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From that verdict there is no appeal.

LOVE AND JUDGMENT

Just as Jesus called in the vision of the unseen world to redress the balance of the visible world, when He said that there was more joy in heaven over the penitent sinner than over ninety and nine just men who needed no repentance, so in His final addresses to His followers He again discloses the unseen world. These final addresses deal with the tremendous problem of a future judgment. Over no problem does the human mind hover with such breathless interest, such unfeigned alarm. But with characteristic perversity the elements in Christ's vision of the judgment on which men have seized most tenaciously, are precisely those elements which are least intelligible, and least capable of strict definition. It is around the word "eternal" and the nature of the punishment suggested, that the theological battles of centuries have centred. Yet the really central point of both the vision and the teaching, is not here at all; and it is only man's habitual love of enigma which can explain the passion with which men have opposed one another over the interpretation of words and phrases which must always remain enigmatic.

Blasphemy indeed, and falsehood too; for the second thing we find is that the one principle which governs the entire vision of Jesus is that Love judges, and that it is by Love that men are tested. The men and women of loving disposition, who have wrought many little acts of kindness which were to them so natural and simple that they do not so much as recollect them, find themselves mysteriously selected for infinite rewards. The men and women of opposite disposition, in spite of all their outward rectitude of behaviour, find themselves numbered with the goats. A cup of cold water given to a child, a meal bestowed upon a beggar, a garment shared with the naked--these things purchase heaven. One who Himself had been thirsty, hungry, and naked, judges their worth, and He judges by His own remembered need. It is love alone that is divine, love alone that prepares the soul for divine felicity. With a beautiful unconsciousness of any merit, the people who have lived lovingly plead ignorance of their own lovely acts and tempers; but they have been witnessed by the hierarchies of heaven, the morning stars have sung of them, they have made glad the heart of God; and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having added to the joy of God, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.

Never was there vision at once so exquisite and so surprising. It is like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined, and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of a piece with all He taught; so much so indeed that without it, His teaching would be incomplete.

Truly, we may say, the Heaven of Jesus is a strangely ordered Kingdom; for in it beggars are comforted for apparently no other reason than that they need comfort; the doers of forgotten kindnesses are crowned with sudden splendours of divine approval while the lords of genius and the makers of empire are forgotten; and the very anthems of the blessed are hushed into silent wondering and joy when solitary penitents turn homewards from the roads of sin! But it is not stranger than that kingdom in which Jesus lived habitually, the kingdom He created round Him in His earthly life. In that kingdom also love was lord, and she who anointed the tired feet of the Master against His burial was promised everlasting remembrance, and she who out of her penury gave her mite to the poor was praised as having done more than all the rich, who from their abundance distributed careless and unmissed benefactions. In all that Jesus says and does the same sequence of thought runs clear, the same master principle rules the various result. Life is a unity either here or hereafter, and love is, and must evermore remain, the one temper that gives significance to life.

THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE

If these things be true, if the whole tradition of Jesus is an exposition of love as the law of life, the deduction is entirely simple, and as logical as it is simple. That deduction has been already stated. It is that Christianity is a method of life by which men and women are taught and inspired to love as Jesus loved, and to live loving and lovable lives. It has little to do with creeds, and still less with formal codes of conduct. For this reason such a definition of Christianity will satisfy neither the theologian nor the philosopher. Jesus never expected that it would. He knew that the one would regard it as heretical, and the other as so deficient in subtlety as to seem foolish. Therefore He made His appeal to simple and natural people, saying that what was hidden from the wise and prudent, was revealed to babes.

The simple and natural people understood Jesus; they always do. The sophisticated and artificial people did not understand Him; they never will. With scarcely an exception the people of intelligence and culture regarded Him with disdain, withdrew from Him, or violently opposed Him. The reason for their conduct lay not so much in either their culture or their intelligence, as in the kind of life that seemed to be necessary to them as the expression of their culture.

Thus, they were full of prejudices, prepossessions, and foregone conclusions, all of which had the sanction of their culture. It was enough for them to know that Jesus came from Nazareth and was unlettered; this produced in them violent scorn and antipathy. They were still further offended because He used none of the shibboleths with which they were familiar. Nor could they conceive of any life as satisfactory but the kind of life they lived, and that was a life of social complexity, ruled by conventional usages and maxims, and essentially artificial in ideal and practice. Jesus, therefore, turned from them to the simple and natural people, fishermen, artisans, and humble women, in whom the natural instincts had fuller play. His reward was immediate; then, and ever since, the Common People heard Him gladly.

