Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
Defence
By:
Henry Drummond
Now I have
a closing sentence or two to add
about Paul’s reason for
singling out love as the supreme
possession. It is a very
remarkable reason. In a single
word it is this: it lasts.
“Love,” urges Paul,
“never faileth.”
Then he
begins again one of his
marvellous lists of the great
things of the day, and exposes
them one by one. He runs over the
things that men thought were
going to last, and shows that
they are all fleeting, temporary,
passing away.
“Whether
there be prophecies, they shall
fail” It was the
mother’s ambition for her
boy in those days that he should
become a prophet. For hundreds of
years God had never spoken by
means of any prophet, and at that
time the prophet was greater than
the king.
Men waited
wistfully for another messenger
to come, and hung upon his lips
when he appeared as upon the very
voice of God. Paul says,
“Whether there be
prophecies, they shall fail”
This Book is full of prophecies.
One by one they have
“failed”; that is,
having been fulfilled their work
is finished; they have nothing
more to do now in the world
except to feed a devout
man’s faith.
Then Paul
talks about tongues. That was
another thing that was greatly
coveted. “Whether there be
tongues, they shall cease.”
As we all know, many, many
centuries have passed since
tongues have been known in this
world. They have ceased. Take it
in any sense you like. Take it,
for illustration merely, as
languages in general—a sense
which was not in Paul’s mind
at all, and which though it
cannot give us the specific
lesson will point the general
truth.
Consider
the words in which these chapters
were written—Greek. It has
gone. Take the Latin—the
other great tongue of those days.
It ceased long ago. Look at the
Indian language. It is ceasing.
The language of Wales, of
Ireland, of the Scottish
Highlands is dying before our
eyes.
The most
popular book in the English
tongue at the present time,
except the Bible, is one of
Dickens’s works, his
Pickwick Papers. It is largely
written in the language of London
streetlife; and experts assure us
that in fifty years it will be
unintelligible to the average
English reader.
Then Paul
goes farther, and with even
greater boldness adds,
“Whether there be knowledge,
it shall vanish away.” The
wisdom of the ancients, where is
it? It is wholly gone. A
schoolboy to-day knows more than
Sir Isaac Newton knew.
His
knowledge has vanished away. You
put yesterday’s newspaper in
the fire. Its knowledge has
vanished away. You buy the old
editions of the great
encyclopaedias for a few pence.
Their knowledge has vanished
away. Look how the coach has been
superseded by the use of steam.
Look how electricity has
superseded that, and swept a
hundred almost new inventions
into oblivion.
One of the
greatest living authorities, Sir
William Thomson, said the other
day, “The steam-engine is
passing away.” “Whether
there be knowledge, it shall
vanish away.” At every
workshop you will see, in the
back yard, a heap of old iron, a
few wheels, a few levers, a few
cranks, broken and eaten with
rust.
Twenty
years ago that was the pride of
the city Men flocked in from the
country to see the great
invention; now it is superseded,
its day is done. And all the
boasted science and philosophy of
this day will soon be old. But
yesterday, in the University of
Edinburgh, the greatest figure in
the faculty was Sir James
Simpson, the discoverer of
chloroform. The other day his
successor and nephew, Professor
Simpson, was asked by the
librarian of the University to go
to the library and pick out the
books on his subject that were no
longer needed. And his reply to
the librarian was this:
“Take every text-book that
is more than ten years old, and
put it down in the
cellar.”Sir James Simpson
was a great authority only a few
years ago: men came from all
parts of the earth to consult
him; and almost the whole
teaching of that time is
consigned by the science of
to-day to oblivion. And in every
branch of science it is the same.
“Now we know in part. We see
through a glass
darkly.”
Can you
tell me anything that is going to
last? Many things Paul did not
condescend to name. He did not
mention money, fortune, fame; but
he picked out the great things of
his time, the things the best men
thought had something in them,
and brushed them peremptorily
aside.
