Everlasting Love

The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.—Jeremiah 31:3.

This tender and gracious assurance appears here in a somewhat unexpected connexion. The Book of Jeremiah, taken as a whole, is a sad book; it consists in the main of warnings, expostulations, and prophecies of doom; and these prophecies are shown in process of fulfilment almost while they were being uttered. It is a sombre picture of human life which is presented to us in these vivid pages. And yet here we have, in the very midst of all this darkness and all these oracles of stern judgment, the sweet utterance which forms the text: “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” With lovingkindness? Loved with an everlasting love? Nothing could have seemed less like it just then. Fierce, terrible, merciless were the ways of God to Israel so far as appearances went, and not without cause. Love was about the last word that could describe the relations of these suffering people to their offended God.

Think what the circumstances were. The chosen people were ripe for judgment. There were two invasions within a few years of each other, each of them involving a siege of Jerusalem and the carrying away of thousands of prisoners into captivity. The scenes of horror associated with both must have been indescribably dreadful, especially after the second, when Jerusalem was left a heap of smoking ruins. It was in the interval between these two sieges that the text was most probably spoken, and the fact is surprising when we consider the circumstances. The prophets view is that Gods love is not shown by His leaving His people to perish morally in the slough of an enervating security, but rather in the infliction of suffering which purifies the soul by the discipline of the flesh. He holds, with wonderful insight, that their sorrows not only are punishments for their sins, but are of the nature of a drastic preparation for the unique work which Israel had yet to do in the world. He foretells the return from the Captivity, which at the moment was only just beginning—in fact, the greater of the two Captivities had not yet taken place; Jerusalem was still standing and autonomous at the time the prophecy was uttered. Jeremiah says that after seventy years the exiles will be permitted to return to their own land, and then will commence their distinctive spiritual mission to all the nations upon earth. And this, as we now know, came true to the letter.

There are three strands in the prophets thought—

The love of God lies behind the darkest experiences of life.

This love is everlasting and changeless.

It is a tender and individual love, manifesting itself as lovingkindness.

I

Love Offered from Afar

“The Lord appeared of old unto me.”

1. The words, “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying,” etc., might mean either that the prophet had been convinced from early days, as well as all through the period of affliction, that God is a God of love; or it might mean, and more probably does mean, as the Hebrew literally states, “The Lord appeared from afar unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” The expression “from afar” suggests the more beautiful idea of the two. The thought is that God hears, as it were, from afar, the cry of His children and comes to their relief. The image suggested is that of the poor enslaved children of Zion far away in a strange land stretching their hands towards their ancient home and praying to God, whose altar once stood there, to come to their deliverance; and God hears that prayer and comes and breaks down their prison walls and brings them back.

Jeremiah represents Jehovah as seeking to win back His chosen people to Himself under the figure of a lover wooing a maiden. Jehovah speaks from His far-away dwelling-place, and when the “virgin of Israel,” in her distant exile, hears him, she answers, “From afar Jehovah appeared unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”

Then Jehovah makes answer:

Again will I build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel:

Again shalt thou take thy tabrets and go forth in the dances of them that make merry;

Again shalt thou plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria; while they that plant shall enjoy the fruit.1 [Note: H. W. Battle.]

2. But in a still deeper sense the meaning is that those who are afar from God in spirit will be heard and helped by Him at the first instant of their turning towards Him again. The saying is in substance almost exactly the same as that immortal utterance of the Master in the parable of the Prodigal Son, “When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” It is not that God is a great way off, but that we in spirit may be a great way off from the apprehension of His eternal holiness and truth. But the grace of God takes advantage of every smallest opportunity to find entrance to the soul. “For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.” The faintest motion of our spirits Godward brings Him to our assistance. There may be very little in us for His goodness to take hold of, but such as it is He makes use of it. Those desolate Jews who lay in tears by the waters of Babylon were scarcely conscious of any change in their spiritual condition beyond the fact that they had suffered; they had been tried in the fire; their worldly delights had been rudely and cruelly swept away from them, but they could not yet have been capable of very much in the way of heavenly-mindedness. Nevertheless, says the prophet, God grasped at the little they had and gave Himself to increase it. It is the same with us. When everything is going well with us in the outer world we may be far from the Kingdom of Heaven, but when trouble overtakes us our thoughts turn more readily to God and things eternal.

