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, encyelopaediacal, 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.
And is it not beautiful to see how Jesus Christ, leaving the little flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction for their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about institutions and organisations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, or Church polity and the like. He knew that all these would come. His one commandment was, Love one another,' and that will make you wise. Love one another, and you will shape yourselves into the right forms. He knew that they needed no exhortations such as ecclesiastics would have put in the foreground. It was not worth while to talk to them about organisations and officers. These would come to them at the right time and in the right way. The one thing needful' was that they should be knit together as true participators of His life. Love was sufficient as their law and as their guide.