Paul had no
charge against these things in
themselves. All he said about
them was that they would not last
They were great things, but not
supreme things. There were things
beyond them. What we are
stretches past what we do, beyond
what we possess. Many things that
men denounce as sins are not
sins; but they are temporary. And
that is a favourite argument of
the New Testament.
John says
of the world, not that it is
wrong, but simply that it
“passeth away.” There
is a great deal in the world that
is delightful and beautiful;
there is a great deal in it that
is great and engrossing; but it
will not last. All that is in the
world, the lust of the eye, the
lust of the flesh, and the pride
of life, are but for a little
while. Love not the world
therefore. Nothing that it
contains is worth the life and
consecration of an immortal soul.
The immortal soul must give
itself to something that is
immortal. And the only immortal
things are these: “Now
abideth faith, hope, love, but
the greatest of these is
love.”
Some think
the time may come when two of
these three things will also pass
away —faith into sight, hope
into fruition. Paul does not say
so.
We know but
little now about the conditions
of the life that is to come. But
what is certain is that Love must
last. God, the Eternal God, is
Love. Covet therefore that
everlasting gift, that one thing
which it is certain is going to
stand, that one coinage which
will be current in the Universe
when all the other coinages of
all the nations of the world
shall be useless and unhonoured.
You will
give yourselves to many things,
give yourselves first to Love.
Hold things in their proportion.
Let at
least the first great object of
our lives be to achieve the
character defended in these
words, the character,—and it
is the character of
Christ—which is built around
Love.
I have said
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 addressed 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 for ever is to live
for ever. Hence, eternal life is
inextricably bound up with love
We want to live for ever for the
same reason that we want to live
tomorrow.
Why do you
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. The “energy
of life” has failed. Eternal
life also is to know God, and God
is love. This is Christ’s
own definition. Ponder it.
“This is life eternal, that
they might know Thee the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom
Thou hast sent.” Love must
be eternal. It is what God is. On
the last analysis, then, love is
life. Love never faileth, and
life never faileth, so long as
there is love.
That is the
philosophy of what Paul is
showing us; the reason why in the
nature of things Love should be
the supreme thing—because it
is going to last; because in the
nature of things it is an Eternal
Life. That Life is a thing that
we are living now, not that we
get when we die; that we shall
have a poor chance of getting
when we die unless we are living
now.
No worse
fate can befall a man in this
world than to live and grow old
alone, unloving, and unloved. To
be lost is to live in an
unregenerate condition, loveless
and unloved; and to be saved is
to love; and he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth already in God. For
God is love.
Now I have
all but finished. How many of you
will join me in reading this
chapter once a week for the next
three months? A man did that once
and it changed his whole life.
Will you do
it?
It is for
the greatest thing in the world.
You might begin by reading it
every day, especially the verses
which describe the perfect
character. “Love suffereth
long, and is kind; love envieth
not; love vaunteth not
itself.”
Get these
ingredients into your life. Then
everything that you do is
eternal. It is worth doing. It is
worth giving time to. No man can
become a saint in his sleep; and
to fulfil the condition required
demands a certain amount of
prayer and meditation and time,
just as improvement in any
direction, bodily or mental,
requires preparation and care.
Address
yourselves to that one thing; at
any cost have this transcendent
character exchanged for yours.
You will find as you look back
upon your life that the moments
that stand out, the moments when
you have really lived, are the
moments when you have done things
in a spirit of love. As memory
scans the past, above and beyond
all the transitory pleasures of
life, there leap forward those
supreme hours when you have been
enabled to do unnoticed
kindnesses to those round about
you, things too trifling to speak
about, but which you feel have
entered into your eternal life.
I have seen
almost all the beautiful things
God has made; I have enjoyed
almost every pleasure that He has
planned for man; and yet as I
look back I see standing out
above all the life that has gone
four or five short experiences
when the love of God reflected
itself in some poor imitation,
some small act of love of mine,
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 to-day is coming
nearer the world’s need.
Live to help that on.
Thank God
men know better, by a
hairsbreadth, 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 child in My name
receiveth Me. And who are
Christ’s? Every one that
loveth is born of God.
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