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. They knew that it was love, although he spoke no word.

Take into your sphere of labor, where you also mean to lay down
your life, that simple charm, and your lifework must succeed. You
can take nothing greater, you need take nothing 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.


II. The Analysis


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.