How, by heaven's grace this Clifford's heart was framed, How he, long forced in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

People who live thus, in wise simplicity, undistracted by the numerous illusions of an artificial life, have no difficulty in accepting Christ's teaching that love is the supreme law of life, because love means everything to them in the kind of life they lead. In the wisdom of the heart they are more learned than the wisest Pharisee, who is rarely "softened into feeling," whose whole social life indeed imposes a restraint on feeling. What peasant father would not welcome a returning prodigal, what peasant mother would not open her arms wide to gather to her bosom a penitent daughter, recovered from the cruel snare of cities? Certainly one is much more likely to find such acts of pure feeling among peasant folk than among the rich and cultured, for the peasant cares less for opinion, is less respectful of social etiquette, and follows more closely in his actions the instincts of primal affection. Who has not discovered among poor and humble folk a strange and beautiful lenience, the lenience of a great compassion, towards those sins which in more artificial conditions of society are held to justify the most violent condemnation, and do indeed close the heart to pity? In poor men's huts beside the Sea of Galilee Jesus Himself had found love, love in all its divine daring, lenience, and magnanimity, and He knew that among people like these He would be understood. He also knew that the only people fitted to interpret His doctrine of sovereign love to the world were these simple folk of the lake and field, and therefore to them He committed His Gospel, and from them He chose His disciples.

It needed a peasant Christ to teach these things, for no other could have imagined them, no other could have had the daring and simplicity to utter them. A peasant Christ He was, living, thinking, and acting as a peasant even in His highest moments of inspiration. It was because He always remained a peasant that He was able to see so clearly the defects of that more intricate social system to which His ministry introduced Him. He brought with Him a new scale of values, which He had learned in the school of a more primal life than could be found in cities. Nature always spoke in Him, convention never. In His treatment of sin it is always the voice of Nature that we hear triumphing over the verdicts of convention. The sins which convention regards as inexpiable are sins of passion; the sins which it excuses are sins of temper, such as greed, malice, craft, unkindness, cruelty. Jesus entirely reverses the scale. His pity is reserved for outcasts, His harshest words are addressed to those whom the world calls good. Folly He views with infinite compassion--the foolish man is as a lost sheep whose very helplessness invokes our pity. But for the man of hard and self-sufficient nature, whose very righteousness is a mixture of prudence and egoism, He has only words of flame. An offense against virtue counts for less with Him than an offense against love. No wonder the Pharisees called Him a blasphemer! Were the true nature of Christ's teaching understood to-day many who profess to revere Him would join in the same accusation. What more offensive and unpalatable truth could be presented to mankind than this on which Jesus constantly insists, that sins of temper are much more harmful than sins of passion, that they spring from a more incurable malignancy of nature, that they produce far wider and more disastrous suffering?

Yet the truth is clear enough to all broadly truthful and simple natures, which are not bewildered by conventional views of right and wrong. Who has occasioned more suffering, the youth who has sinned against himself in wild folly and repented, or the man who has planned his life with that cold craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices everything to self-advantage? Can any human mind measure the various and almost infinite wrongs committed by the man who piles up through years of sordid avarice an unjust fortune? Who can count the broken hearts in the pathway of that implacable ambition which "wades through slaughter to a throne"? These things may not be apparent to the man whose nature is subdued to the hue of that artificial society in which he lives, a society which permits such crimes to pass unquestioned. They are certainly not perceived by the criminals themselves. To-day, as in the day of Christ, they "devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers," save, perhaps, that more blind than the ancient Pharisees, their prayers seem real, and they themselves are unconscious of pretense. Now also, as then, they give their tithes in conventional benevolence, forgetting, and hoping to make others forget, the sources of their wealth in their use of it. How is it that such men are so unconscious of offense? Simply because they have never grasped Christ's deliberate statement that sins of temper are much worse than sins of passion; that cruelty is a worse thing than folly; that the wrong wrought by squandering the substance in a far country is more quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, than the wrong of hoarding one's substance in the avarice which neglects the poor, or adding to it by methods which trample the weak and humble in the dust, as deserving neither pity nor attention.

Yet it needs but a very brief examination of society to prove the truth of Christ's contention; very little experience of life to discover that the utmost corruption of the human heart lies in lovelessness. The spiteful and rancorous temper, always seeking occasions of offense; the jealous spirit which cannot bear the spectacle of another's joy; the bitter nagging tongue, darting hither and thither like a serpent's fang full of poison, and diabolically skilled in wounding; the sour and grudging disposition, which seems most contented with itself when it has produced the utmost misery in others; the narrow mind and heart destitute of magnanimity; the cold and egoistic temperament, which demands subservience of others and receives their service without thanks, as though the acknowledgment of gratitude were weakness--these are common and typical forms of lovelessness, and who can estimate the sum of suffering they inflict? Their fruit is everywhere the same; love repressed, children estranged, the home made intolerable. It does but add to the offense of these unlovely people that in what the world calls morality they are above reproach, for they instill a hatred of morality itself by their appropriation of it. Before them love flies aghast, and the tenderest emotions of the heart fall withered. Could the annals of human misery be fairly written, it might appear that not all the lusts and crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye have wrought such wide-spread misery, have inflicted such general unhappiness, as these sins of temper, so common in their operation that they pass almost unrebuked, but so wide-spread in their effects that their havoc is discovered in every feature of our social life.

THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF

Nevertheless there are occasions in life when these things become evident to even the least observant of us. When we stand beside the newly dead the most intolerable reflection of countless mourners is that their tears fall on quiet lips to which they gave scant caresses, in the days of health: their passionate words of love are uttered to unhearing ears, which in life waited eagerly for such assurances as these, and waited vainly. All the purity and beauty of the vanished human soul is revealed to us now, when it is no longer in our power to gladden or delight it with our kindness or our praise. All the willing service rendered to us by those folded hands and resting feet, which we so thanklessly accepted, is seen as a thing dear and precious to us now, when the opportunity of thanks is past forever. What would we give now if but for one brief hour we might recall our dead just to say the tender things we might have said and did not say, through all those days and years when they were with us,--presences familiar and accustomed, moving round us with so soft a tread that we scarce regarded them, nor laid on them detaining hands, nor lifted our preoccupied and careless eyes to theirs!

For most of us, alas, it is not Grief and Love alone who conduct us to the chambers of the dead; the sad and silent Angel of Reproach also stands beside the bed, and the shadow of his wings falls upon the features fixed in their immutable appeal, their pathetic and unwilling accusation. Then it is that veil after veil is lifted from the past, till in the pitiless light we read ourselves with a new understanding of our faults. We see that through some element of hardness in ourselves which we allowed to grow unchecked; through vain pride, or obstinate perversity, or mere thoughtless disregard, we repulsed love from the dominion of our hearts, and made him the servitor of our desires, but no longer the lord of our behaviour and the spirit of our lives. And now as we gaze on these things across the gulf of the irreparable, we see our sin and how it came to pass; how we were unkind not in the things we did but in those we failed to do; how, without being cruel, our denied response to hearts that craved our tenderness became a more subtle cruelty than angry word or hasty blow; how with every duty accurately measured and fulfilled, yet love evaporated in the cold and cheerless atmosphere of repression and aloofness with which we clothed ourselves; and then the significance of Christ's teaching comes home to us, for we know too late, that kindness is more than righteousness, and tenderness more than duty, and that to have loved with all our hearts is the only fulfilling of the law which heaven approves. None, bowed beside the newly dead, ever regretted that they had loved too well; millions have wept the bitterest tears known to mortals because they loved too little, and wronged by their poverty of love the sacred human presences now withdrawn forever from their vision.

But there are other and more joyous ways of learning the truth of Christ's teaching, ways that are accessible to all of us. The best and most joyous way of all is to make experiment of it. Here is a law of life which to the sophisticated mind seems impossible, impracticable, and even absurd. No amount of argument will convince us that we can find in love a sufficient rule of life, or that "to renounce joy for our fellow's sake is joy beyond joy." How are we to be convinced? Only by making the experiment, for we really believe only that which we practice. "I wish I had your creed, then I would live your life," said a seeker after truth to Pascal, the great French thinker. "Live my life, and you will soon have my creed," was the swift reply. The solution of all difficulties of faith lies in Pascal's answer, which is after all but a variant of Christ's greater saying, "He that willeth to do the will of God, shall know the doctrine." Is not the whole reason why, for so many of us, the religion of Christ which we profess has so little in it to content us, simply this, that we have never heartily and honestly tried to practice it? We have accepted Christ's religion indeed, as one which upon the whole should be accepted by virtuous men, or as one which has sufficient superiorities to certain other forms of religion to turn the scale of our intellectual hesitation, and win from us reluctant acquiescence. But have we accepted it as the only authoritative rule of practice? Have we ever tried to live one day of our life so that it should resemble one of the days of the Son of Man? Knowing what He thought and did, and how He felt, have we ever tried to think and act and feel as He did--and if we have not, what wonder that our religion, being wholly theoretical, appears to us tainted with unreality, a thin-spun web of barren, fragile idealism which leaves us querulous and discontented?

Such a sense of discontent should be for us, as it really is, the signal of some deep mistake in our conception of religion. It should at least cause us alarm, for what can be more alarming than that we should be haunted with a sense of unreality in religion, yet still profess religion for reasons which leave the heart indifferent and barely serve to satisfy the intellect? And what can produce a keener torture in a sincere mind than this eternal suspicion of unreality in a religion whose conventional authority is acknowledged and accepted?

