to be loved equally elevate courage, and
brace the weakest for calm endurance and high deeds. The man who loves
and knows that he is loved will be a hero. It must always seem strange
and inexplicable that a heart which has known the enlargement and joy of
love given and received, should ever fall so far beneath itself as to be
narrowed and troubled by nourishing feelings of separation and
alienation from those whom it might have gathered into its embrace, and
thereby communicated, and in communicating acquired, courage and
strength. We have all known the comfort of love; should it not impel us
to live in 'the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace'? Men around
us are meant to be our helpers, and to be helped by us, and the one way
to secure both is to walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us.

But Paul has still further heart-melting motives to urge. He turns the
Philippians' thoughts to their fellowship in the Spirit. All believers
have been made to drink into one spirit, and in that common
participation in the same supernatural life they partake of a oneness,
which renders any clefts or divisions unnatural, and contradictory of
the deepest truths of their experience. The branch can no more shiver
itself off from the tree, or keep the life sap enclosed within itself,
than one possessor of the common gift of the Spirit can separate himself
from the others who share it. We are one in Him; let us be one in heart
and mind. The final appeal is connected with the preceding, inasmuch as
it lays emphasis on the emotions which flow from the one life common to
all believers. That participation in the Spirit naturally leads in each
participant to 'tender mercies and compassions' directed to all sharers
in it. The very mark of truly possessing the Spirit's life is a nature
full of tenderness and swift to pity, and they who have experienced the
heaven on earth of such emotions should need no other motive than the
memory of its blessedness, to send them out among their brethren, and
even into a hostile world, as the apostles of love, the bearers of
tender mercies, and the messengers of pity.

II. The fair ideal which would complete the Apostle's joy.

We may gather from the rich abundance of motives which the Apostle
suggests before he comes to present his exhortation, that he suspected
the existence of some tendencies in the opposite direction in Philippi,
and possibly the same conclusion may be drawn from the exuberance of