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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Empire of Love, by W. J. Dawson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Empire of Love
+
+Author: W. J. Dawson
+
+Release Date: August 28, 2006 [EBook #19134]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EMPIRE OF LOVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Empire of Love
+
+
+By
+
+W. J. DAWSON
+
+
+
+
+
+New York  Chicago  Toronto
+
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+
+London and Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1907, by
+
+FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+  New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
+  Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
+  Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
+  London: 21 Paternoster Square
+  Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
+
+
+
+
+  To
+  M. M. D.,
+
+  who, during the last two years
+  of our residence in London,
+  practiced the teachings of this book
+  before I taught them:
+
+  proving daily
+  in her compassionate toil for others
+  the divine efficacy of simple love
+  to redeem the lives,
+  that were most estranged from virtue,
+  and most lost to hope.
+
+
+
+
+Love feels no burden, regards not labours, would willingly do more than
+it is able, pleads not impossibility, because it feels that it can and
+may do all things.
+
+THOMAS À KEMPIS.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I.  THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED
+   II.  WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
+  III.  THE JUSTICE OF JESUS
+   IV.  LOVE IS JUSTICE
+    V.  LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
+   VI.  THE PRACTICE OF LOVE
+  VII.  LOVE AND JUDGMENT
+ VIII.  THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE
+   IX.  THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF
+    X.  A CONFESSION
+   XI.  A LOVER OF MEN
+  XII.  THE LAW OF COMPASSION
+ XIII.  THE EMPIRE OF LOVE
+  XIV.  THE BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE
+
+
+
+
+THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED
+
+
+
+  _WHY THEY LOVED HIM_
+
+  _So kindly was His love to us,
+    (We had not heard of love before),
+  That all our life grew glorious
+    When He had halted at our door._
+
+  _So meekly did He love us men,
+    Though blind we were with shameful sin,
+  He touched our eyes with tears, and then
+    Led God's tall angels flaming in._
+
+  _He dwelt with us a little space,
+    As mothers do in childhood's years,
+  And still we can discern His face
+    Wherever Joy or Love appears._
+
+  _He made our virtues all His own,
+    And lent them grace we could not give,
+  And now our world seems His alone,
+    And while we live He seems to live._
+
+  _He took our sorrows and our pain,
+    And hid their torture in His breast,
+  Till we received them back again
+    To find on each His grief impressed._
+
+  _He clasped our children in His arms,
+    And showed us where their beauty shone,
+  He took from us our gray alarms,
+    And put Death's icy armour on._
+
+  _So gentle were His ways with us,
+    That crippled souls had ceased to sigh,
+  On them He laid His hands, and thus
+    They gloried at His passing by._
+
+  _Without reproof or word of blame,
+    As mothers do in childhood's years,
+  He kissed our lips in spite of shame,
+    And stayed the passage of our tears._
+
+  _So tender was His love to us,
+    (We had not learned to love before),
+  That we grew like to Him, and thus
+    Men sought His grace in us once more._
+
+  CONINGSBY WILLIAM DAWSON.
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED
+
+In the history of the last two thousand years there is but one Person
+who has been, and is supremely loved.  Many have been loved by
+individuals, by groups of persons, or by communities; some have
+received the pliant idolatries of nations, such as heroes and national
+deliverers; but in every instance the sense of love thus excited has
+been intimately associated with some triumph of intellect, or some
+resounding achievement in the world of action.  In this there is
+nothing unusual, for man is a natural worshipper of heroes.  But in
+Jesus Christ we discover something very different; He possessed the
+genius to be loved in so transcendent a degree that it appears His sole
+genius.
+
+Jesus is loved not for anything that He taught, nor yet wholly for
+anything that He did, although His actions culminate in the divine
+fascination of the Cross, but rather for what He was in Himself.  His
+very name provokes in countless millions a reverent tenderness of
+emotion usually associated only with the most sacred and intimate of
+human relationships.  He is loved with a certain purity and intensity
+of passion that transcends even the most intimate expressions of human
+emotion.  The curious thing is that He Himself anticipated this kind of
+love as His eternal heritage with men.  He expected that men would love
+Him more than father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a
+love a condition of what He called discipleship.  The greatest marvel
+of all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly
+verified in the event.  He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love,
+unrealizable as it is by touch, or glance, or spoken word, or momentary
+presence, men and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and
+surrender all things.  The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his
+last lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing
+in universal history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, I, have founded empires.
+They were founded on force, and have perished.  Jesus Christ has
+founded an empire on love, and to this day there are millions ready to
+die for Him."
+
+Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the baffling, inexplicable marvel.
