and recognise the solemn obligation of the commandment of love.

II. Note, secondly, the Sufficiency of love.

Our Lord has been speaking in a former verse about the keeping of His
commandments. Now He gathers them all up into one. 'This is my
commandment, that ye love one another' All duties to our fellows, and
all duties to our brethren, are summed up in, or resolved into, this
one germinal, encyclopaediacal, all-comprehensive simplification of
duty, into the one word 'love.'

Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften
the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do; will
take the bitterness out of opposition and diversity, will make even
rebuke, when needful, only a form of expressing itself. If the heart
be right all else will be right; and if there be a deficiency of love
nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody except on condition of
having an honest, beneficent, and benevolent regard towards him. You
cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of
love in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you
will neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach
him, and your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing
that is required to bind Christian men together is this common
affection. That being there, everything will come. It is the germ out
of which all is developed. As we read in that great chapter to the
Corinthians--the lyric praise of Charity,--all kinds of blessing and
sweetness and gladness come out of this, It is the central force
which, being present, secures that all shall be right, which, being
absent, ensures that all shall be wrong.