Love Analyzed

After contrasting love with these things, Paul, in three very short verses, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme gift is.

I ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like light. You have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through a crystal prism, and you have seen it come out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component colors - red, blue, yellow, violet, orange, and all the colors of the rainbow. In the same way, Paul passes this virtue – love - through the magnificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up into its elements.

In these few words we have what one might call the spectrum of love, the analysis of love. Will you observe what its elements are? Will you notice that they have common names; that they are virtues, which we hear about every day; that they are things, which can be practice by every man in every place of life? It is by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues that the supreme gift of love is made up. The spectrum of love has nine ingredients:


Patience …….. Love suffers long.

Kindness ……. And is kind.

Generosity…… Love does not envy.

Humility ….. Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up.

Courtesy …… Does not behave rudely.

Unselfishness … Seek not its own.

Good temper … Is not provoked.

Guilelessness .. Thinks no evil.

Sincerity ….. Rejoices not in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.

Patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, guilelessness, sincerity - these make up the supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man.

You will observe that all are in relation to men, in relation to life, in relation to the known today and the near tomorrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all. It is the ultimate purpose of the many words and acts which make up the sum of every common day.

Patience. This is the normal attitude of love; love passive, love waiting to begin, not in a hurry, calm, ready to do its work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things. For love understands, and therefore waits.

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in doing kind things - in merely doing kind things? Review His life with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness. Holiness is not in our keeping, but what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.

“The greatest thing”, says someone, “a man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His other children.” I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs it! How easily it is done! How instantaneously it acts! How infallibly it is remembered. How superabundantly it pays itself back - for there is no debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly honorable, as love. “Love never fails.” Love is success, love is happiness, love is life. “Love,” I say with Browning, “is energy of life.”

For life, with all its yields of joy or woe

And hope and fear,

Is just our chance o’the prize of learning love, --

How love might be, had been indeed, and is.

Where love is, God is. He that dwells in love dwells in God. God is love. Therefore love. Without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure, for that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Generosity. “Love does not envy.” This is love in competition with others. Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not. Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. Christian work is little protection against unchristian feeling! Envy, that most despicable of all the unworthy moods which cloud a Christian’s soul, assuredly waits for us on the threshold of every work, unless we are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. Only one thing truly need the Christian envy - the large, rich, generous soul which “envy not.”

Humility. And then, after having learned all that, you have to learn this further thing, humility - to put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after love has stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love waives even self-satisfaction. “Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up.” Humility – love hiding.

Courtesy. The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in this supreme gift: courtesy. This is love in society, love in relation to etiquette. “Love does not behave rudely.”

Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to love.

Love cannot behave rudely. You can put the most untutored persons into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of love in their hearts they will not behave rudely. They simply cannot do it. Carlisle said of Robert Burns that there was no truer gentleman in Europe than the ploughman poet. It was because he loved everything - the mouse, and the daisy and all the things, great and small, that God had made. So with this simple passport he could mingle with any society and enter courts and palaces from his little cottage on the banks of the Ayr.

You know the meaning of the word “gentleman.” It means a gentle man – a man who does things gently, with love. This is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man cannot in the nature of things do an ungentle, and ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature cannot do anything else. “Love does not behave rudely.”

Unselfishness. “Love seeks not her own.” Observe: Seeks not even that which is her own. In Britain the Englishman is devoted, and rightly, to his rights. But there comes a time when a man may exercise even the higher right of giving up his rights.

Yet Paul does not summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes much deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the personal element altogether from our calculations.

It is not hard to give up our rights. They are often external. The difficult thing is to give up ourselves. The more difficult thing still is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have sought them, bought them, won them, deserved them, we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already. It is a small cross to give them up then. But not to seek them at all, for every man to look not on his own things, but on the things of others – that is the difficulty. “Seek you great things for yourself?” said the prophet; “seek them not.” Why? Because there is no greatness in things. Things cannot be great.

The only greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste.

It is more difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all than having sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only true of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to love, and nothing is hard. I believe that Christ’s “yoke” is easy. Christ’s yoke is just His way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any other. I believe it is a happier way than any other. The most obvious lesson in Christ’s teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It really consists in giving and in serving others. “He” that would be great among you,” said Christ, “let him serve.” He that would be happy, let him remember that there is but one way – “It is more blessed, it is more happy, to give than to receive.”

Good temper. The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: “love is not provoked.” Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man’s character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature.

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or “touchy” disposition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.

The truth is, there are two great classes of sins- sins of the body, and sins of the disposition. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another’s sins, and coarser and finer are but human words. But faults in the higher nature may be more serious than those in the lower. And to the eye of Him who is love, a sin against love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone.

Look at the Elder Brother - moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful - let him get all credit for his virtues - look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his own father’s door. “He was angry,” we read, “and would not go in.” Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal - and how many prodigals are kept out of the kingdom of God by the unlovely character of those who profess to be inside. Analyze, as a study in temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the Elder Brother’s brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness - these are the ingredients of this dark and loveless soul. In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question Himself when He said, “I say unto you that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of god before you.” There is really no place in heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he cannot, simply cannot, enter the kingdom of heaven.

