Then those others—'Depart from me,' he says—and there was a vision painted of the unutterable horrors of a state of separation and loneliness and self-embittered remorse—'I was an hungred and ye gave me no meat.' They also, had not known—'Lord, when saw we thee an hungred?' If they had known they would assuredly have hastened to him with their meat, asked him to their feasts, lavished all upon him. But for what sake? For no other than their own. Love had no place in their hearts, nor had the Lord. Only self-seeking. They were their own Lords and Gods. And thenceforth they had to know it. In their impenitent, disappointed, cheated (they would say) and remorseful hearts there was no room for anything but the sense of punishment. Their inevitable reaction to the voice of love, as it reproached their lack of love, shut out both forgiveness and all possibility of the sense of it. So we come to the extreme of distinction between the ways of the showing of love. Here is all punishment, it seems, to the sinner. But it is he who makes love so. It is very love that punishes, a consistent, unwavering love which, in the sinner's last extremity, shows itself to the utmost he can receive and in the only way he can receive. What, I ask you, would a man like this make of a love that should express itself (if in the nature of love it could thus express itself) as condoning the want of love and professing oneness in so complete an alienation? Not only does the nature of love forbid such an expression, but the nature of the self-worshipper, who cannot receive it. There is a very marvellous knowledge of the hidden heart shown in these prophetic teachings. As we converse with the Supreme Person of the Gospels we feel him searching out our bones and marrow. To him there lies open the secret of disunion among us personal beings and the secret of the utmost furtherance, and the means towards furtherance, of the conversion of our will from self-seeking to love-finding. This utmost furtherance necessarily falls short of the compulsion love can never even contemplate or man endure. A man compelled to love is unthinkable. Words, mere empty words these are that so speak of him. He cannot be. If he could be compelled he could not be man; if the semblance of love were forced upon him it would not be love. But the atonement in which the Christian believes shows the love of God working to further love in man to an utmost God alone can reach. Punishment and forgiveness work together as that love, and the life of Jesus and the Cross on which he died are at once their final showing-forth, their clearest call to man, and the tremendous acceptance by man of all that they entail and are.