t may be rooted in impressive convictions
about the person of the Saviour and enthusiastic admiration of His
character. It may spring from a profound sense of the lost condition
from which He has rescued ourselves and of the destiny to which He has
raised us. It may be due most of all to the impression made on our
mind and heart by the sacrifice at the cost of which Jesus procured
salvation for us. And here the depth or shallowness of our theology
will be sure to tell. If our views are superficial either of the
difference which salvation has made to ourselves or of what Christ did
to constitute Himself the Saviour, the likelihood is that we shall
love little. It is the man who knows that he has been forgiven much
and saved at a great cost, who loves much. And the amount of love is
the measure of sacrifice.

In all ages this has been the secret of devoted lives. It has made the
great preachers--St. Augustine and St. Bernard, Luther and Wesley,
Samuel Rutherford and McCheyne. It has made those too who have not
been great in the eyes of men, but by their self-denying lives have
made the kingdom of God to come. In one of his sonnets Matthew Arnold
tells of meeting with a minister, "ill and o'erworked," on a broiling
August day in the East End of London, and asking him how he fared in
that scene of sin and sorrow. "Bravely," was the answer, "for I of
late have been much cheered with thought of Christ." It is said to
have been an actual incident.[52] At all events, it is the explanation
of thousands of heroic lives passed in similar desperate situations.
At present the adherents of a humanitarian philanthropism are loud in
proclaiming the woes of the world, as if they had been the first to
discover them, and propounding schemes for their amelioration; but
their methods have all been anticipated by the humble followers of
Jesus; and nine-tenths of the genuine philanthropic work of the world
are being done by men and women who make no noise, but who cannot
help working for the ends of Jesus, because His love is burning in
their very bones, and because the life of Christ in them cannot help
manifesting itself after its kind. Down the Christian centuries there
has come floating a kind of hymn: the words are said to be by St.
Patrick: the sentiment may well be called the music to which the true
Church militant has always marched:--

Christ with me, Christ before be,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, C