“Walk in love,” St Paul says, “as the Christ also loved us and gave up Himself for us a sacrifice.” When the apostle writes _the Christ_, he points us along the whole line of the revelation of the cross.[132] We think of the Christhood of Jesus, of the Christliness of such love as this. Christ’s was a representative and exemplary love, with its forerunners and its followers all walking in one path. “The Christ loved _and gave_”; for love that does not give, that prompts to no effort and puts itself to no sacrifice, is but a luxury of the heart,--useless and even selfish. And He “gave up _Himself_”--the only gift that could suffice. The rich who bestow many gifts in furtherance of humanitarian and religious work and still do not bestow themselves, their sympathetic thought, their presence and personal aid, are withholding the best thing, the one thing required to make their bounties efficacious. In what we give and forgive, it is the accent of sympathy, the giving of the heart with it that adds grace to the act. “Though I dole out all my goods, though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.” We do a thousand things to serve and benefit our fellow-men, and yet evade the real sacrifice,--which is simply to love them. In studying this epistle, we have felt increasingly that the Church is the centre of humanity. The love born and nourished in the household of faith goes out into the world with a universal mission. The solidarity of moral interests that is realized there, embraces all the kindreds of the earth. The incarnation of Christ knits all flesh into one redeemed family. The continents and races of mankind are members one of another, with Jesus Christ for head. We are brothers and sisters of humanity: He our elder brother, and God our common Father in heaven,--His Father and ours.