As memory scans the
past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there
leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do
unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to
speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I
have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed
almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look
back I see standing out above all the life that has gone four or five
short experiences, when the love of God reflected itself in some poor
imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the
things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our
lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of
love which no man knows about, or can ever know about--they never
fail.
In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in
the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from
the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but
"How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion,
is not religiousness, but Love.
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