The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a theologian, "is the mystery of this love, ... that God can never by His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the life of His creatures--love to Himself, but that He receives it as the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea also has told us how God does not compel, but allure or _woo_, the sinful back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophet's heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man's apathy or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his discourse. _I have redeemed them--yet have they spoken lies against Me._[769] _I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness--they went to Ba'al-Peor._[770] _When Israel was a child, then I loved him ... but they sacrificed to Ba'alim._[771] _I taught Ephraim to walk, but they knew not that I healed them._[772] _How can I give thee up, Ephraim? how can I let thee go, O Israel?... Ephraim compasseth Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit!_[773] We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders of Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the caresses of a little child; Who met men with no angelic majesty or heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that we should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world, loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted and betrayed,--it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: _I drew them with cords of a man and with bands of love_. We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as John in his great simplicity says, _We love Him because He first loved us_.