The Worlds Great Sermons, Volume 10 | Page 3

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 observe what its elements are? Will you
notice that they have common names; that they are virtues which we
hear about every day, that they are things which can be practised by
every man in every place in life; and how, by a multitude of small
things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, the _summum bonum_,
is made up?
The spectrum of love has nine ingredients:
Patience--"Love suffereth long." Kindness--"And is kind."
Generosity--"Love envieth not." Humility--"Love vaunteth not itself, is
not puffed up." Courtesy--"Doth not behave itself unseemly."
Unselfishness--"Seeketh not her own." Good temper--"Is not easily
provoked." Guilelessness--"Thinketh no evil." Sincerity--"Rejoiceth not
in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."
Patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good
temper, guilelessness, sincerity--these make up the supreme gift, the
stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in relation to
men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near
to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to
God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace
with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a
strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the
breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme
thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to
the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every
common day.
There is no time to do more than to make a passing note upon each of

these ingredients. Love is patience. This is the normal attitude of love;
love passive, love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its
work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament
of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; beareth all things;
believeth all things; hopeth all things. For love understands, and
therefore waits.
Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's
life was spent in doing kind things--in merely doing kind things? Run
over it with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great
proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good
turns to people. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the
world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping; but what God
has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is
largely to be secured by our being kind to them.
"The greatest thing," says some one, "a man can do for his Heavenly
Father is to be kind to some of his other children." I wonder why it is
that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs it.
How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is
remembered. How superabundantly it pays itself back--for there is no
debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly honorable,