However, the excitant of love, in all its finer aspects, is a felt possibility of communication, a dawning of sympathetic renewal. We grow by influence, and where we feel the presence of an influence that is enlarging or uplifting, we begin to love. Love is the normal and usual accompaniment of the healthy expansion of human nature by communion; and in turn is the stimulus to more communion. It seems not to be a special emotion in quite the same way that anger, grief, fear, and the like are, but something more primary and general, the stream, perhaps, of which these and many other sentiments are special channels or eddies. Love and sympathy, then, are two things which, though distinguishable, are very commonly found together, each being an instigator of the other; what we love we sympathize with, so far as our mental development permits. To be sure, it is also true that when we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize—any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy—but affection is a more usual stimulus. Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught that God is Love. Thus understood it is not any specific sort of emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that everyone that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal affection, something that knows as well as feels, that takes account of all special aspects of life and is just to all. Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice, but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion, but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points of view. So far as love approaches this comprehensiveness it tends toward justice, because the claims of all live and are adjusted in the mind of him who has it. “Love’s hearts are faithful but not fond, Bound for the just but not beyond.”