I am convinced that these feelings are general among great multitudes of the more thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Christianity. Religion rests with them upon a certain intellectual acquiescence, or upon the equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the compromise of intellectual hesitations. Their tastes are gratified by the normal forms of worship, and their sentiments are softly stirred and stimulated. But when the voice of the orator dies upon the porches of the ear, and the music of the Church is silent, and the seduction of splendid ceremonial is forgotten, there remains the uneasy sense that between all this and the actual Carpenter-Redeemer there is a wide gulf fixed; that Jesus scarcely lived and died to produce only such results as these; that there must be some other method of interpreting His life, much simpler, much truer, and much more satisfying. Is it wonderful that among such men the current forms of Christianity excite no enthusiasm, and that the bonds of their attachment to it are lax and easily dissolved? And what is felt by these men within the Church is felt with much greater strength by multitudes of sincere men outside the Church, who do not hesitate to express their feeling and to pronounce current Christianity a burlesque and tragic travesty upon the real religion of the Nazarene.

But the moment we do begin to live, however inefficiently, as Jesus lived, the sublime reality of His religion is revealed to us. We do actually find that in the postponement of our own desires for the sake of others; in the abandonment of our own apparently legitimate ambitions for the service of the poor; in the patient endurance of affront and injury; in the forgiveness of those whose wrong seems inexpiable; in the daily exercise of love that "seeketh not itself to please," but hopeth all things, and believeth all things,--there is a joy beyond joy, and an exceeding great reward. We do actually find that to forgive our brother freely is better both for him and us than to judge him harshly, and the wisdom of Jesus is thus justified in its moral and social efficacy. We do actually find that in ceasing to live by worldly maxims and by living instead according to the maxims of Jesus, we have attained a form of happiness so incredibly sweet and pure that the world holds nothing that resembles it, and nothing that we would exchange for it. For this is now our great reward, that peace attends our footsteps, and that our hearts are no longer vexed with the perturbations of vanity and self-love, of envy and revenge. We find human nature answering to our touch even as it answered to the touch of Jesus, and revealing to us all its best and purest treasure. We find the very natures we thought intractable and destitute of all affinity with ours, brought near our own; the very men and women we thought wholly alien to us suddenly made lovable, and full of qualities that claim our love. And as we thus humbly follow in the steps of Jesus, trying to live each day as He lived, we know that sublimest joy of all--we feel Jesus acting once more through our actions, and we see in the eyes that meet our own the same look that Jesus saw in the eyes of those whom He had cured of misery and redeemed from sin.

A CONFESSION

In speaking thus I do but speak of those things which have been revealed to me in my own experience. For many years I preached the truths of Christianity with a real sincerity, but with a fluctuating sense of their authority and value. Sometimes their authority seemed supreme, and then I trod on bright clouds high above the world; at other times they appeared to crumble at my touch, and then I walked in darkness. One thing I saw at intervals, and at last with complete and agonized distinctness, that however I preached these truths, they had little visible effect upon the lives of others. Those to whom I preached lived after all much as other people lived. I did not find them more magnanimous than the ordinary men and women of the world, nor less liable to take offense, to utter harsh words, to indulge in resentments, and to retaliate on those who injured them. I did not find that they loved humanity any better than their fellows; like all mankind they loved those who loved them, and had domestic virtues and affections, but little more. It was impossible to say that Christianity had produced in them any type of character wholly and radically different from that which might be found in multitudes of men and women who made no pretense of Christian sentiment. Christianity had no doubt imposed upon them many valuable restraints, so that without it they might have been worse men and women, but this was a merely negative result. Where was the spectacle of a character composed of new qualities, a life wholly governed by novel impulses and principles? I could not find such a life; nor ought I to have been surprised; for I could not find it in myself. I also lived much as other people did, except that I had a higher theory of conduct. Put to the test, I also showed resentment and was moved with the spirit of retaliation towards those who wronged me. Nor, save as a matter of theory and sentiment, did I love my fellows any better than the average of mankind. I sought those who were congenial to me, and had no pleasure in the company of the common and the ignorant. I liked clever people. I gave them my best, but I had nothing to bestow upon the dull and stupid. How many times have I borne the society of inferior people with ungracious tolerance, and hastened from them with undisguised relief? How often when dealing with the poor and ignorant in the exercise of conventional philanthropy, have I been careful to preserve the sense of a great gulf that yawned between me and them? And what was my daily life after all but a life existing for its own purposes, as most other men's lives were; and what credit could I take for the fact that the nature of those purposes was a trifle more consonant with what the world calls high ideals than theirs?

