Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
Analysis
By:
Henry Drummond
AFTER
contrasting Love with these
things, Paul, in three verses,
very short, gives us an amazing
analysis of what this supreme
thing is. I ask you to look at
it. It is a compound thing, he
tells us.
It is like
light. As you have seen a man of
science take a beam of light and
pass it through a crystal prism,
as you have seen it come out on
the other side of the prism
broken up into its component
colours—red, and blue, and
yellow, and violet, and orange,
and all the colours of the
rainbow—so Paul passes this
thing, Love, through the
magnificent prism of his inspired
intellect, and it comes out on
the other side broken up into its
elements.
And in
these few words we have what one
might call the Spectrum of Love,
the analysis of Love. Will you
observe what its elements are?
Will you notice that they have
common names; that they are
virtues which we hear about every
day; that they are things which
can be practised by every man in
every place in life; and how, by
a multitude of small things and
ordinary virtues, the supreme
thing, the summum bonum, is made
up?
The
Spectrum of Love has nine
ingredients:—
- Patience
. . . . . . “Love
suffereth
long.”
-
- Kindness
. . . . . . “And is
kind.”
-
- Generosity
. . . . “Love envieth
not.”
-
- Humility
. . . . . . “Love
vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed
up.”
-
- Courtesy
. . . . . . “Doth not
behave itself
unseemly.”
-
- Unselfishness
. . “Seeketh not her
own.”
-
- Good
Temper . . “Is not easily
provoked.”
-
- Guilelessness
. . “Thinketh no
evil.”
-
- Sincerity
. . . . . . “Rejoiceth
not in iniquity, but rejoiceth
in the
truth.”
Patience;
kindness; generosity; humility;
courtesy; unselfishness; good
temper; guilelessness;
sincerity—these make up the
supreme gift, the stature of the
perfect man.
You will
observe that all are in relation
to men, in relation to life, in
relation to the known today and
the near tomorrow, and not to the
unknown eternity. We hear much of
love to God; Christ spoke much of
love to man. We make a great deal
of peace with heaven; Christ made
much of peace on earth.
Religion is
not a strange or added thing, but
the inspiration of the secular
life, the breathing of an eternal
spirit through this temporal
world. The supreme thing, in
short, is not a thing at all, but
the giving of a further finish to
the multitudinous words and acts
which make up the sum of every
common day.
There is no
time to do more than make a
passing note upon each of these
ingredients. Love is Patience.
This is the normal attitude of
Love; Love passive, Love waiting
to begin; not in a hurry; calm;
ready to do its work when the
summons comes, but meantime
wearing the ornament of a meek
and quiet spirit. Love suffers
long; beareth all things;
believeth all things; hopeth all
things. For Love understands, and
therefore waits.
Kindness.
Love active. Have you ever
noticed how much of Christ’s
life was spent in doing kind
things—in merely doing kind
things?
Run over it
with that in view and you will
find that He spent a great
proportion of His time simply in
making people happy, in doing
good turns to people. There is
only one thing greater than
happiness in the world, and that
is holiness; and it is not in our
keeping; but what God has put in
our power is the happiness of
those about us, and that is
largely to be secured by our
being kind to them.
“The
greatest thing,” says some
one, “a man can do for his
Heavenly Father is to be kind to
some of His other children.”
I wonder why it is that we are
not all kinder than we are? How
much the world needs it. How
easily it is done. How
instantaneously it acts. How
infallibly it is remembered. How
superabundantly it pays itself
back—for there is no debtor
in the world so honourable, so
superbly honourable, as Love.
“Love never faileth”.
Love is success, Love is
happiness, Love is life.
“Love, I say, “with
Browning, “is energy of
Life.”
“For
life, with all it yields of joy
and woe
And hope
and fear,
Is just our
chance o’ the prize of
learning love—
How love
might be, hath been indeed, and
is.”
Where Love
is, God is. He that dwelleth in
Love dwelleth in God. God is
love. Therefore love. Without
distinction, without calculation,
without procrastination, love.
Lavish it upon the poor, where it
is very easy; especially upon the
rich, who often need it most;
most of all upon our equals,
where it is very difficult, and
for whom perhaps we each do least
of all.
