our knowledge of God's love towards us? None whatever, or at most a
very indirect and shadowy one. We have to dig deeper down than that.
'God commends His love ... in that Christ died.' 'He that hath seen
Me hath seen the Father.' And we have the right and the obligation to
argue back from all that is manifest in the tender Christ to the
heart of God, and say, not only, 'God so loved the world that He'
sent His Son, but to see that the love that was in Christ is the
manifestation of the love of God Himself.

So there stands the Cross, the revelation to us, not only of a
Brother's sacrifice, but of a Father's love; and that because Jesus
Christ is the revelation of God as being the 'eradiation of His
glory, and the express image of His person.' Friends! light does pour
out from that Cross, whatever view men take of it. But the omnipotent
beam, the all-illuminating radiance, the transforming light, the heat
that melts, are all dependent on our looking at it--I do not only
say, as Paul looked at it, nor do I even say as Christ looked at it,
but as the deep necessities of humanity require that the world should
look at it, as the altar whereon is laid the sacrifice for our sins,
the very Son of God Himself. To me the great truths of the
Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ are not points in a
mere speculative theology; they are the pulsating vital centre of
religion. And every man needs them in his own experience.

I was going to have said a word or two here--but it is not
necessary--about the need that the love of God should be irrefragably
established, by some plain and undeniable and conspicuous fact. I
need not dwell upon the ambiguous oracles which--

'Nature, red in tooth and claw,