"FOR God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "LOVE is of God," "for God is love." Love is his nature; love is the moral atmosphere in which he dwells. Love is the motive of all his acts and purposes. He is infinite in wisdom, but the wisdom is the wisdom of love. He is infinite in power, but the power is exercised in love. All this must be true, "for God is love." It was in love that God created man; it was in love that he made man a free moral agent, capable of choosing and appreciating; it was in love that God prohibited sin, and said unto man, "Thou shalt not." It was also in love that infinite wisdom made righteousness life, and sin death. Righteousness in perfection, physical, mental, and moral, means perpetual being; and thus the fittest survives. Transgression of good laws means inevitable death. Thus sin becomes, in the very nature of the case, its own destruction, and the sin-accursed life reaps the most merciful thing—not an existence of continued and increasing sin and misery, but extinction of being, the fruit of the individual's own choice. It is the most merciful thing that Love can do. But God loves the sinner. Infinite love is not content in permitting the sinner to have his own way, because love knows better; and love believes in the greatest good to the greatest number. But love will not, cannot, compel the sinner to turn from the way of sin and death to the way of righteousness and life. And so love entreats, persuades, pleads, "Turn ye, O turn ye, for why will ye die?" In a myriad of voices love speaks. Of the beauty of life love speaks in the glistening dew, in the various colored flowers, in the sparkling spring, in the songs of birds, in the graceful curve of wing and flight, in ten thousand other ways. Of infinite power and wisdom love speaks in the glories of the heavens, the rolling suns, the ever recurring seasons, and the adaptability of the various parts of nature to each other. And of the horrors of sin, love speaks in every form of death and destruction which our eyes everywhere see—all came because of sin. These all are voices of Infinite Love saying righteousness is joy and life; sin is misery and death. But God has done more than all this to prove his love; he has done all that he could do; he gave his only-begotten Son, he who was from the beginning with him, to die for a race of sinners, those who had rebelled against his authority. And all that Christ did was a manifestation of the love of God to guilty man, in order that man might be made righteous and so live forever. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." "For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Sinner, will you not respond to God's love?