sentiment of awe-struck distance. But we need that the righteousness
shall be loving, and that the love shall be righteous, in order that the
one may be apprehended in its tenderest tenderness and the other may be
adored in its loftiest loftiness.

And yet we are always tempted to wrench the two apart, and to think that
the operation of the one must sometimes, at all events on the outermost
circumference of the spheres, impinge upon, and collide with, the
operations of the other. Hence you get types of religion--yes! and two
types of Christianity--in which the one or the other of these two
harmonious attributes is emphasised to such a degree as almost to blot
out the other. You get forms of religion in which the righteousness has
swallowed up the love, and others in which the love has destroyed the
righteousness. The effect is disastrous. In old days our fathers fell
into the extreme on the one hand; and the pendulum has swung with a
vengeance as far from the vertical line, to the other extreme, in these
days as it ever did in the past. The religion which found its
centre-point and its loftiest conception of the divine nature in the
thought of His absolute righteousness made strong, if it made somewhat
stern, men. And now we see renderings of the truth that God is love
which degrade the lofty, noble, sovereign conception of the righteous
God that loveth, into mere Indulgence on the throne of the universe. And
what is the consequence? All the stern teachings of Scripture men recoil
from, and try to explain away. The ill desert of sin, and the necessary
iron nexus between sin and suffering--and as a consequence the
sacrificial work of Jesus Christ, and the supreme glory of His mission
in that He is the Redeemer of mankind--are all become unfashionable to
preach and unfashionable to believe. God is Love. We cannot make too
much of His love, unless by reason of it we make too little of His
righteousness.