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.