You will see then why temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. This is why I speak of it with such unusual plainness. It is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one’s guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and unchristian sins. A want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of temper. Hence it is not enough to deal with the temper. We must go to the source, and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in - a great love, a new spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating our spirit, sweetens, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Willpower does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ does. Therefore, “Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

Some of us haven’t much time to lose. Remember, once more, that this is a matter of life or death. I cannot help speaking urgently for myself, for yourselves. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” That is to say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than not to love. It is better not to live than not to love.

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed almost with a word. Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people. The possession of it is the great secret of personal influence.

You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who in- fluence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up, but in a trusting atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship.

It is a wonderful thing that here and there in this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. Love “thinks no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day! And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that our endeavor is successful in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. To respect a man is the first restoration of the self-respect he has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become.

“Love rejoices not in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth.” I have called this sincerity, from the words rendered in the Authorized Version by “rejoices in the truth.” And, certainly, were this the real translation, nothing could be more just, for he who loves will love truth not less than men. He will rejoice in the truth - rejoice not in what he has been taught to believe, not in this Church’s doctrine or in that, not in this ism or in that ism, but “in the truth.” He will accept only what is real; he will strive to get at facts; he will search for truth with a humble and unbiased mind, and cherish whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But in these verse the more literal translation of the Revised Version calls for just such a sacrifice for truth’s sake. For, as we read it there what Paul really meant is, “Rejoices not in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth,” a quality which probably no one English word--and certainly not “sincerity”--adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of other’s faults; the charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but “covers all things”; the sincerity of purpose which endeavors to see things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion feared or gossip denounced.

So much for the analysis of love. Now the business of our lives is to have these things fitted into our characters. That is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn love. Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how we can “love better.”

What makes a man a good athlete? Practice. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musician? Practice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer? Practice. What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the body and the mind. If a man does not exercise his arm, he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of moral fiber, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character --- the Christ like nature in its fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless practice.

What was Christ doing in the carpenter’s shop? Practicing. Though perfect, we read that He learned obedience, and grow in wisdom and in favor with God. Do not quarrel, therefore, with your lot in life. Do not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with. Above all, do not resent temptation; do not be perplexed because it seems to thicken round you more and more, and ceases neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. That is your practice. That is the practice to which God appoints you; and it is having its work in making you patient, humble, generous, unselfish, kind, and courteous. Do not begrudged the hand that is molding the still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more beautiful, though you do not see it, and every touch of temptation may add to its perfection.

Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men and among things, among troubles, difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe’s words: “Talent develops itself in solitude, character in the stream of life.” Talent develops itself in solitude, the talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, of seeing the unseen; character grows in the stream of the world’s life. That chiefly is where men are to learn love.

How? To make it easier, I have named a few of the elements of love. But these are only elements. Love itself can never be defined. Light is something more than the sum of its ingredients – glowing, dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is something more than all its elements --a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness; they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot create love. How then are we to have this transcendent living whole conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We pray. But these things alone will not bring love into our nature. Love is an effect. And only as we fulfill the right condition can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is?

If you turn to the Revised Version of the First Epistle of John you will find these words: “We love, because He first loved us.” “We love,” not “We love Him.” The latter is the way the old Version has it, and it is quite wrong. “We love -- because He first loved us.” Look at that word “because.” It is the cause of which I have spoken. “Because He first loved us,” the effect follows that we love, we love Him, we love all men. We cannot help it. Because He loved us, we love, we love everybody. Our heart is slowly changed.

Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ’s character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot love to order. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into likeness to it. And so look at this Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. Look at the great Sacrifice as He laid Himself down, all through life, and upon the Cross of Calvary, and you must love Him. And loving Him, you most become like Him. Love begets love. It is a process of induction. Put a piece of iron in the presence of an electrified object, and that piece of iron for a time becomes electrified. It is changed into a temporary magnet in the mere presence of a permanent magnet, and as long as you leave the two side by side, they are both magnets alike. Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you, too, will become a permanent magnet, a permanently attractive force. And like Him you will draw all men unto you, like Him you will be drawn unto all men. That is the inevitable effect of love. Any man who fulfills that cause must have that effect produced in him.

Try to give up the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or by mystery. It comes to us by natural law, or by supernatural law, for all law is Divine.

Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he entered the room he just put his hand on the sufferer’s head, and said, “My boy, God loves you,” and went away. And the boy started from his bed, and called out to the people in the house,

“God loves me! God loves me!”

One word! It changed that boy. The sense that God loved him overpowered him, melted him down, and began the creating of a new heart in him. And that is how the love of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the new creature, who is patient and humble and gentle and unselfish. And there is no other way to get it. There is no mystery about it. We love others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because He first loved us.