The power of God is the power of love; and it is that love, and that love alone, that has won the victories of God. It is a very slow method, men say. No doubt. But it is the only method that has any success. The method of force seems effective; but its triumphs are illusory. Force cannot make men love, it can only make them hate. The world is being won to God by the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord. And it is as well to remember, when we are tempted to complain of the slowness of the process, that the slowness is ours, not God's. The process is slow because men will not consent to become the instruments of God's love for the world, will not transmit the crucified love of God's Son to their fellows. They continually, in their impatience, revert to force of some sort, for the attainment of spiritual ends. They become the tools of all sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to admit that it has been in the wrong. Human disregard of the divine method of love and humility can hardly go farther; and the only practical result that can be expected to follow is such as followed from the negotiations of Herod and Pontius Pilate--a new Crucifixion of the Ever-sacrificed Christ.