, warm hearts, the glow
of love, the fire of enthusiasm, and even the flame of life. We draw the
contrast with cold natures, which are loveless and unemotional, hard to
stir and quicken; we talk about thawing reserve, about an icy torpor,
and so on. The same general strain of allusion is undoubtedly to be
traced in our text. Whatever more it means, it surely means this, that
Christ comes to kindle in men's souls a blaze of enthusiastic, divine
love, such as the world never saw, and to set them aflame with fervent
earnestness, which shall melt all their icy hardness of heart, and turn
cold self-regard into self-forgetting consecration.

Here, then, our text touches upon one of the very profoundest
characteristics of Christianity considered as a power in human life. The
contrast between it and all other religions and systems of ethics lies,
amongst other things, in the stress which it lays upon love and on the
earnestness which comes from love; whereas these are scarcely regarded
as elements in virtue according to the world, and have certainly no
place at all in the world's notion of 'temperate religion.' Christ gives
fervour by giving His Spirit. Christ gives fervour by bringing the
warmth of His own love to bear upon our hearts through the Spirit, and
that kindles ours. Where His great work for men is believed and trusted
in, there, and there only, is there excited an intensity of consequent
affection to Him which glows throughout the life. It is not enough to
say that Christianity is singular among religious and moral systems in
exalting fervour into a virtue. Its peculiarity lies deeper--in its
method of producing that fervour. It is kindled by that Spirit using as
His means the truth of the dying love of Christ. The secret of the
Gospel is not solved by saying that Christ excites love in our souls.
_The_ question yet remains--how? There is but one answer to that. He
loved us to the death. That truth laid on hearts by the Spirit, who
takes of Christ's and shows them to us, and that truth alone, makes
fire burst from their coldness.

Here is the power that produces that inner fervour without which virtue
is a name and religion a yoke. Here is the contrast, not only to John's
baptism, but to all worldly religion, to all formalism and decent
deadness of external propriety. Here is the consecration of
enthusiasm--not a lurid, sullen heat of ignorant fanaticism, but a
living glow of an enkindled nature, which flames becau