There is a
difference between trying to
please and giving pleasure Give
pleasure. Lose no chance of
giving pleasure. For that is the
ceaseless and anonymous triumph
of a truly loving
spirit.
“I
shall pass through this world but
once. Any good thing therefore
that I can do, or any kindness
that I can show to any human
being, let me do it now. Let me
not defer it or neglect it, for I
shall not pass this way
again.”
Generosity.
“Love envieth not” This
is Love in competition with
others. Whenever you attempt a
good work you will find other men
doing the same kind of work, and
probably doing it better. Envy
them not. Envy is a feeling of
ill-will to those who are in the
same line as ourselves, a spirit
of covetousness and detraction.
How little
Christian work even is a
protection against unchristian
feeling. That most despicable of
all the unworthy moods which
cloud a Christian’s soul
assuredly waits for us on the
threshold of every work, unless
we are fortified with this grace
of magnanimity. Only one thing
truly need the Christian envy,
the large, rich, generous soul
which “envieth
not.”
And then,
after having learned all that,
you have to learn this further
thing, Humility— to put a
seal upon your lips and forget
what you have done.
After you
have been kind, after Love has
stolen forth into the world and
done its beautiful work, go back
into the shade again and say
nothing about it Love hides even
from itself. Love waives even
self-satisfaction. “Love
vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up.”
The fifth
ingredient is a somewhat strange
one to find in this summum bonum:
Courtesy. This is Love in
society, Love in relation to
etiquette. “Love doth not
behave itself unseemly.”
Politeness has been defined as
love in trifles. Courtesy is said
to be love in little things.
And the one
secret of politeness is to love.
Love cannot behave itself
unseemly. You can put the most
untutored person into the highest
society, and if they have a
reservoir of love in their heart,
they will not behave themselves
unseemly. They simply cannot do
it. Carlyle said of Robert Burns
that there was no truer gentleman
in Europe than the
ploughman-poet. It was because he
loved everything—the mouse,
and the daisy, and all the
things, great and small, that God
had made.
So with
this simple passport he could
mingle with any society, and
enter courts and palaces from his
little cottage on the banks of
the Ayr. You know the meaning of
the word “gentleman.”
It means a gentle man—a man
who does things gently, with
love. And that is the whole art
and mystery of it.
The
gentleman cannot in the nature of
things do an ungentle, an
ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle
soul, the inconsiderate,
unsympathetic nature cannot do
anything else. “Love doth
not behave itself
unseemly.”
Unselfishness.
“Love seeketh not her
own.” Observe: Seeketh not
even that which is her own. In
Britain the Englishman is
devoted, and rightly, to his
rights.
But there
come times when a man may
exercise even the higher right of
giving up his rights. Yet Paul
does not summon us to give up our
rights. Love strikes much deeper.
It would have us not seek them at
all, ignore them, eliminate the
personal element altogether from
our calculations.
It is not
hard to give up our rights. They
are often external. The difficult
thing is to give up ourselves.
The more difficult thing still is
not to seek things for ourselves
at all.
After we
have sought them, bought them,
won them, deserved them, we have
taken the cream off them for
ourselves already. Little cross
then, perhaps, to give them up.
But not to seek them, to look
every man not on his own things,
but on the things of
others—id opus est.
“Seekest thou great things
for thyself? “said the
prophet; “seek them
not.” Why? Because there is
no greatness in things. Things
cannot be great. The only
greatness is unselfish love. Even
self-denial in itself is nothing,
is almost a mistake. Only a great
purpose or a mightier love can
justify the waste. It is more
difficult, I have said, not to
seek our own at all, than, having
sought it, to give it up. I must
take that back.
It is only
true of a partly selfish heart.
Nothing is a hardship to Love,
and nothing is hard. I believe
that Christ’s yoke is easy.
Christ’s “yoke” is
just His way of taking life. And
I believe it is an easier way
than any other. I believe it is a
happier way than any other. The
most obvious lesson in
Christ’s teaching is that
there is no happiness in having
and getting anything, but only in
giving.
I repeat,
there is no happiness in having
or in getting, but only in
giving. And half the world is on
the wrong scent in the pursuit of
happiness. They think it consists
in having and getting, and in
being served by others. It
consists in giving, and in
serving others.
