Bishop Challoner's Meditations - Fourth Sunday After Easter

ON THE GREAT COMMANDMENT OF DIVINE LOVE

Consider first, those words of the divine law, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This (says the Lord) is the greatest, and the first commandment,’ Matt. xxii. 39. Yes, my soul, it is the greatest of all the commandments of God, and that which he takes most of all to heart, since he has made our souls to his own image and likeness, to this very end that we should love him, and should dedicate our whole being to his divine love, for all the time of our pilgrimage here upon earth, that so we might come to be happily united to him in an eternal band of love in his heavenly kingdom. O the excellent dignity of this divine commandment, which tends directly and immediately to raise our souls above this earth, and above the heaven of heavens, and the whole created universe, and to bring them to the God that made heaven and earth, and to unite them to him by a most perfect love, both for time and eternity.

Consider 2ndly, the incomprehensible goodness of God is manifested to us in this commandment, in his insisting so much upon our loving him, and upon our tending with all our power to a union with him. Is then our love of any consequence to him? Or can we add any thing to his happiness, by loving him? Or will he lose any thing, if we refuse him our love? And what is there in us poor little ants, if compared to his infinite majesty, that he should concern himself whether we love him or not? Would it not be an unspeakable favour to us, that he should even suffer us, considering who he is, and who we are, to aspire so high as to pretend to his love? But that this great God should make it a commandment - and the very first and principal of all his commandments - that we should love him, and love him with our whole heart; that he should insist upon our entering into this league of eternal friendship with him, promising all happiness for eternity upon our compliance, and threatening us with most dreadful and eternal evils if we love him not; ‘tis this that shows forth and sets in so wonderful a light the goodness of our God and his love for us that we should be not only most wretched, insensible, and ungrateful beyond expression, but even in some sense worse than devils, if we should refuse him our love.

Consider 3rdly, the excellence of this commandment of divine love, with regard to the fruits it brings to our souls. Divine love is the queen of virtues. She never comes alone, but brings all other virtues along with her; she gives life to them all; even faith and hope are dead when she is not in their company. She brings with her the remission of all our sins; she makes us the friends and favourites of the Most High; she makes us his children, his spouses, his temples she is the ‘band of all perfection.’ O my soul, how glorious it is, how happy, how delightful, to be thus united to thy God by a strict band of friendship and love! O embrace then, with all thy powers, this great commandment, which, by obliging thee to give thy whole self up to the love of God, brings down thy God with all his treasures to thee.

Conclude to make it henceforward the business of thy life to learn this great lesson of loving God; and as no one but God himself can effectually teach thee so sublime and so divine a science, continually beg of him to introduce thee into his school, which he holds in thy interior, and there to be thy master.