LOVING WITH GREATER INTENSITY AT ONE TIME THAN ANOTHER.

2. It is said that we are conscious of loving our friends, and serving God, with greater strength and intensity at one time than at another. Yet our love, in all such instances, is real. Love, therefore, may be real, and yet be greatly defective—that is, it may be real, and embrace elements morally wrong. It is true, that love may exist in different degrees, as far as the action of the Sensibility is concerned. It is not so, however, with love in the form of intention—intention in harmony with moral obligation, the only form of love demanded by the moral law. Such intention, in view of the same degrees of light, and under the same identical influences, cannot possess different degrees of intensity. The Will always yields, when it really does yield at all to moral obligation, with all the intensity it is, for the time being, capable of, or the nature of the case demands.