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I. WHAT CHARITY IS. It is not easy to find one word which adequately represents what Christ and His apostles meant by charity. Charity has become identified with almsgiving. Love is appropriated to one particular form of human affection, and that one with which self and passion mix inevitably. Philanthropy is a word too cold and negative.

1. Let us define Christian charity in two sentences.

(1) The desire to give. Let each man go deep into his own heart. Let him ask what that mysterious longing means which we call love, whether to man or God, when he has stripped from it all that is outside and accidental, when he has taken from it all that is mixed with it and perverts it. Not in his worst moments, but in his best, what did that yearning mean? I say it meant the desire to give. Not to get something but to give something. And the more irrepressible this yearning was, the more truly was his love. To give — whether alms in the shape of money, bread, or a cup of cold water, or else self. But be sure sacrifice in some shape or other is the impulse of love, and its restlessness is only satisfied and only gets relief in giving. For this, in truth, is God's own love, the will and the power to give.

(2) The desire to bless. It wishes the well-being of the whole man — body, soul, and spirit, but chiefly spirit. And the highest love is the desire to make men good and Godlike; it may wish, as a subordinate attainment, to turn this earth into a paradise of comfort by mechanical inventions; but far above that, to transform it into a kingdom of God, the domain of love, where men cease to quarrel and to envy, and to slander and to retaliate. "This also we wish," said St. Paul, "even your perfection."

2. Concerning this charity we remark two points.

(1) "Fervent." Literally intense, unremitting, unwearied. Give us the man who can be insulted and not retaliate, meet rudeness and still be courteous; the man who, like the Apostle Paul, buffeted and disliked, can yet be generous and make allowances and say, "I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though the more abundantly I love you the less I be loved." That is "fervent charity."(2) It is capable of being cultivated. When an apostle says, "Have fervent charity among yourselves," it is plain that it would be a cruel mockery to command men to attain it if they could do nothing towards the attainment. How shall we cultivate this charity? Now I observe, first, love cannot be produced by a direct action of the soul upon itself. You cannot love by a resolve to love. That is as impossible as it is to move a boat by pressing it from within. Love is a feeling roused not from ourselves, but from something outside ourselves. There are, however, two methods by which we may cultivate this charity.

(a) By doing acts which love demands. It is God's merciful law that feelings are increased by acts done on principle. Let a man begin in earnest with I ought, he will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with the free blessedness of I will. Let him force himself to abound in small offices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all those for God's sake. By and by he will feel them become the habit of his soul. By and by, walking in the conscientiousness of refusing to retaliate when he feels tempted, he will cease to wish it; doing good and heaping kindness on those who injure him he will learn to love them.

(b) By contemplating the love of God. You cannot move the boat from within, but you may obtain a purchase from without. You cannot create love in the soul by force from within itself, but you may move it from a point outside itself. God's love is the point from which to move the soul. Love begets love. It is easy to be generous and tolerant and benevolent when we are sure of the heart of God, and when the little love of this life, and its coldness and its unreturned affections are more than made up to us by the certainty that our Father's love is ours.

II. WHAT CHARITY DOES. It covereth a multitude of sins.

1. In refusing to see small faults. That microscopic distinctness in which all faults appear to captious men who are forever blaming, dissecting, complaining, disappears in the large, calm gaze of love. And oh! it is this spirit which our Christian society lacks, and which we shall never get till we begin each one with his own heart. What we want is, in one word, that graceful tact and Christian art which can bear and forbear.

2. Love covers sin by making large allowances. In all evil there is a "soul of goodness." Most evil is perverted good. Now there are some men who see all the evil, and never trace, never give themselves the trouble of suspecting the root of goodness out of which it sprung. There are others who love to go deep down and see why a man came to do wrong, and whether there was not some excuse or some redeeming cause, in order that they may be just. Just, as "God is just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." Now human life, as it presents itself to these two different eyes, the eye of one who sees only evil, and that of him who sees evil as perverted good, is two different things. Take an instance. Not many years ago a gifted English writer presented us with a history of ancient Christianity. To his eye the early Church presented one great idea, almost only one. He saw corruption written everywhere. In public and in private life, in theology and practice, within and without, everywhere pollution. Another historian, a foreigner, has written the history of the same times, with an intellect as piercing to discover the very first germ of error, but with a calm, large heart, which saw the good out of which the error sprung, and loved to dwell upon it, delighting to trace the lineaments of God, and discern His Spirit working where another could see only the spirit of the devil. And you rise from the two books with different views of the world: from the one, considering the world as a devil's world, corrupting towards destruction; from the other, notwithstanding all, feeling triumphantly that it is God's world, and that His Spirit works gloriously below it all. You rise from the study with different feelings: from the one, inclined to despise your species; from the other, able joyfully to understand in part why God so loved the world, and what there is in man to love, and what there is, even in the lost, to seek and save. Now that is the "charity which covereth a multitude of sins." It understands by sympathy. It is that glorious nature which has affinity with good under all forms, and loves to find it, to believe in it, and to see it. And therefore such men — God's rare and best ones — learn to make allowances, not from weak sentiment, which calls wrong right, but from that heavenly charity which sees right lying at the root of wrong.

3. Lastly, charity can tolerate even intolerance. St. Paul saw even in the Jews, his bitterest foes, that "they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge." St. Stephen prayed with his last breath, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." Earth has not a spectacle more glorious or more fair to show than this — love tolerating intolerance, charity covering, as with a veil, even the sin of the lack of charity.

(F. W. Robertson, M. A.)

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KJV: But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.

WEB: But the end of all things is near. Therefore be of sound mind, self-controlled, and sober in prayer.