ROBERT BROWNING: SAUL

THE HEART'S CRY FOR JESUS CHRIST

"If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.”

LUKE XI. 13.

HAT IS how our Lord would have men

THAT

reason in the hour when faith in the Love of God needs reinforcement. It is an argument founded upon the existence of human love, and one, therefore, that is brought within the reach of all who read their own hearts. From the presence of love within ourselves, He would lead us to infer Love in the Creator. St. John is but applying this method when he makes his great declaration "Every one that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God." He had studied in the Master's school, and reveals the impression made upon his mind by these far-reaching inferences of thought. To know God, he affirms, we should observe how love operates in ourselves, and then remember that though our love is small

compared with the Divine Love it is the same in nature. One result of this principle, which can only be suggested here, is that unselfish souls always find it so much easier than others to believe that "God is Love." They have an inward witness, an argument of the heart "which melts the freezing reason's colder part."

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It is important to observe that our Lord begins His argument with the average man in His mind. In another place He said: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." phasised the same certainty in this place and have urged His hearers to believe in the Father's love because of what they had seen and trusted in Himself. But He appeals now to something in themselves and so makes the inference universal. "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give." There is the flower, growing, it is true, out of much that is rank and foul, still in itself incontestably beautiful and fragrant. Whence then came the seed? There is the river, at times clogged in its course by thick fungous growths of selfishness, still, refreshing and redeeming life wherever it flows. What then of

the fountain? We are to argue from the highest in ourselves to Him from Whom we came, in Whose image we are made.

Our Lord would say to any one who doubts the love of God: "But you are capable of unselfishness where your child is concerned? Think you God has fashioned a creature greater than Himself? Do you pity helplessness in its need? Surely then there will be found pity in Him Who taught you to be pitiful. You are conscious of evil and do not profess to be perfect, you are just a normal man or woman with many faults, but you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more then will your heavenly Father, infinitely perfect and good, give good gifts." This is a logic any one can understand, a system of reasoning which needs no further elucidation than that of the human heart.

When Kirchoff was endeavouring to discover the elements present in the Sun, he thrust, between the image of the Sun and the tinted band of his spectroscope, a flame of sodium vapour, and when he saw the subduing effect of his experiment upon the band, he left the laboratory hastily with the words: "That seems to me a funda

mental fact." He had discovered, by his examination, the existence of the vapour of sodium in the Sun and had done so through the existence of the same element in his laboratory.

We should become investigators of the elements present in our own hearts, experimenters, if we will, in the action and reaction of powers within ourselves. Here, at all events, is one fundamental fact. Love is real-as real as man-as old and as new. The earliest chapters of human history are brightened by its presence. We find it in men of all races and conditions. There is no lowliest spot unvisited by some gleam of its radiance. It is at times suppressed, but never wholly destroyed. When men find it, they know it for the most Divine thing in the world. We find its mighty surging within our own hearts, and it has power to content us as nothing else can do. Love is the greatest fact in the world.

Under the inspiration of this noble passion men are led to do that which would surprise them did they pause to think. "What came to me? What made me do it? That's what I want to know! That's the great secret," cried Blanco Posnet in Bernard Shaw's Play, when he had sacrificed

himself, evil man that he was, to help a woman and a little child. Well, that is the question Jesus would have us ask, when we have been moved to do some unselfish deed, when we have been carried clean out of ourselves by the rush and urge of our own hearts. Here is a fundamental fact. What does it mean? "What made me do it? That is the secret." Face the fact resolutely and bravely and you have the great secret. God is Love and He has left no soul without some witness of that supreme certainty. "If we being evil know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more."

"Oh, that I knew where I might find Him is a cry heard through all the generations. We have swept the heavens with our telescopes-have searched amid rocks and hills and trees and sometimes have returned without the secret. But here, said the Master, is the true place of meeting, and it is near, even in your own hearts. Does not this throw new light upon His own experience and help us to expound His sublime words? "Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life." Never was He surer of the love of God than when He was about to make