Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/205

 are to be equally enduring. It cannot be rationally imagined that God will destroy those beings whom He has created to be the manifestations of those virtues of which He is Himself the Author; and, supposing the people were to become apostates, it can hardly be concluded that He will turn aside His face, and so permit them to pass away. That would be contrary to all that is written of His love. He has said, "I have loved you with an everlasting love:" does not this imply that there will always be men who can be made sensible of that love?

Mankind have fallen into the lowest possible degradation, but God during that process did not withhold His love, and refuse to save them. In every stage of that catastrophe God watched over them with an unabated love. Jesus said, "How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not." The Divine love cannot be diminished by human wickedness; the creature cannot so act upon the Creator; that which is infinite cannot be decreased. From the first symptom of human degeneracy, God made efforts to arrest its progress. He could not see His people straying from His fold like lost sheep, and refuse to put forth His hand to stay and save them; He followed them to the very verge of ruin, and snatched them from the precipice. Love is the essential characteristic of the Divine Being. "God," says the Apostle, "is Love." This does not simply mean that God is a being who loves, but it is a sentence declaratory of His very nature: "God is love." Thus it is a principle of Divine life perpetually active in all creation. Everything that God has created must be an object of His love; that is the principle out of which they originated, and their preservation is an evidence that its intensity has never been