During my absence I discovered the fact that love vanquishes distance, and—I think I may say it reverently—that love vanquishes death. I seemed to see it as a network of golden filaments, invisible to the selfish eye, but holding together the whole world. Moreover, India showed to me, much more clearly than I ever gathered before I went, the lovelessness of men when they have not heard or have not believed that God is Love.

Religion there is fear, not love; worship there is an attempt to propitiate the baleful and destructive forces in the midst of which we have to live; love has no part in it. In Mohammedanism, which has taken a fifth of India under its leadership and inspired them with its ideal, there is only submission to the Supreme Authority, but no love. I came back, therefore, as you can imagine, with quite a new apprehension of the meaning of the words of this text; and I wonder whether I ever could have learned the full meaning of that word apart from the experiences of the past few months.1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

3. The crowning glory of the Christian religion, the sum of all its glories, is its God. He is one; He is personal; He is self-existent, almighty, eternal; He is holy, wise, loving and good. Fairbairn states that the transcendent moment for man, the moment of supreme promise and of grandest hope, was when the idea of a moral deity entered his heart, when all the energies of religion came to be moral energies for the making of moral men. “The moment when gravitation, navigation, the secrets of the sea, or the stars, or the earth, were discovered had neither singly nor all combined equal or even approximate significance for man. Take from him this religion steeped in morality, made living by the moral character of its God, and you will leave him without the grandest energy working for God and peace and progress that ever came into his history or into his heart.”

“At heart Christianity is simply a revelation of a perfect God, doing the work of perfect love and holiness for His creatures and transforming men into His own likeness, so that they will do the work of love and holiness towards their fellows.” He is the universal Father, the giver of every good gift and every perfect gift. It is in Him that we live and move and have our being. He is interested in the welfare of every child made in His image, and makes all things work together for his good. “His glory is to diffuse happiness, and fill up the silent places of the universe with voices that speak out of glad hearts.”

The greatest of the philosophers of Greece did but sum up the belief of antiquity when he put into the mouth of Phaedrus the words: “Love is a mighty god, and wonderful among gods and men, but especially wonderful in his birth. For he is the eldest of the gods, which is an honour to him; and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any.”1 [Note: R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, ii. 254.]

4. There is nothing that so challenges the attention of the non-Christian peoples as the statement that God is love and that He loves them and desires their redemption and their present and eternal well-being. There is nothing that impresses them as this does. Missionaries say that people who were disposed to shut their ears to the message and to drive them away were profoundly affected by the story of Gods love and mercy and goodness. When they heard a little they were eager to hear more. The story is so unlike anything they ever heard or imagined and so pleasing in itself that they are charmed by it. It is to them like good news from a far country, like rivers of water in a dry place, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Friendship and love [he wrote to Professor von Wyss of Zürich] are the deepest springs of happiness in this world. And what else is the sum of Christianity than Gods love in Christ, Christ for the world and we for Christ? The theology of the future must start from Johns definition of God, “God is love.” Just now we have set on foot in the Presbyterian Church a revision of the Westminster Confession. The Confession is too rigidly Calvinistic for my liking, a creed for the small number of the elect but not for the whole world for which the Saviour died.

We need a theology, we need a confession, that starts from the living person of Jesus Christ, the God-man and Saviour of the world. This is the burden of Peters confession, the fruitful germ of all creeds; this is a central fact and truth on which all true Christians can agree. We need a theology and a confession that is inspired and controlled, not by the idea of Divine justice, which is a consuming fire, but by the idea of Divine love, which is life and peace. Love is the key which unlocks His character and all His works. And this love extends to all His creatures, and has made abundant provision in Christ for the salvation of ten thousand worlds.1 [Note: The Life of Philip Schaff, 428.]

