than the impress and reflection of the love of God upon your own
character. That is the universal language. It will take you years to
speak in Chinese; or in the dialects of India. From the day you land,
that language of love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its
unconscious eloquence. It is the man who is the missionary, it is not
his words. His character is his message. In the heart of Africa, among
the great lakes, I have come across black men and women who remembered
the only white man they ever saw before--David Livingstone; and as you
cross his footsteps in that dark continent, men's faces light up as
they speak of the kind doctor who passed there years ago. They could
not understand him; but they felt the love that beat in his heart.
Take into your new sphere of labor, where you also mean to lay down
your life, that simple charm, and your life-work must succeed. You
can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. It is not
worth while going if you take anything less. You may take every
accomplishment; you may be braced for every sacrifice; but if you give
your body to be burned, and have not love, it will profit you and the
cause of Christ nothing.

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 colors--red, and
blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the colors 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