Simple and far from novel as the answer seems yet it came to me with the authority of a revelation. It illumined the entire circumference of life. I could no longer hesitate: Jesus had never spoken from the Syrian heavens more surely to the heart of Saul of Tarsus than He had to me. And in the moment that He spoke, I also, like Saul, found all my feelings altered, altered incredibly, miraculously, so that I scarcely recognized myself. I no longer stood aloof from men, and found pleasure in intellectual superiority; I was willing to "become a fool for Christ's sake" if by any means I might save some. I issued a card of invitation to the services of my Church with this motto of St. Paul's upon it, which I now felt was mine. I had had for years feelings of resentment towards one who I thought had wronged me; those feelings were now dead. In another case I had been harsh and unforgiving under great provocation; but when I met after a long interval of time, the one who had injured me, my heart had only love and pity for him. I sought out the drunkard and the harlot, and, when I found them, all repulsion perished in the flow of infinite compassion which I felt. I prayed with fallen women, sought them in their miserable abodes, fought with them for their own souls, and O exquisite moment!--I saw the soul awake in them, I saw in their tear-filled eyes the look that Jesus saw in the eyes of Magdalene. On my last Sabbath in London before leaving for America, one of these rescued girls, now as pure of look and manner as those most sweetly nurtured, called at my house to give my daughter a little present bought with the first money she had earned by honest toil in many years. On the day we sailed another said a special mass for us, and held the day sacred for prayer, in the convent where her bruised life had been nursed back to moral beauty. Love had triumphed in them, and I had brought them that love. I had lived the life, I had tried to do something that Jesus did, and behold Jesus had come back to me, and I knew His presence with me even as Francis knew it when he washed the leper's sores, and Catherine when she gathered to her bosom the murderer's guilty head, drew from him the confession of his sin, and whispered to him softly of the Lamb of God.

There is no sense of unreality in religion now for me. There are no weary uncertainties, no melancholy sense of beating the air in what I teach. He who will try to live the life of Jesus for a single day, and in such few particulars as may lie within his scope, will at once realize the presence of Jesus with him. In the practice of love comes the manifestation of the Lover, the drawing of the soul into the bosom of that Christ who was the very love of God, and the exchange of our poor proud carnal heart for the tender heart that yearned over Magdalene, was moved with compassion for the people, and broke upon the Cross.

A LOVER OF MEN

When I recollect these experiences, and the almost breathless sense of joy which accompanied them, I can only marvel that I lived so many years without discovering the path that led to them. The path was quite plain, and nothing concealed it from me but my own pride. I could even see with distinctness those who trod it, not only the saints of far-off days, but men like Father Dolling, and women whose pale intense faces met mine from beneath the quaint ugliness of Salvation Army bonnets. These soldiers of the League of Service moved everywhere around me in the incessant processions of a tireless love. I knew their works, and there was no hour when my heart did not go out to them in sympathy. Why was it that I was only sympathizer and spectator, never comrade?

Partly through a kind of mischievous humility which was really pride. They could do these things; I could not, nor were they required of me. It needed special gifts for such a work, and I had not these gifts. Besides, had I not my own work? Was it not as important to educate persons of some culture and social position in a knowledge of Christian truth as to redeem lost people from the hell of their misdoing? Certainly it was easier and pleasanter. I found in it that most subtle of all gratifications, the sense of ability efficiently applied, and winning praise by its exertion. There was no one who wished me to live in any other way than that in which I lived. Those to whom I ministered were satisfied with me, and had I told them that I wished to do the sort of things that Salvation Army people did among the slums, they would have been shocked, and would certainly have dissuaded me. And so to this mischievous humility which assured me that I had no fitness for the kind of life which I knew was the life of the saints in every age, there was added the dull pressure of convention. Why should I do what no one expected me to do? Why could I not be content to fulfill the common standard approved by the average conception of Christianity?

I can see now how foolish and how wrong these thoughts were. I saw it even then at intervals. Again and again, like a torturing flash of fire, there ran through me illumining agonized dissatisfactions with myself, my work, my whole position. And again and again I let the flame die down, knowing not that the Son of Man had walked amid the fire. Nay more, I deliberately smothered the holy fire, being in part fearful of it, and of what its consequence might be, if once it were allowed to triumph. For I knew that if I followed these strange impulses my whole life must be changed, and I did not want it changed. I did not want to give up the ease of an assured position, the calm of studious hours, the tasks which flattered my ability. I did not want to face what I knew must happen, the estrangement of old friendships, the rupture of accustomed forms of life. Besides, I might be wholly wrong. I might have no real fitness for the tasks I contemplated; saints, like poets, were born, not made. No one who knew me would have believed me better fitted for any kind of life than that I lived. I had no friend who did not think my present life adequate and satisfactory, and many envied me for the good fortune that had given me just the kind of sphere which seemed best suited to me.

