THE thing to promote brotherly love is love. The unchanging law from the first is, “herb and tree yielding fruit after his kind” (Genesis 1:11). Corn bears corn, and nettles produce nettles. And just as surely love bears love, and pride produces pride. So let as seek to sow broadcast after the Blessed Pattern, who fell into the ground and died, that He might yield fruit after His kind. One thing that may mar this is impatience, expecting fruit too soon. I have seen this in my children, and have felt it in my own experience. I expect fruit before its time, or fruit of a kind too high, not seeing how God accepts “the good smell” of the “tender grape,” while it is yet sour (Song of Sol. 2:13). Any one can see that the image of God, when it comes, is “very good” (Gen. 1:27, 31), when the new man created in righteousness rules the whole creature; but the thing is to be like God, to see what is good in brethren from the fruit, and when any light has come, to see with God “that it is good” (Gen. 1:4). That verse in Acts, where we are told that when Barnabas went to Antioch “he saw the grace of God” in them, has been of use to me. He saw the grace of God, for he saw with the eyes of grace— “he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost”—and good men yet see grace, even when it is in the bud, where carnal and proud souls only see the flesh in some poor weak brother. Let us thus seek the things which edify, duly estimating what is of Christ in each other: so shall the body be united rather than torn asunder.
“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.”