able number of
so-called and of real Christians in this world, and in our churches
to-day, who have little conception that God has spoken to them for
anything else than to deliver them from the fear of death, and from the
incidence on them of future condemnation. He _has_ spoken for this
purpose, but the ultimate end of all is that we may be helped to love
Him, and so to be like Him. The aim of the commandment is love, and if
you ever are tempted to rest in intellectual apprehensions, or to
pervert the truth of God into a mere arena on which you can display your
skill of fence and your intellectual agility, or if ever you are tempted
to think that all is done when the sweet message of forgiveness is
sealed upon a man's heart, remember the solemn and plain words of my
text--the final purpose of all is that we may love God and man.

But then, on the other side, note that no less distinctly is the sole
foundation of this love laid in God's speech. My text, in its elevation
of sentiment and character and conduct above doctrine, falls in with the
prevailing tendencies of this day; but it provides the safeguards which
these tendencies neglect. Notice that this favourite saying of the most
advanced school of broad thinkers, who are always talking about the
decay of dogma, and the unimportance of doctrine as compared with love,
is here uttered by a man who was no sentimentalist, but to whom the
Christian system was a most distinct and definite thing, bristling all
over with the obnoxious doctrines which are by some of us so summarily
dismissed as of no importance. My very text protests against the modern
attempt to wrench away the sentiments and emotions produced in men, by
the reception of Christian truth, from the truth which it recognises as
the only basis on which they can be produced. It declares that the
'commandment' must come first, before love can follow; and the rest of
the letter, although, as I say, it decisively places the end of
revelation as being the moral and religious perfecting of men into
assimilation with the divine love, no less decisively demands that for
such a perfecting there shall be laid the foundation of the truth as it
is revealed in Jesus Christ.

And that is what we want to-day in order to make breadth wholesome, and
if only we will carry with us the two thoughts, the commandment and
love, we shall not go far wrong. But what would you think of a man that
said, 'I do not want any foundations. I w