+Were we able to detach ourselves enough from use and custom, to survey
+the movement of human thought from some lonely height above the floods
+of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea-silences of St. Helena, we also
+might feel the wonder of this most wonderful thing the world has ever
+known.
+
+That the majority of men, and even Christian men, do not perceive that
+the whole meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a thing too obvious
+to demand evidence or invite contradiction.  I say men, and Christian
+men, thus limiting my statement, because women and Christian women,
+frequently do perceive it, being themselves the creatures of affection,
+and finding in affection the one sufficing symbol of life and of the
+universe.  It is a St. Catherine who thinks of herself as the bride of
+Christ, and dreams the lovely vision of the changed hearts--the heart
+of Jesus placed by the hands that bled beneath her pure bosom, and her
+heart hidden in the side of Him who died for her.  It is a St. Theresa
+who melts into ecstasy at the brooding presence of the heavenly Lover,
+and can only think of the Evil One himself with commiseration as one
+who cannot love.  It is true that Francis of Assisi also thought and
+spoke of Christ with a lover's ecstasy, but then Francis in his
+exquisite tenderness of nature, was more woman than man.  No such
+thought visited the stern heart of Dominic, nor any of those makers of
+theology who have built systems and disciplines upon the divine poetry
+of the divine Life.
+
+Love, as the perfect symbol of life and the universe, does not content
+men, simply because for most men love is not the key to life, nor an
+end worth living for in itself, nor anything but a complex and often
+troublesome emotion, which must needs be subordinated to other
+faculties and qualities, such as greed, or pride, or the desire of
+power, or the dominant demands of intellect.  Among men the poets alone
+have really understood Jesus: and in the category of the poets must be
+included the saints, whose religion has always been interpreted to them
+through the imagination.  The poets have understood; the theologians
+rarely or never.  Thus it happens that men, being the general and
+accepted interpreters of Christ, have all but wholly misinterpreted
+Him.  The lyric passion of that life, and the lyric love which it
+excites, has been to them a disregarded music.  They have rarely
+achieved more than to tell us what Christ taught; they have wholly
+failed to make us feel what Christ was.  But Mary Magdalene knew this,
+and it was what she said and felt in the Garden that has put Christ
+upon the throne of the world.  Was not her vision after all the true
+one?  Is not a Catherine a better guide to Jesus than a Dominic?  When
+all the strident theologies fall silent, will not the world's whole
+worship still utter itself in the lyric cry,
+
+  Jesu, Lover of my soul,
+  Let me to Thy bosom fly.
+
+
+Is it then not within the competence of man to interpret Christ aright,
+simply because the masculine temperament is what it is?  By no means,
+for such a statement would disqualify the evangelists themselves, who
+are the only biographers of Jesus.  But in the degree that a
+temperament is only masculine, it will fail to understand Jesus.
+Napoleon could not understand; he was the child of force, the son of
+the sword, the very type of that hard efficiency of will and intellect
+which turns the heart to flint, and scorns the witness of the softer
+intuitions.  Francis could understand because he was in part
+feminine--not weakly so, but nobly, as all poets and dreamers and
+visionaries are.  Paul could understand for the same reason, and so
+could John and Peter; each, in varying degrees, belonging to the same
+type; but Pilate could not understand, because he had been trained in
+the hard efficiency of Rome; nor Judas, because the masculine vice of
+ambition had overgrown his affections, and deflowered his heart.  What
+is it then in Paul and John and Peter, what element or quality, which
+we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or Napoleon?  Clearly there is no lack
+of force, for the personality of these three first apostles lifted a
+world out of its groove and changed the course of history.  Was it not
+just this, that each had beneath his masculine strength a feminine
+tenderness, a power of loving and of begetting love in others?  John
+lying on the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of love and sorrow at
+the last Supper; Peter, plunging naked into the Galilean sea, and
+struggling to the shore at the mere suspicion that the strange figure
+outlined there upon the morning mist is the Lord; Paul praying not only
+to share the wounds of Jesus, but if there be any pang left over, any
+anguish unfulfilled, that this anguish may be his--these are not alone
+immortal pictures, but they are revelations of a temperament, the
+temperament that understands Jesus.  He who could not melt into an
+abandonment of grief and love over one on whom the shadow of the last
+hour rested; he who would spring headlong into no estranging sea to
+reach one loved and lost and marvellously brought near again; he who
+can share the festal wine of life, but has no appetite for agony, no
+thirsting of the soul to bear another's pain--these can never
+understand Jesus.  They cannot understand Him, simply because they
+cannot understand love.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
+
+
+
+  _TOWARDS GALILEE_
+
+  _The great obdurate world I know no more,
+  The clanging of the brazen wheels of greed,
+  The taloned hands that build the miser's store,
+  The stony streets where feeble feet must bleed.