He that
would be great among you, said
Christ, let him serve. He that
would be happy, let him remember
that there is but one way—it
is more blessed, it is more
happy, to give than to
receive.
The next
ingredient is a very remarkable
one: Good Temper. “Love is
not easily provoked.”
Nothing could be more striking
than to find this here. We are
inclined to look upon bad temper
as a very harmless weakness.
We speak of
it as a mere infirmity of nature,
a family failing, a matter of
temperament, not a thing to take
into very serious account in
estimating a man’s
character.
And yet
here, right in the heart of this
analysis of love, it finds a
place; and the Bible again and
again returns to condemn it as
one of the most destructive
elements in human
nature.
The
peculiarity of ill temper is that
it is the vice of the virtuous.
It is often the one blot on an
otherwise noble character. You
know men who are all but perfect,
and women who would be entirely
perfect, but for an easily
ruffled, quick-tempered, or
“touchy” disposition.
This
compatibility of ill temper with
high moral character is one of
the strangest and saddest
problems of ethics. The truth is
there are two great classes of
sins—sins of the Body, and
sins of the Disposition.
The
Prodigal Son may be taken as a
type of the first, the Elder
Brother of the second. Now
society has no doubt whatever as
to which of these is the worse.
Its brand falls, without a
challenge, upon the Prodigal.
But are we
right? We have no balance to
weigh one another’s sins,
and coarser and finer are but
human words; but faults in the
higher nature may be less venial
than those in the lower, and to
the eye of Him who is Love, a sin
against Love may seem a hundred
times more base.
No form of
vice, not worldliness, not greed
of gold, not drunkenness itself,
does more to un-Christianise
society than evil temper. For
embittering life, for breaking up
communities, for destroying the
most sacred relationships, for
devastating homes, for withering
up men and women, for taking the
bloom off childhood; in short,
for sheer gratuitous
misery-producing power, this
influence stands alone.
Look at the
Elder Brother, moral,
hardworking, patient,
dutiful—let him get all
credit for his virtues—look
at this man, this baby, sulking
outside his own father’s
door. “He was angry,”
we read, “and would not go
in.”
Look at the
effect upon the father, upon the
servants, upon the happiness of
the guests. Judge of the effect
upon the Prodigal—and how
many prodigals are kept out of
the Kingdom of God by the
unlovely characters of those who
profess to be inside? Analyse, as
a study in Temper, the
thundercloud itself as it gathers
upon the Elder Brother’s
brow. What is it made of?
Jealousy, anger, pride,
uncharity, cruelty,
self-righteousness, touchiness,
doggedness, sullenness—these
are the ingredients of this dark
and loveless soul. In varying
proportions, also, these are the
ingredients of all ill temper.
Judge if
such sins of the disposition are
not worse to live in, and for
others to live with, than sins of
the body.
Did Christ
indeed not answer the question
Himself when He said, “I say
unto you, that the publicans and
the harlots go into the Kingdom
of Heaven before you.” There
is really no place in Heaven for
a disposition like this. A man
with such a mood could only make
Heaven miserable for all the
people in it. Except, therefore,
such a man be born again, he
cannot, he simply cannot, enter
the Kingdom of Heaven. For it is
perfectly certain— and you
will not misunderstand
me—that to enter Heaven a
man must take it with
him.
You will
see then why Temper is
significant. It is not in what it
is alone, but in what it reveals.
This is why
I take the liberty now of
speaking of it with such unusual
plainness. It is a test for love,
a symptom, a revelation of an
unloving nature at bottom. It is
the intermittent fever which
bespeaks unintermittent disease
within; the occasional bubble
escaping to the surface which
betrays some rottenness
underneath; a sample of the most
hidden products of the soul
dropped involuntarily when off
one’s guard; in a word, the
lightning form of a hundred
hideous and unchristian sins.
For a want
of patience, a want of kindness,
a want of generosity, a want of
courtesy, a want of
unselfishness, are all
instantaneously symbolised in one
flash of Temper.
Hence it is
not enough to deal with the
temper. We must go to the source,
and change the inmost nature, and
the angry humours will die away
of themselves.
Souls are
made sweet not by taking the acid
fluids out, but by putting
something in—a great Love, a
new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ.
