Let us meditate upon, without multiplying words over this solemn theme, and turn to the Love that burns, too, so brightly there. Who can measure the infinity of love to us when, in order that that love might have its way unhindered, God forsakes the One who, for all the countless ages of the eternal past, had afforded Him perfect "daily" delight, was ever in His bosom--the only one in that wide creation who could satisfy or respond, in the communion of equality, to His affections--and turns away from Him; nay, "it pleased the Lord to bruise Him"; "He hath put Him to grief." Ponder these words; and in view of who that crucified Victim was, and His relationship with God, measure, if you can, the love displayed there, the love in that one short word "so"--"God _so_ loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son;"--then, whilst viewing the cross, hear, coming down to us from the lips of the wise king, "No man knoweth love or hatred." Hush! Ecclesiastes, hush! Breathe no such word in such a scene as this. Pardonable it were in that day, when you looked only at the disjointed chaos and tangle under the sun; but looking at that cross, it were the most heinous sin, the most unpardonable disloyalty and treason, to say now, "No man knoweth love." Rather, adoringly, will we say, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. And _we have known and believed the love that God has to us_." Yea, now let "all things come alike to all:"--that tender Love shall shed its light over this stormy scene, and enable the one that keeps _it_ before him to walk the troubled waters of this life in quiet assurance and safety. Death still may play sad havoc with the most sensitive of affections; but that Love shall, as we have before seen, permit us to weep tears; but not bitter despairing tears. Further, it sheds over the spirit the glorious light of a coming Day, and we look forward, not to an awful impending gloom, but to a pathway of real light, that pierces into eternity. The Day! We are of the Day! The darkness passes, the true light already shines! Then listen, my fellow-pilgrims, to the _Spirit's_ counsel: "But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, _let us not sleep_, as do others, but _let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night; and they that are drunken, are drunken in the night. But let us who are of the Day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation_."