d this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually
John associates love and faith with eternal life? I was not told
when I was a boy that "God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should have everlasting
life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world
that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I
was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have safety. But
I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him--that
is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to love--hath
everlasting life. The gospel offers a man life. Never offer men a
thimbleful of gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace,
or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give
men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love,
and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in
enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then
only can the gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul, and
spirit, and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward.
Many of the current gospels are addrest only to a part of man's
nature. They offer peace, not life; faith, not love; justification,
not regeneration. And men slip back again from such religion because
it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it. It
offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was
lived before. Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can
compete with the love of the world.

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to
live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.
We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live
tomorrow. Why do we want to live tomorrow? It is because there is some
one who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and
love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we
love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he
commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and
whom he loves, he will live; because to live is to love. Be it but the
love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no
contact with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand. Eternal
life is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ's own definition.
Ponder it. "This is life eternal, that they m