“He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” “If a man love me, he will keep my words;”—“he that loveth me not, keepeth not my sayings.” “That the world may know that I love the Father, as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do.” We now are prepared to appreciate the new and most wonderful revelation ever made to the human race, and one which the wisest heathen philosophers never even conjectured. Jesus Christ first revealed to mankind that our Creator is a loving Father to the whole human race; and that such is the eternal nature of things, that our highest possible happiness and escape from endless evil can be accomplished only by self-denying sacrifice and suffering, to save ourselves and others; and that our heavenly Father himself so loves us as to encounter such suffering to save us. For whatever views men form as to the divinity of Jesus Christ, or how his sufferings avail to save from danger in the life to come, all will concede that he teaches that God is represented as having made such a painful sacrifice as a father suffers in seeing a dear and lovely and only son subjected to long years of humiliation, of painful toils, and to a disgraceful and torturing death. And whatever opinions men form as to the nature and duration of future retributions, it is clear that Jesus Christ teaches that so great are our dangers, that every consideration of earthly enjoyment should be subordinate, and that our first interest and aim should be to secure escape to ourselves and our fellow-men. And here we should notice that most comforting doctrine revealed by Jesus Christ, and that is, that our eternal welfare does not depend on our judging correctly as to what _is_ for the best good of all concerned, both for this life and the life to come. On the contrary, we are assured that it is having our _heart_, or _chief desire_, set to do right by obeying all God’s laws as fast as we learn what they are. “Sin is the transgression of law,” and all men have sinned, and will continue to sin, sometimes from ignorance, sometimes from the force of temptation swaying from the prevailing desire and controlling purpose. And so the righteous men of olden times, though they committed heinous sins, were “men after God’s own heart,” because their “heart” was set to obey him in all things. And thus their failures were pardoned, and their eternal safety secured. The same comforting assurance lessens the anxieties of those whose chief aim and desire is to obey Jesus Christ under the new obligations imposed by him. For the “_faith_” which saves our fellow-men both before and after Christ, is not the mere intellectual conviction; for the “devils thus believe and tremble.” It is rather that faith which includes intellectual belief in his teachings, and the voluntary conformity of purpose and action to that belief.