But now I see, as I look back, that at the root of all my inconsistency there lay this one thing, I was not a lover of my kind. I did not love men as men, humanity as humanity, as Jesus did. Of course I loved individuals, and even groups of men and classes of men, who could understand my thoughts, recognize my qualities, and repay my affection with affection. But to feel love for men as men; for those whose vulgarity distressed me, whose ignorance offended me, whose method of life repelled me; love for the drudge, the helot, the social pariah; love for people who had no beauty that men should desire them, nor any grace of mind or person, nor any quality that kindled interest; love for the dull average, with their painful limitations of mind and ideal, the gray armies of featureless grief, whose very sorrows had nothing picturesque in them and no tragic fascination--no, for these I had no real love. I had a deep commiseration, but it was that kind of romantic or aesthetic pity which begins and ends in its own expression. I did not know them by actual contact; I could not honestly say that I wished to know them. And then the thought came to me, and grew in me, that Jesus did love these people with an unconquerable passion. The multitudes to whom He preached were composed, as all multitudes are, of quite ordinary immemorable people. He also, to the eyes of those who saw Him in the peasant garb of Galilee, and judged only by outward appearance, was a common man. And so it would appear that if I did not love men after the fashion in which Jesus loved them, it was very unlikely that I should love Jesus Christ Himself if He once more appeared in the habit in which men saw Him long ago in Galilee. A Jesus, footsore, weary, travel-stained, wearing the raiment of a village carpenter, speaking with the accent of an unconsidered province, surrounded by a rabble of rude fishermen, among whom mingled many persons of doubtful character--how should I regard Him? Should I discern the Light and Life of men beneath His gray disguise of circumstance? Should I have left my books, my studious calm, my pleasant and sufficing tasks, to listen to One who seemed so little likely to instruct me? Would not the same spirit of disdain which made me think lightly and even scornfully of persons whose lives had no resemblance to my own, have made me disdainful of the Man of Nazareth? I knew the answer and I quailed before it. I saw that the temper of my mind was the temper of the Pharisee, and had I lived two thousand years ago in Jerusalem or Galilee, I should have rejected Jesus even as the scribes and Pharisees rejected Him.

And I should have rejected Him for the same reason, because I had no truly generous love of man as man. I should have been no better able to perceive than they that it had pleased God to clothe Himself in the flesh of one who united in His own person all those disabilities which incur the scorn of those who account themselves superior and cultivated, such as lowly and doubtful origin, poverty and the lack of liberal education, and methods of life which outraged social use and custom. Did not Jesus demand for the understanding of Himself precisely that temper which enabled Him to understand others, the temper which discerns the soul beneath all disguise of circumstance? He discerned the splendid and divine beneath the sordid. He saw beneath the drift of sin the buried magnificence of human nature as men discover the hidden temple beneath the sand-drift of the desert. He was able to love all men because all men were to Him living souls. And His own manifestation to the world was such that only those who had this temper could at all perceive His divine significance. The Pharisee could not see that significance simply because he was not accustomed to see men as men. He had no real interest in man as man. He was not a lover of his kind. Hence, when the Son of Man came out of Nazareth, the Pharisee was too careless or too supercilious to regard Him with interest. The divine wonder passed him by; all he saw was a wandering fanatic with no place to lay His head. He could not pierce the disguise of circumstance, and bow in love and awe before the soul of Jesus because he was not accustomed to discern the soul in common people. And so there came home to me the awful truth that I was not a lover of my kind. I was even as the Pharisees, and in denying my regard and love to the lowliest of men and women I was rejecting Jesus Christ. That which had seemed to me a strange exaggeration or an enigmatic sentence, now became a rational principle, a saying that had its root in the deep truth and reality of things; inasmuch as I showed not love to the least of these, my fellows, I denied my love to Jesus Christ Himself.

THE LAW OF COMPASSION

Thus to love our fellow men is a difficult business,--there is none harder. It is so difficult that only a few in any age succeed on so conspicuous a scale as to attract prolonged attention. Yet the secret of success is not obscure; it lies in that temper of compassion which is the most beautiful of all features in the character of Jesus. When He looked upon the multitude He was "moved with compassion"--never was there more illuminative sentence. It reveals an attitude of mind absolutely original. For the general attitude towards the multitude in Christ's day was harsh and scornful. All the splendid intellectualism of Greece existed for the favoured few; beneath that glittering edifice of art and letters lay the dungeons of the slave. It was the same with Rome; it was an empire of privilege, in which the multitude had no part. Jewish society was built after the same pattern, except that with the Pharisee the sense of religious superiority bred a kind of arrogance much more bitter than that which is the fruit of intellectual or social exclusiveness. With men of this temper the call to love all men as fellows could only provoke anger and derision. What possible relation could exist between an Athenian philosopher and a helot, a Roman noble and a slave, a Pharisee proud of his meticulous knowledge of the law, and the common people who were unlettered? The gulf that yawned between such lives was as wide as that which separates the scholar, the artist, or the aristocrat of modern Europe from the pale toiler of a New York sweating-room, or the coal carriers of Zanzibar or Aden. When Jesus bade the young ruler sell all that he had and give it to the poor, He proposed an entirely unthinkable condition of discipleship. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He proposed instead real comradeship with the poor, He Himself being poor. For two thousand years the pulpit has denounced the young ruler for not doing what no one even now would think of doing--not even those who are most eloquent in denunciation.

