g of man.

Well, then, notice how the Apostle in the context fastens upon a certain
characteristic of that divine love which we are to imitate in our lives;
and thereby makes the precept a very practical and a very difficult one.
Godlike love will be love that gives as liberally as His does. What is
the very essence of all love? Longing to be like. And the purest and
deepest love is love which desires to impart itself, and that is God's
love. The Bible seems to teach us that in a very mysterious sense, about
which the less we say the less likely we are to err, there is a quality
of giving up, as well as of giving, in God's love; for we read of the
Father that 'spared not His Son,' by which is meant, not that He did not
shrink from inflicting something upon the Son, but that He did not
grudgingly keep that Son for Himself. 'He spared not His own Son, but
delivered Him up to the death for us all.' And if we can say but little
about that surrender on the part of the infinite Fountain of all love,
we can say that Jesus Christ, who is the activity of the Father's love,
spared not Himself, but, as the context puts it, 'gave Himself _up_ for
us.'

And that is the pattern for us. That thought is not a subject to be
decorated with tawdry finery of eloquence, or to be dealt with as if it
were a sentimental prettiness very fit to be spoken of, but impossible
to be practised. It is the duty of every Christian man and woman, and
they have not done their duty unless they have learned that the bond
which unites them to men is, in its nature, the very same as the bond
which unites men to God; and that they will not have lived righteously
unless they learn to be 'imitators of God,' in the surrender of
themselves for their brother's good.

Ah, friend, that grips us very tight--and if there were a little more
reality and prose brought into our sentimental talk about Christian
love, and that love were more often shown in action, in all the
self-suppression and taking a lift of a world's burdens, which its great
Pattern demands, the world would be less likely to curl a scornful lip
at the Church's talk about brotherly love.

You say that you are a Christian--that is to say a child of God. Do you
know anything, and would anybody looking at you see that you knew
anything, about the love which counts no cost and no sacrifice too great
to be lavished on the unworthy and the sinful?

But that brings me to another point. The Apostle here, in