Christ, the Spirit of Christ,
interpenetrating ours, sweetens,
purifies, transforms all. This
only can eradicate what is wrong,
work a chemical change, renovate
and regenerate, and rehabilitate
the inner man. Will-power does
not change men. Time does not
change men.
Christ
does. Therefore “Let that
mind be in you which was also in
Christ Jesus.” Some of us
have not much time to lose.
Remember, once more, that this is
a matter of life or death. I
cannot help speaking urgently,
for myself, for yourselves.
“Whosoever shall offend one
of these little ones, which
believe in me, it were better for
him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the
sea.” That is to say, it is
the deliberate verdict of the
Lord Jesus that it is better not
to live than not to love. It is
better not to live than not to
love.
Guilelessness
and Sincerity may be dismissed
almost with a word. Guilelessness
is the grace for suspicious
people.
And the
possession of it is the great
secret of personal influence. You
will find, if you think for a
moment, that the people who
influence you are people who
believe in you. In an atmosphere
of suspicion men shrivel up; but
in that atmosphere they expand,
and find encouragement and
educative fellowship. It is a
wonderful thing that here and
there in this hard, uncharitable
world there should still be left
a few rare souls who think no
evil.
This is the
great unworldliness. Love
“thinketh no evil,”
imputes no motive, sees the
bright side, puts the best
construction on every action.
What a delightful state of mind
to live in! What a stimulus and
benediction even to meet with it
for a day! To be trusted is to be
saved.
And if we
try to influence or elevate
others, we shall soon see that
success is in proportion to their
belief of our belief in them. For
the respect of another is the
first restoration of the
self-respect a man has lost; our
ideal of what he is becomes to
him the hope and pattern of what
he may become.
“Love
rejoiceth not in iniquity, but
rejoiceth in the truth.” I
have called this Sincerity from
the words rendered in the
Authorised Version by
“rejoiceth in the
truth.” And, certainly, were
this the real translation,
nothing could be more just.
For he who
loves will love Truth not less
than men. He will rejoice in the
Truth—rejoice not in what he
has been taught to believe; not
in this Church’s doctrine or
in that; not in this ism or in
that ism; but “in the
Truth.” He will accept only
what is real; he will strive to
get at facts; he will search for
Truth with a humble and unbiased
mind, and cherish whatever he
finds at any sacrifice.
But the
more literal translation of the
Revised Version calls for just
such a sacrifice for truth’s
sake here. For what Paul really
meant is, as we there read,
“Rejoiceth not in
unrighteousness, but rejoiceth
with the truth,” a quality
which probably no one English
word—and certainly not
Sincerity—adequately
defines. It includes, perhaps
more strictly, the self-restraint
which refuses to make capital out
of others’ faults; the
charity which delights not in
exposing the weakness of others,
but “covereth all
things”; the sincerity of
purpose which endeavours to see
things as they are, and rejoices
to find them better than
suspicion feared or calumny
denounced.
So much for
the analysis of Love. Now the
business of our lives is to have
these things fitted into our
characters.
That is the
supreme work to which we need to
address ourselves in this world,
to learn Love. Is life not full
of opportunities for learning
Love? Every man and woman every
day has a thousand of them. The
world is not a playground; it is
a schoolroom. Life is not a
holiday, but an education.
And the one
eternal lesson for us all is how
better we can love What makes a
man a good cricketer? Practice.
What makes a man a good artist, a
good sculptor, a good musician?
Practice. What makes a man a good
linguist, a good stenographer?
Practice.
What makes
a man a good man? Practice.
Nothing else. There is nothing
capricious about religion. We do
not get the soul in different
ways, under different laws, from
those in which we get the body
and the mind. If a man does not
exercise his arm he develops no
biceps muscle; and if a man does
not exercise his soul, he
acquires no muscle in his soul,
no strength of character, no
vigour of moral fibre, nor beauty
of spiritual growth.
Love is not
a thing of enthusiastic emotion.
It is a rich, strong, manly,
vigorous expression of the whole
round Christian
character—the Christlike
nature in its fullest
development. And the constituents
of this great character are only
to be built up by ceaseless
practice.
What was
Christ doing in the
carpenter’s shop?