How then am I ever to find myself in any relation of affection towards these human creatures from whom I am alienated by the nature of my education? If, by any chance, I come in contact with them, it is certain that they will arouse in me repugnance and perhaps disgust. I shall find them coarse, crude, and ignorant; their methods of speech will grate upon me, their manners will repel me; they will be as truly foreign to me as the natives of New Guinea, and their total incapacity to share the thoughts which compose my own inner life will be scarcely less complete. It is a truly humiliating thing to admit that differences of nationality separate men less effectually than disparity of manners. If I am at all fastidious I am more likely to be repelled by coarse language, gross habits, or vulgar behaviour in my fellow mortal than by all his errors in creed or morals. So little parts men, and is permitted to part them, that it is very likely that some mere awkwardness of behaviour in my fellow man may extirpate effectually the regard I might have had for him. How little indeed is permitted to part friends--often nothing more than a tone of voice, a word misinterpreted, or something equally slight, the product very possibly of shyness, or inability for right expression on a sudden call. And there is all that goes by the name of antipathy, the nameless and quite irrational repulsions which we permit ourselves to cherish, for which we have no better excuse than that they are instinctive. With all these forces against us how can we love our neighbour as ourselves? It is something if we do not detest him; if we tolerate him it should be counted to us for a virtue.

Yet the method by which we may love him is quite simple; it is to approach him not with judgment but compassion, to put ourselves in his place, to see his life from his point of view instead of our own. What is his ignorance after all but lack of opportunity? What are his bad manners but the penalty of a narrow life? What are these habits of his which so offend me but things inevitable in that condition of servitude which he occupies--a servitude, let me recollect, which ministers to my ease and comfort? To-day, not less than in earlier generations, society resembles the palaces of the Italian Renaissance,--the feast of life in the painted hall, and the groaning of the prisoner in the depths below. For every comfort that I have, some one has sweated. My fire is lit not only with coal from the mine, but with the miner's flesh and blood; my food has come through roaring seas in which men perished by hurricane and shipwreck; the very books from which I draw my culture are the product not alone of the scholar and the thinker, but of rude unlettered men in forest and at forge who helped to make them by their toil. If I were as educated as I claim to be I should know myself debtor to the barbarian as truly as to the Greek, and as I read my book I should see the forest falling that it might be woven into paper, and men labouring in the heat of factories that the moulded metal might become the organ of intelligence. Nay, I should see yet more; for would it not appear that these nameless toilers are richer in essential life, and in the deep knowledge of what man's existence is, than even the scholar and the writer, whose main acquaintance with life is with words rather than acts? They toil with tense muscles through the summer heat and winter cold; they endure hardship and danger; and week by week their scanty wage is shared by wives and children, who excite in them tenderness and self-sacrifice, and repay them with affection and devotion. For it is so decreed that the sacred magnanimities of the human heart come to flower as fully in lives of crude labour as in lives of ease; these roughened hands grow gentle when they touch the heads of little children, on these strong breasts the wife rests her weariness, and these lips that speak a language so different from mine have nevertheless known the sacramental wine of love. Were my life weighed with theirs might it not appear that theirs was the richer in essential fortitude, in patience and endurance, in all the final qualities that compose the finest manhood?

The spirit of compassion interprets these lives to me; it lends me vision. It enables me to see them not in their artificial disparities, but in their deep-lying kinship with mine and all other lives. And the same thing happens when I survey lives stained with folly, wrecked by weakness, or made detestable by sin and crime. I also have known folly, weakness, sin; but for me there were compulsions to a virtuous life which these never knew. Why am I not as these? Perhaps because my nature rests on a securer equipoise, or because there is in it a certain power of moral recuperation which these have lacked, or because I have the prudence that stops short of consummated folly, or because my environment imposes and creates restraint, or because I have never known the peculiar violence of temptation before which they succumbed. There may be a hundred reasons, but scarce one which gives me cause for boasting. With their life to live, had I done better? Exposed to their temptations, deprived of all the helpful friendships that have interposed between my life and ruin, should I have done as well? In those wakeful hours of night when all my past life runs before me like a frieze of flame, how clearly do I see how frequently I grazed the snare, hung over gulfs of wild disaster, courted ruin, and escaped I know not how? Remembering this, can I be hard towards those who fell? Can I pride myself on an escape in which my will had little part, a deliverance which was a kind of miracle, wrought not by virtue or discretion, but by some outside force which thrust out a strong and willing hand to save me? And, as these thoughts pursue me, I find myself all at once regarding these wrecked and miserable lives not from the outside but the inside. I penetrate their inmost coil of being, and see with horror the crumbling of the house of life--with horror, but also with a torturing pity. And then because compassion lives in me, I can at last separate between the sinner and his sin. The sin remains abhorrent, but I cannot hate the sinner. I see him as one who has fallen in a bad cause, but his wounds cry so loud for pity that I forget the moral treason that has brought him to a battle-field so ignominious and so disastrous. And out of the pity grows love, for love is the natural end of pity; and the magnanimity of love, overleaping moral values, fixes only on the fact of suffering that appeals for succour, misery that cries for help. This was the vital fact that Jesus saw when He had compassion on the multitude.

