite. A man must be hungry to know what hunger is; he must
taste honey or wormwood in order to know the taste of honey or wormwood,
and in like manner he cannot know sorrow but by feeling its ache, and
must love if he would know love. Experience is our only teacher, and her
school-fees are heavy.

Just as a blind man can never be made to understand the glories of
sunrise, or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may