+  No more I walk beneath thy ashen skies,
+  With pallid martyrs cruelly crucified
+  Upon thy predetermined Calvaries:
+  I, too, have suffered, yea, and I have died!
+  Now, at the last, another road I take
+  Thro' peaceful gardens, by a lilted way,
+  To those low eaves beside the silver lake,
+  Where Christ waits for me at the close of day.
+  Farewell, proud world!  In vain thou callest me.
+  I go to meet my Lord in Galilee._
+
+
+
+II
+
+WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
+
+Christianity, as it exists to-day, is in the main a misrepresentation
+and a misinterpretation of Christ; not consciously indeed--if it were
+so the remedy would be easy; but unconsciously, which makes the remedy
+difficult.  One need not stop to define Christianity, for there is only
+one sincere meaning to the word; it implies a _kind of life whose
+spirit and method reproduce as accurately as possible the spirit and
+the method of the life of Jesus_.  It would seem that if this
+interpretation of the term be correct there could be no difficulty in
+adjusting even unconscious misinterpretation of Christ to the true
+facts of the case: but here we are met by that perversity of vision
+which springs not from ignorance, but from thoughtlessness, and is in
+its nature much more obdurate than the worst perversity of ignorance.
+Ignorance can be enlightened; thoughtlessness, being usually associated
+with vanity, recognizes no need of enlightenment.
+
+The life of Jesus, freshly introduced to a mind wholly ignorant of its
+existence may be trusted to convey its own impression; but the
+thoughtless mind will be either too proud, or too shallow, or too
+confident, to be sensitive to right impressions.  Thus the trouble with
+most people who call themselves Christians is not to educate them into
+right conceptions of the life of Christ, but to destroy the growth of
+wrong impressions.  "Surely," they will say, "we know all about the
+life of Christ.  We have read the biographies of Jesus ever since the
+days of infancy.  We have heard the life of Jesus expounded through
+long years by multitudes of teachers.  We have a church which claims to
+have extracted from the life of Jesus a whole code of laws for life and
+conduct; is not this enough?"  But what if the teachers themselves have
+never found the true secret of Jesus?  What if they have but repeated
+the error of the Pharisees in elaborating a code of laws in which the
+vital spirit of the truth they would impart is lost?  And does not the
+whole history of man's mind teach us that one simple truth known at
+first-hand is worth more to us, and is of greater influence on our
+conduct, than all the second-hand instruction we may receive from the
+most competent of teachers?  It is just this first-hand thought which
+we most need.  We need to see for ourselves what Jesus was, and not
+through the eyes of another, whatever his authority.
+
+Suppose that we should read the Gospels in this spirit, with an
+entirely unbiassed and receptive mind, capable of first-hand
+impressions, what would be the probable character of these impressions?
+The clearest and deepest of all, I think, would be that the Jesus
+therein depicted lived His life on principles so novel that we are able
+to discover no life entirely like His in the best lives round about us.
+We should probably be struck first of all by certain outward
+dissimilarities.  Thus He was not only poor, but He did not resent
+poverty--He beatified it.  The things for which men naturally, and, as
+we think, laudably strive, such as a settled position in society and
+the consideration of others, He did not think worth seeking at all.  He
+made no use of His abilities for private ends, which has been the
+common principle of social life since society began.  He asked nothing
+of the world, being apparently convinced that nothing which the world
+could give Him was worth having.  Strangest thing of all in one who
+must have been conscious of His own genius, and of the value of His
+teachings to mankind, He made not the least effort to perpetuate these
+teachings.  He wrote no book, provided no biographer, did none of those
+things which the humblest man of genius does to ensure that distant
+generations shall comprehend and appreciate his character and message.
+He was content to speak His deepest truths to casual listeners.  He
+spent all His wealth of intellect upon inferior persons, fishermen and
+the like, who did not comprehend one tithe of what He said.  He was the
+friend of all who chose to seek His friendship.  He discriminated so
+little that He even admitted a Judas to His intimacy, and allowed women
+tainted with dishonour and impurity to offer Him public tokens of
+affection.  In all these things He differed absolutely from any other
+man who ever lived beneath the public eye.  In all these things He
+still stands alone; for who, among the saintliest men we know, has not
+some innocent pride in his ability, or some preference in friendship,
+or some instinctive compliance with social usage, or some worldly hopes
+and honourable aims which he shares in common with the mass of men?