God is love, and I for one can never conceive that God shuts out any human being from that love either here or in the world to come. But I think that a man can, and often does, as we know, so harden himself in sin here that he shuts away the love of God from himself. Now, God never compels, so that it is possible that this process may go on hereafter. I cannot conceive God not trying to reach the soul, but I can conceive the soul getting so hardened and devilish that it may go on resisting for ever.2 [Note: Bishop John Selwyn: A Memoir, 256.]

I vexed me with a troubled thought,

That God might be

A God whose mercy must be bought

With misery.

But theres no wrath to be appeased

In heaven above;

No wrath with bitter anguish pleased,

For God is Love.

No pleasure from our suffering

The Lord could steal,

Or anguish of the meanest thing

He made to feel.

But on Himself the grief He took,

The pain and loss

And shame of sin, and its rebuke

Upon the Cross.

For love rejoiceth not in pain

Of good or bad,

But beareth all, and still is fain

To make us glad.

Love circles us with mercies sweet,

And guides our way,

And sheds its light around our feet

By night and day.

O love of Jesus! love of heaven!

O holy Dove,

Teach all the ransomed and forgiven

That God is Love.1 [Note: Walter C. Smith.]

II

Love that Lasts

“I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”

The love of God is everlasting and changeless in contrast to that of other lovers. Elsewhere Jeremiah says, “All thy lovers have forgotten thee.” Israel had had many lovers professing regard and offering service; but what had their regard and service come to? They were now cold, careless, perhaps even hostile. They had shown the appearance of love to Israel, not that they cared for Israel, but because they themselves were advantaged. Now, that is no true affection which changes when the thing loved ceases to gratify us. Yet this was all that the affection of these other lovers amounted to—a mere name of love, a feeling which, in the course of time, was to evince their own instability and bring shame to them. But God is a contrast to all this. He loves with an everlasting love. He loved Israel, not only in the days of prosperity and wealth and beauty, but in the days of downfall and despair. His thought penetrates through to the abiding worth of humanity. We do not slander human affection, or in any way underestimate it, when we say that man cannot love his fellow-man as God loves him. God it is who first of all shows man what love really is; then man, having the Spirit of the Divine Father breathed into him, learns to love also. We cannot attain to anything which will give us the right to say with respect to duration that ours is an everlasting love; but, as true Christians, we may have something of the quality of that affection.

1. Love is everlasting.—It is from the first to the last. Love was, before love was expressed, as design is in the mind of the architect before he produces his drawings, and as harmony in the soul of the composer of music before he has written a musical passage. From everlasting, until the day of creation, love was pent up, if one may so speak, in the being of God, as the central fires of our globe, or as the waters of a spring without an outlet. It was unmanifest then, as the light below the horizon ere the morning has dawned. This cannot be said of selfishness or sin in any form. Sin is old, but sin is not eternal. One can look back through the past and see where sin begins; we cannot look back through the past and see where love begins, it is from everlasting.

In a letter dated June 22, 1864, Clerk Maxwell, who was then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Kings College, London, wrote to his wife: “Love is an eternal thing, and love between father and son or husband and wife is not temporal if it be the right sort, for if the love of Christ and the Church be a reason for loving one another, and if the one be taken as an image of the other, then, if the mind of Christ be in us, it will produce this love as part of its complete nature, and it cannot be that the love which is first made holy, as being a reflection of part of the glory of Christ, can be any way lessened or taken away by a more complete transformation into the image of the Lord. I have been back at 1 Corinthians 13. I think the description of charity or Divine love is another loadstone for our life—to show us that this is one thing which is not in parts, but perfect in its own nature, and so it shall never be done away. It is nothing negative, but a well-defined, living, almost acting picture of goodness; that kind of it which is human, but also divine.”1 [Note: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 338.]

2. Gods love is continuous.—“He loved us from the first of time, He loves us to the last.” As His love cared for us in the past, it continues to care for us during the whole of our earthly life, notwithstanding all that may appear to be at variance with it. As it embraced us at first, irrespective of any good qualities in ourselves, so it embraces us throughout the whole of our varying experience. Our trials are no proof of its having forsaken us. Our unworthiness and sinfulness have not driven it away. When Israel was suffering as the consequence of wrong-doing, even then God bore testimony to His everlasting love, and intimated that through their suffering He would wean them from their sin, and thus promote their welfare. Thus did it prove its immutability amidst all changes in their experience, and in spite of all faults in their character.