Jesus had compassion on the multitude, and He gives the reason; He saw them as sheep having no shepherd. It was the element of misdirection in their lives on which Jesus fixed His glance--it was for lack of guidance and a shepherd they had gone astray. May not the same be said of all the lives that fail, whether through ignorance or want, folly or crime? Rightly guided they might have attained knowledge and esteem, wisdom and virtue; and if that be so, no man of right spirit can refuse to feel the pathos of their situation. It is to this point that Jesus leads us. He makes us conscious of "the still sad music of humanity." No further incentive is needed to make us love humanity than the pathos of the human lot. A man may be a knave, a fool, a rogue; yet could we unravel all the secrecies of his disaster we should find so much to move our pity, so much in his life which resembles crises in our own, that in the end the one vision that remains with us is of a wounded brother man. When once we see that vision all our pride of virtue dies in us, and quicker yet to die is the temper of contempt which we have nurtured towards those whose faults offend us. A yet greater offense is ours if we can behold suffering, however caused, without pity. Worse than the worst crime which man can commit against society, or the worst personal wrong he can inflict on us, is the temper in ourselves which judges him without mercy, and refuses him the one medicine that may reinvigorate him--the balm of pity and forgiveness. And, after all, of what wrong is it not true that the bitterest suffering it creates falls not upon the wronged but the wronger, so that in the end the sinner is the real victim, and like all victims should be the object of compassion rather than of vengeance?

THE EMPIRE OF LOVE

But if this spirit of compassion were general, would virtue itself be secure? Would not a fatal lenience towards vice become the temper of society? Would not the immediate effect be the declaration of a general amnesty towards every kind of wrong-doer, and from such an act what could be expected but a rapid dissolution of the laws and conventions that maintain the structure of society?

These are natural fears, and they are not altogether the fears of weak and timid men. They will certainly be shared by all tyrants, all persons whose tempers incline to absolutism, all believers in force as the true dynamic of stable social government. To reason with such persons is impossible, because their opinions are the fruit of temper, and are therefore irrational. But even such persons are not destitute of powers of observation, and in the long history of the world there is a field of observation which no person of intelligence can neglect.

Do we find, as we survey this field, that force has ever proved the true dynamic of stable social government? We find the exact contrary to be true. The great empires of the past were founded on force and perished, even as Napoleon discovered in his final reveries on human history. Whenever force has been applied to maintain what seemed a right social system it has uniformly failed. The Church of Rome applied force to produce a world consonant with her ideas of truth; she was all but destroyed by the recoil of her prolonged persecutions. The Puritans were persecuted in the name of truth and virtue; they triumphed. The Puritans in turn persecuted, under the impulse of ideals that an impartial judgment must pronounce among the loftiest and noblest that ever animated human hearts, and in turn they were overthrown. Again and again, when crime has attained monstrous and threatening proportions, laws of barbarous severity have been applied for its repression; in not one solitary instance have they been successful. The more barbarous and severe the law against crime, the more has crime flourished. When men were hanged for petty theft, when they were whipped at the cart's tail for seditious language, when they were disembowelled for treasonable practices; theft, sedition, and treason flourished as they have never flourished since. The very disproportion and hideousness of the penalty inflamed men's minds to the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate the death penalty for the anarchist, irrespective of his exact crime; when city councils propose the same penalty for those guilty of outrages on women; when indignant mobs, in spite of law, and without trial, burn at the stake offending negroes. If history teaches anything with an emphasis at once clear and unmistakable, it is that crime has never yet been abridged by brutal harshness, but has thriven on it. History also teaches with an emphasis equally clear and positive, that the spirit of love, manifesting itself in lenience, compassion, and magnanimity, has constantly justified itself by the reduction of crime, and the taming of the worst kind of criminal.

Is not this in itself a justification of the spirit of Jesus? Does it not appear, on the review of nearly two thousand years of history, that society has attained its greatest happiness and has reached its highest condition of virtue, precisely in those periods when the gentle ideals of Jesus have had most sway over human thought and action? And if this be so, is it possible to doubt that society will only continue to progress towards happiness and content in the degree that it obeys the counsels of Jesus, making not force but love the great social dynamic, which shall control all its operations and guide all its judgments?

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