+
+But these outward dissimilarities of conduct disclose a dissimilarity
+of soul.  Men live for something; for what did Jesus live?  And the
+answer that leaps upon us like a great light from every page of the
+Gospels is plain; He lived for love.  If He did not care for praise or
+honour; if He regarded even the preservation of His teachings with a
+divine carelessness, it was because He had a nobler end in view, the
+love of men.  He could not live without love, and His supreme aim was
+to make Himself loved.  And yet it was less a conscious aim, than the
+natural working out of His own character.  Fishermen by the sea saw Him
+but once; instantly they left their boats and followed Him.  A man
+sitting at the receipt of custom, a hard man we should suppose, little
+likely to be swayed by sudden emotions, also sees Him once, and finds
+his occupation gone.  A beautiful courtesan, beholding Him pass by,
+breaks from her lovers, and follows Him into an alien house, where she
+bathes His feet with tears and wipes them with the hairs of her head.
+Mature women without a word spoken or a plea made, minister to Him of
+their substance, and count their lives His.  When He sleeps wearied out
+upon a rude fishing-boat, there is a pillow for His head, placed there
+by some unknown adorer.  The men He makes apostles, all but one, count
+His smile over-payment for the loss of home, of wife, of children.
+Countless throngs of ordinary men and women forget their hunger, and
+are content to camp in desert places only to listen to the music of His
+voice.  Wild and outlawed men, criminals and lepers and madmen, become
+as little children at His word, and all the wrongs and bruises
+inflicted on them by a cruel world are healed beneath His kindly
+glance.  Does it matter greatly what He taught?  This is how He lived.
+He lived in such a way that men saw that love was the only thing worth
+living for, that life had meaning only as it had love.  And this is the
+imperishable tradition of Jesus:
+
+  This is His divinity,
+  This His universal plea,
+  Here is One that loveth thee.
+
+
+What then is a true Christianity but the accurate reproduction of this
+spirit of love, the creation of loving and lovable men and women, who
+attract and uplift all around them by the subtle fascination of the
+love that animates them?  What is a Christian Church but a
+confraternity of such men and women?  What is a Christian society, but
+a society permeated by this spirit, and bringing all the affairs of
+life to its test?  And what place have social superiorities and
+inferiorities; pride, scorn, or coldness; harsh theologies, breeding
+harsh tempers and infinite disputes; the egoism that wounds the humble,
+the strength that disregards the weak, the vanity that hurts the
+simple, in any company of men and women who dare to wear the name of
+such a Founder?  It was as a Bridegroom Christ came, anointed with all
+the perfumes of a dedicated love, and until the last bitter hour of His
+rejection, He moved with such lyric joyousness across the earth, that
+life became festive in His presence.  It is as a Bride the church
+exists on earth, and if no festive smiles are awakened by its presence,
+and no gracious unsealing of the founts of love in human hearts, then
+is it not Christ's Church, for He has passed elsewhere with another
+company to the marriage-feast, and His Church stands without, before a
+barred and darkened door.
+
+
+
+
+THE JUSTICE OF JESUS
+
+
+
+  _HOW HE CAME_
+
+  _When the golden evening gathered on the shore of Galilee,
+  When the fishing boats lay quiet by the sea,
+  Long ago the people wondered, tho' no sign was in the sky,
+  For the glory of the Lord was passing by._
+
+  _Not in robes of purple splendour, not in silken softness shod,
+  But in raiment worn with travel came their God,
+  And the people knew His presence by the heart that ceased to sigh
+  When the glory of the Lord was passing by._
+
+  _For He healed their sick at even, and He cured the leper's sore,
+  And sinful men and women sinned no more,
+  And the world grew mirthful hearted, and forgot its misery
+  When the glory of the Lord was passing by._
+
+  _Not in robes of purple splendour, but in lives that do His will,
+  In patient acts of kindness He comes still;
+  And the people cry with wonder, tho' no sign is in the sky,
+  That the glory of the Lord is passing by._
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE JUSTICE OF JESUS
+
+One strong peculiarity of the teaching of Jesus--we might even call it
+its outstanding feature--is that it is frequently disclosed in a series
+of incidents.  Unlike most teachers He philosophizes little about life.