Practicing. Though perfect, we
read that He learned obedience,
He increased in wisdom and in
favour with God and man. Do not
quarrel therefore with your lot
in life. Do not complain of its
never-ceasing cares, its petty
environment, the vexations you
have to stand, the small and
sordid souls you have to live and
work with. Above all, do not
resent temptation; do not be
perplexed because it seems to
thicken round you more and more,
and ceases neither for effort nor
for agony nor prayer.
That is the
practice which God appoints you;
and it is having its work in
making you patient, and humble,
and generous, and unselfish, and
kind, and courteous.
Do not
grudge the hand that is moulding
the still too shapeless image
within you. It is growing more
beautiful though you see it not,
and every touch of temptation may
add to its perfection. Therefore
keep in the midst of life.
Do not
isolate yourself. Be among men,
and among things, and among
troubles, and difficulties, and
obstacles. You remember
Goethe’s words: Es bildet
ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Doch ein Character in dem Strom
der Welt. “Talent develops
itself in solitude; character in
the stream of life.” Talent
develops itself in
solitude—the talent of
prayer, of faith, of meditation,
of seeing the unseen; Character
grows in the stream of the
world’s life. That chiefly
is where men are to learn
love.
How? Now,
how? To make it easier, I have
named a few of the elements of
love. But these are only
elements. Love itself can never
be defined. Light is a something
more than the sum of its
ingredients—a glowing,
dazzling, tremulous ether. And
love is something more than all
its elements— a palpitating,
quivering, sensitive, living
thing. By synthesis of all the
colours, men can make whiteness,
they cannot make light.
By
synthesis of all the virtues, men
can make virtue, they cannot make
love. How then are we to have
this transcendent living whole
conveyed into our souls? We brace
our wills to secure it. We try to
copy those who have it. We lay
down rules about it. We watch. We
pray.
But these
things alone will not bring Love
into our nature. Love is an
effect. And only as we fulfil the
right condition can we have the
effect produced. Shall I tell you
what the cause is?
If you turn
to the Revised Version of the
First Epistle of John you will
find these words: “We love,
because He first loved us.”
“We love,” not “We
love Him” That is the way
the old Version has it, and it is
quite wrong. “We
love—because He first loved
us.” Look at that word
“because.” It is the
cause of which I have spoken.
“Because He first loved
us,” the effect follows that
we love, we love Him, we love all
men. We cannot help it.
Because He
loved us, we love, we love
everybody. Our heart is slowly
changed. Contemplate the love of
Christ, and you will love. Stand
before that mirror, reflect
Christ’s character, and you
will be changed into the same
image from tenderness to
tenderness. There is no other
way. You cannot love to order.
You can only look at the lovely
object, and fall in love with it,
and grow into likeness to it And
so look at this Perfect
Character, this Perfect Life.
Look at the
great Sacrifice as He laid down
Himself, all through life, and
upon the Cross of Calvary; and
you must love Him. And loving
Him, you must become like Him.
Love begets love. It is a process
of induction.
Put a piece
of iron in the presence of a
magnetized body, and that piece
of iron for a time becomes
magnetized. It is charged with an
attractive force in the mere
presence of the original force,
and as long as you leave the two
side by side, they are both
magnets alike.
Remain side
by side with Him who loved us,
and gave Himself for us, and you
too will become a centre of
power, a permanently attractive
force; and like Him you will draw
all men unto you, like Him you
will be drawn unto all men. That
is the inevitable effect of Love.
Any man who fulfils that cause
must have that effect produced in
him.
Try to give
up the idea that religion comes
to us by chance, or by mystery,
or by caprice. It comes to us by
natural law, or by supernatural
law, for all law is Divine.
Edward
Irving went to see a dying boy
once, and when he entered the
room he just put his hand on the
sufferer’s head, and said,
“My boy, God loves
you,” and went away. And the
boy started from his bed, and
called out to the people in the
house, “God loves me! God
loves me!” It changed that
boy.
The sense
that God loved him overpowered
him, melted him down, and began
the creating of a new heart in
him.
And that is
how the love of God melts down
the unlovely heart in man, and
begets in him the new creature,
who is patient and humble and
gentle and unselfish.
And there
is no other way to get it. There
is no mystery about it We love
others, we love everybody, we
love our enemies, because He
first loved us.
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