the will; we
cannot love because we wish to do so, any more than we can taste honey
bitter because we wish to do so. We cannot love a person because we know
that their influence is needful to forward our interests. But if love
lies deeper than the will, what power have we to love what at present
does not draw us? We have no power to do so immediately; but we can use
the means given us for altering, purifying, and elevating our nature. We
can believe in Christ's power to regenerate us, we can faithfully follow
and serve Him, and thus we shall learn one day to love Him.

But the presence or absence in us of the love of Christ is an index not
only to our present state, but a prophecy of all that is to be. The love
of Christ was that which enabled and impelled the Apostles to live great
and energetic lives. It was this simple affection which made a life of
aggression and reformation possible to them. This gave them the right
ideas and the sufficient impulse. And it is this affection which is open
to us all and which equally now as at first impels to all good. Let the
love of Christ possess any soul and that soul cannot avoid being a
blessing to the world around. Christ scarcely needed to say to Peter,
"Feed My sheep; be helpful to those for whom I died," because in time
Peter must have seen that this was his calling. Love gives us sympathy
and intelligence. Our conscience is enlightened by sympathy with the
person we love; through their desires, which we wish to gratify, we see
higher aims than our own, aims which gradually become our own. And
wherever the love of Christ exists, there sooner or later will the
purposes of Christ be understood, His aims be accepted, His fervent
desire and energetic endeavour for the highest spiritual condition of
the race become energetic in us and carry us forward to all good.
Indeed, Jesus warns Peter of the uncontrollable power of this affection
he expressed. "When you were younger," He says, "you girded yourself and
walked where you would; but when you are old another shall gird you, and
carry you on to martyrdom." For he who is possessed by the love of
Christ is as little his own master and can as little shrink from what
that love carries him to as the man that is carried to execution by a
Roman guard. Self-possession terminates when the soul can truly say,
"Thou knowest that I love Thee." There is henceforth no choosing of ways
of our own; our highest and best self is evoked in all its p