V. Lastly, Christian beneficence is the expression of grateful love. The importance attributed throughout the New Testament to active charity is not more remarkable than is this peculiarity which merges the natural and spontaneous sentiments of good-will and compassion towards our fellows, in an emotion of a deeper kind, and virtually denies merit and genuineness to every feeling, how amiable soever it may appear, if it does not thus fall into subordination to that devout affection which we owe to him who redeemed us by his sufferings and death. The reasons of this remarkable constitution of motives it is not difficult to perceive. For, in the first place, it is evident that the love of the Supreme Being can exist in the heart only as a dominant sentiment, drawing every other affection into its wake. Even the softest and purest tendernesses of our nature must yield precedence to the higher attachment of the soul; for he who does not love Christ more than "father and mother, wife and children," loves him not. Much more, then, must the sentiment of general benevolence own the same subordination. Again; as the promise of future recompense, and the doctrine of dependence upon divine agency, elevate the motives of benevolence from the level of earth to that of heaven, they would presently assume a character of dry and visionary abstraction, unless animated by an emotion of love, belonging to the same sphere. Zeal without love were a preposterous and dangerous passion: but Christian zeal must be warmed by no other love than that of him who, "for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich." It has already been said that religious enthusiasm takes its commencement from the point where the emotions of the heart are transmuted into mere pleasures of the imagination; and assuredly the excitements incident to a course of beneficence are very likely to furnish occasions to such a transmutation. But the capital motive of grateful affection to him who has redeemed us from sin and sorrow, prevents, so far as it is in active operation, this deadening of the heart, and consequent quickening of the imagination. The poor and the wretched are the Lord's representatives on earth; and in doing them good we cherish and express feelings which otherwise must lie latent, or become vague, seeing that he to whom they relate is remote from our senses.