Mans love ebbs and flows like the tide. Often it is as fickle as it is fervent. Sometimes when it talks loudest we can trust it least. Absence may cool it. Some little disappointment or opposition may change it into ill-concealed or unconcealed dislike. But there are no such changes in the love of God. His is no ebbing and flowing tide, but a sea, like the Mediterranean, ever full. His is no waxing and waning moon, but a full-orbed sun for ever shining in its strength. It shines as brightly and strongly now as it has ever done throughout the ages that are past; and it will continue to shine with the same brightness and strength throughout all the ages that are to come.

Our hearts may be well-nigh broken under some crushing sorrow; the light of our life may be taken away; the bitterness of death may enter our homes; the winter of an intolerable discontent may smite within us every spring of happiness and leave only the consciousness of a misery that hardly dares to lift its head. God may seem far away from us—at least as a power of love—in the midst of the darkness that surrounds us. The very sun may be turned into blackness, and the flowers of the earth and the charms of the sea and sky, which were once as the breath of Paradise, may seem only to add to our misery. But the voice of God is not still because man does not hear it, and the love of God is not gone because man does not feel it. It is still crying to us; it abides as an everlasting fact. No cloud can extinguish it, however it may obscure it; no misery born of the depths of human despair, no tragedy of human agony or of human crime, can make that love doubtful. It is still there; it is around us; it is with us; its everlasting arms are holding us even when we cannot feel it, and grasping us in its soft embrace although our feet may be bleeding and sore with the hardness of the road along which we travel.

I cannot go

Where Universal Love smiles not around,

Sustaining all yon orbs and all their suns;

From seeming evil still educing good,

And better thence again, and better still,

In infinite progression.1 [Note: James Thomson.]

3. To the Divine love there is absolutely no end.—Never having begun, it will never terminate, but will last as long as God Himself shall live; for throughout the eternity which is His lifetime He never ceases to be Himself, and He is love. We have in His love, therefore, a guarantee not only for our present but for our future welfare. Never can we reach a point in our existence in which this love will not encircle and provide for us. When we come to die, He will love us as much in dying as He has loved us while we lived. When we appear at His judgment-seat, He will love us as much as when He gave Christ to die for us; through all eternity He will love us as much as He has ever done.

To a friend who was experiencing a heavy sorrow, Dr. Martineau wrote, “Often the love of God is hid—passes behind the cloud and leaves us with a cold shudder of alarm, as if it were not there. But the Divine realities do not depend on our apprehension of them; the eclipse of our vision makes no difference to their shining, except to us. The Infinite Love abides behind, and waits till we return to it, and the intercepting veil falls away. At times, I think, when the mists of fear and distrust gather round the heart, it is even better to forget Him till He finds us again, and say: I will possess my soul in patience, than to accuse either Him or oneself of deserting a relation which is suspended, it may be, only to be more closely bound.”1 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, i. 450.]

III

Love as Lovingkindness

“Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

1. Here again is an alternative rendering. It might be, as the margin of the Revised Version has it, “I have continued loving-kindness unto thee.” But the expression as it stands is truer to the facts. The profound idea which it enshrines is that, despite appearances, the afflictions of Israel have all been the instruments of Gods love, means whereby He has been drawing His people towards Himself and towards a higher destiny than they knew. The sublime declaration thus made is that God draws His children by kindness even when it seems most like cruelty. It is almost audacious in its defiance of probabilities as judged from the standpoint of the natural man. Jeremiah calmly tells his contemporaries that all the ruin, woe, and devastation through which they were at the moment passing was a mode of the loving-kindness of God. One can hardly wonder that they refused to believe him, for anything more unlike the evidence of their senses it would have been difficult to find. We shall never reach the heart of the mystery of earthly misery and wretchedness by any exercise of the mind, but only by development of soul. For here is an amazing paradox—that the very thing which to the wisdom of this world is the most conclusive demonstration that there is no Divine love is that wherein the spiritual mind discerns it most clearly.

