ne, and these seem to be the
things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our
lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of
love which no man knows about, or can ever know about, they never
fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the judgment day is depicted for us in
the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from
the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but
"How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion,
is not religiousness, but love. I say the final test of religion at
that great day is not religiousness, but love; not what I have done,
not what I have believed; not what I have achieved, but how I have
discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that
awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done,
by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the
withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof
that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He
suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all
our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with
the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that

I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
For myself, and none beside--
Just as if Jesus had never lived,
As if He had never died.

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations of the world shall be
gathered. It is in the presence of humanity that we shall be charged.
And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, will silently judge
each one. Those will be there whom we have met and helped; or there,
the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No other
witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be
preferred. Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one day
hear sound not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but
of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter
and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water
in the name of Christ. Thank God the Christianity of today is coming
nearer the world's need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know
better, by a hairbreadth, what religion is, what God is, who Christ
is, where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed
the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ? Where?--Whoso shall
receive a little