love one another. He comes back and back to this with significant
persistence, and declines to utter one other commandment. In love alone
is sufficient wisdom, sufficient motive, and sufficient reward for human
life. It alone has adequate wisdom for all situations, new resource for
every fresh need, adaptability to all emergencies, an inexhaustible
fertility and competency; it alone can bring the capability of each to
the service of all. Without love we beat the air.

That love is our true life is shown further by this--that it is its own
reward. When a man's life is in any intelligible sense proceeding from
love, when this is his chief motive, he is content with living, and
looks for no reward. His joy is already full; he does not ask, What
shall I be the better of thus sacrificing myself? what shall I gain by
all this regulation of my life? what good return in the future shall I
have for all I am losing now? He cannot ask these questions, if the
motive of his self-sacrificing life be love; just as little as the
husband could ask what reward he should have for loving his wife. A man
would be astounded and would scarcely know what you meant if you asked
him what he expected to get by loving his children or his parents or his
friends. Get? Why he does not expect to get anything; he does not love
for an object: he loves because he cannot help it; and the chief joy of
his life is in these unrewarded affections. He no longer looks forward
and thinks of a fulness of life that is to be; he already lives and is
satisfied with the life he has. His happiness is present; his reward is
that he may be allowed to express his love, to feed it, to gratify it by
giving and labouring and sacrificing. In a word, he finds in love
eternal life--life that is full of joy, that kindles and enlivens his
whole nature, that carries him out of himself and makes him capable of
all good.

This truth, then, that whatever a man does from love is its own reward,
is the solution of the question whether virtue is its own reward. Virtue
is its own reward when it is inspired by love. Life is its own reward
when love is the principle of it. We know that we should always be happy
were we always loving. We know that we should never weary of living nor
turn with distaste from our work were all our work only the expression
of our love, of our deep, true, and well-directed regard for the good
of others. It is when we disregard our Lord's one commandment and tr