True love is not mere benevolence, it is a burning fire, a passionate eagerness to possess the souls of those who are loved. Therefore it is that the perfect love of God embraces what in our poor earthly language we term the wrath of God against all unrighteousness of men and also the grief of the Holy Spirit at mans ingratitude, as where it is written “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” There is no contradiction between those two great texts, “God is love” and “Our God is a consuming fire,” for the Love Divine is a Consuming Fire, which warms, lightens, and quickens all whose nature will receive it, but burns up all the wood, hay, stubble which cannot receive it. And so when the sword flashes forth in terrible judgment, the Hand behind the cloud that wields it is the Hand of Love.

You see the child running in from the garden full of tears, and saying, “Something has hurt me.” On examination it is found that a thorn is in one of his fingers. Then the gentlest of hands will endeavour to extract it. When she is doing so the child will cry out, “Oh, mother, you hurt me.” Ah, it is not the mother that hurts, but the thorn. When God takes out the thorn, we think that He hurts us. Not so, it is the thorn. Even God cannot take sin out of the heart without its giving pain. “Woe is me; who will deliver me from this body of death?” There are trials and disappointments, there are crosses and burdens, and we feel them keenly. God is then extracting the thorns. But in all His dealings His tender mercy is over all His works. Everywhere, and at all times, it is His lovingkindness.1 [Note: T. Davies.]

2. Nothing but lovingkindness can draw men to goodness. No coercive force—only the force of love—can bring the sinner into repentance and faith—the repentance that shall not be repented of, and the faith that will secure the favour of God. It would be an easy matter for God to crush the sinner, and deprive him of every facility for sin; but it is a different matter to crush his sin and the desire which fosters it. The sinner may quail in the presence of Gods displeasure, or he may cease altogether from sin by reason of the abuse and the destruction of natural force; but there is no virtue in his tremor; there is no faith in his weakness. The sinner must be made willing to part with his sin. The power to effect this comes from God, but it can be applied only when the willing cry rends his heart—“Lord, save, or I perish.”

I understand the word “drawn” to be used here as the opposite of “driven.” I take the meaning to be, “It is because I love you that I do not force you; I desire to win by love.” We often express surprise that human life does not reveal more traces of Gods omnipotence. We see the visible universe subject to inexorable law and yielding submissively to that law. But man does not yield submissively; he resists the will of the Eternal. Why should he be allowed to resist? Is he not but an atom in the infinite spaces—these spaces that obey the heavenly mandate? Why not put down his insane rebellion and crush his proud will into conformity with the universal chorus? The Bible gives its answer. It is because love is incompatible with the exercise of omnipotence. Inexorable law can rule the stars; but the stars are not an object of love. Man is an object of love, and therefore he can be ruled only by love—as the prophet puts it, “drawn.” Nothing is a conquest for love but the power of drawing. Omnipotence can subdue by driving—but that is not a conquest for love; it is rather a sign that love is baffled. Therefore it is that our Father does not compel us to come in. He would have us “drawn” by the beauty of holiness; therefore He veils all that would force the will.1 [Note: G. Matheson, Thoughts for Lifes Journey, 70.]

Two beautiful allegories by the late Mr. Munro, The Journey Home and The Dark Mountains, describe a certain Palace of Unbelief, belonging to Azrael, the Prince of Darkness. It has no background; its motto is: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Here the careless revellers are disturbed by the sudden arrival of an unlooked-for visitor. His name is Conscience. He is pale and stern, with the starry crown of Truth upon his white forehead. All shrink back trembling at his approach, as though from the angel of death himself. Yet he does not win the wanderers back to the narrow way. They do but shudder for a moment at the awful vision. Then, once more, they strive to drown the new like the old cares, in mirth and debauchery. But are long another unbidden guest enters Azraels palace. His head is crowned not with stars but with thorns. His eye tells not of wrath, but of mercy. His words are words of love unspeakable—the love that in Gethsemane and on Calvary showed itself stronger than death. And that mighty love prevails. The fetters of lust and selfishness and pride are broken, and the prisoner is free.1 [Note: E. Curling, The Transfiguration, 103.]

