You may
take every accomplishment; you may be braced for every sacrifice;
but if you give your body to be burned, and have not Love, it will
profit you and the cause of Christ NOTHING.
II. The Analysis
After contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in three verses,
very short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme thing
is.
I ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It
is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of
light and pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come
out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component
colors--red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all
the colors of the rainbow--so Paul passes this thing, 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 practised by every man in every place in life; and how, by a
multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing,
the "summum bonum," is made up?
The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:
Patience .
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28