3. Gods love is truly personal; it is the love of one loving heart for another. When God is speaking to the Jewish nation, He very often, and as a rule, addresses them as if they were one person. Was it that He always saw Abraham in them? Was it that He always saw the Messiah in them? Or is it the language of affection? The more earnest we are in anything, the more we point our words. And so God, gathering in the wide circumference of His comprehensive love for every Jew, in every age, to the centre of a single man, says, “I have loved thee.” For with God the capacity of love is universal. It embraces all. Yet it individualizes all. It is to you and to me, and all who believe in Him and look to Him as a Father. How personal always was the ministry of our Lord! “Come unto me.” “Take up my cross.” “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?”

Gods love is like His sunlight, diffused throughout the heavens, catching the heights of the hills and crowning them with ruddy gold and clothing them in purple. So it seems to us an easy and a natural thing for God to love some people; outstanding men and women whose goodness might make them dear to Him. But this is not all that the sun does. It climbs higher that it may creep lower—down the hillsides farther and farther, until it lifts the mists of the valley and covers the meadows with its glory: and kisses the daisy and fills its cup with gold, and puts energy and strength into its very heart. God loves the good, the true, the pure, but His love rises higher that it may come down lower; and He loves me—me.2 [Note: M. G. Pearse, Parables and Pictures, 52.]

Let me link together detached sentences from the Word, that in their associations we may discern what is meant by the depth of the love of God. “The high and lofty One whose name is holy.” … “He is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God … began to wash the disciples feet.” “And one cried with another, saying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord!” … “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” All these are suggestive of what is meant by the love-depths of our God. It is only the really lofty that can truly reach the really deep. The arm that can reach far upward is the only arm that can reach far downward. It is only holy love that can deal with humanitys deepest needs. A low love has no depths of service. Low love is a thing of compromise, and has no dealings with extremes, whether of holiness or of sin. Holy love, crystalline love, goes down and down into human necessity, and is not afraid of the taint. Sunbeams can move among sewage and catch no defilement. The brilliant, holy love of God ministers in the deepest depths of human need.

Gods love is deeper than human sorrow. Drop your plummet-line into the deepest sea of sorrow, and at the end of all your soundings, “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Gods love is deeper than death, and there are multitudes who know how deep grim death can be. “Just twelve months ago,” said a near friend of mine a week or two ago, “I dug a deep grave!” Aye, and I know it was deep enough. But the grave-diggers spade cannot get beneath our Fathers love. Gods love is deeper than the deepest grave you ever dug! “And entering into the sepulchre they saw an angel,” and you can never dig into any dreary, dreary dwelling of death which is beyond the reach of those white-robed messengers of eternal love. Yes, Gods love is deeper than death. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

And Gods love is deeper than sin. Listen to this: “He descended into hell,” and He will descend again if you are there. “If I make my bed in hell. Thou art there.” “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” “He bore our sin”; then He got beneath it; down to it and beneath it; and there is no human wreckage, lying in the ooze of the deepest sea of iniquity, that His deep love cannot reach and redeem. What a Gospel! However far down, Gods love can get beneath it!1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Things that Matter Most, 15.]

Everlasting Love

Literature

Armitage (W. J.), The Fruit of the Spirit, 11.

Curling (E.), The Transfiguration, 102.

Davies (T.), Sermons, ii. 53.

Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, ii. 253.

Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 58.

Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 57.

McLean (A.), Where the Book Speaks, 200.

Martin (S.), Fifty Sermons, 171.

Matheson (G.), Thoughts for Lifes Journey, 70.

Paget (E. C.), Silence, 65.

Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 52.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxii. (1888), No. 1914; 1. (1904), No. 2880.

Stewart (J.), Outlines of Discourses, 174.

Tulloch (J.), Sundays at Balmoral, 18.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), v. (1867), No. 521.

Christian Commonwealth, xxxiv. 285 (R. J. Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 209 (J. Tulloch); lvii. 109 (J. S. Maver).

Homiletic Review, lxi. 147 (H. W. Battle).