+A single chapter of the Gospels, or at most two, would contain all the
+maxims about life which He thought necessary for wise and lofty
+conduct.  His method is rather to put Himself in relation to the
+crucial occurrences of life, and to reveal the true way of regarding
+them by His own attitude towards them.  When He would teach the beauty
+of humility it is by putting a little child in the midst of His
+arrogant and vainglorious disciples, that the child may become the
+living and memorable parable of His sentiments.  When He would teach
+humanity, He does so by His own conduct to lepers.  When He would
+discredit and expose the barbarism of the Mosaic Sabbatarian laws as
+interpreted by scribes and Pharisees, He does so by healing the sick
+and blind upon the Sabbath day.  He is all for the concrete, teaching
+not by theory, but by example.  The method is novel, and its advantages
+are obvious.  The best conceived discourses on humility, mercy, or
+sympathy, might be forgotten, but no one can forget the child among the
+disciples, nor the raptured gaze of the blind man when his purged eyes
+open to behold the face of his miraculous Physician, nor the picture of
+Jesus touching without fear or disgust the leper whose unclean
+contagion made him an object of aversion even to the pitiful.
+
+It is a wonderful method of instruction; it makes every other method
+seem trite and wearisome.  Its effect is to make the Gospels a series
+of tableaux, which dwell in the memory as things actually seen.  The
+groups upon the stage perpetually shift and rearrange themselves; each
+represents some phase of life, some problem, some combination of
+circumstance more or less common in the experience of men, something
+that is typical, for Jesus chooses only the typical and essential
+things of life for these occasions.  The lesser things of life He
+passes over; it is the great and crucial matters which attract Him.
+
+But what are the great things of life?
+
+They all fall into one category, they all present problems in human
+relationship.  No problems are so difficult.  They are not speculative,
+but practical.  A man who may be wise as the world counts wisdom, and
+able to pierce with acute analysis to the depth of the abstrusest
+philosophic problem, may nevertheless find himself hopelessly baffled
+by some quite common fact of life, such as how to treat a wayward son,
+or a sinful woman.  I am not likely to lose a night's rest because I am
+unable to define the Trinity but with what sore travail of heart do I
+toss through midnight hours when I have to settle some course of action
+towards the friend who has betrayed me, the brother who has brought me
+shame, the child who scoffs at my restraint, and hears the call of the
+far country in every swift pulsation of his passionate heart!  And why
+cannot I settle my course of action?  Because my mind is confused by
+something which I call justice, to which custom has given authority and
+consecration.  Justice prescribes one course of action, affection
+another.  The convention of the world insists that wrong-doing should
+be punished, which is manifestly right; but when it insists that I
+should be the punisher, I suspect something wrong.  The more closely I
+study conventional justice the more I am conscious of something in
+myself that distrusts and revolts from it.  The more I incline to the
+voice of affection the more I fear it, lest I should be guilty of
+weakness which would merit my own contempt.  The struggle is one
+between convention and instinct, and I know not which side to take.
+But one thing I do know; it is that I have no certain clue to guide me,
+no clear determining principle that divides the darkness with a sword
+of light, no voice within myself that is authoritative.
+
+Now the wonderful thing in Jesus is that He is always sure of Himself.
+Nothing takes Him by surprise, nothing produces the least hesitation in
+His judgment.  Therefore He must have had an unfailing clue to which He
+trusted in the maze of life.  Behind all consistency of judgment there
+must exist consistency of principle.  The principle that governed all
+the thoughts of Jesus was _that love was the only real justice_.  He
+came not to condemn, not to destroy men's lives, but to save them.
+There was no problem of human relationship that could not be solved by
+love; there was no other principle needed for the regulation of
+society; and no other could produce that general peace and good-will
+which He called the Kingdom of God.
+
+Thus, on one occasion Jesus tells a story which is so lifelike in every
+touch that we may accept it, without doubt, as less a parable than an
+incident.  A father has two sons, one of whom is industrious and
+dutiful, the other wayward and rebellious.  The wayward son finally
+casts off all pretense of filial obedience, goes into a far country,
+and wastes his substance in riotous living.  Here we have one of the
+saddest of all problems in human relationship, for presently the
+disgraced son comes home a beggar.  The elder brother who represents
+the average social view, has no doubt whatever as to what should be
+done.  He is offended that the disgraced son should come home at all;
+he would have thought better of him if he had hidden his shame in the
+country that had witnessed it.  Probably his sense of pride and
+respectability is offended more than his love of virtue, though he
+characteristically gives his jealous anger the illusion of morality.
+This, I say, is the average social view.  There are few things more
+cruel than affronted respectability.  The elder brother is an eminently
+respectable person, totally unacquainted with wayward passions, and his
+only feeling for his brother is disdain.
+
+Jesus tells the story, however, in such a way as to discredit the
+average social view.  He begins by making us feel that whatever follies
+the prodigal had committed, he had already been punished for them in
+the miseries he had endured.  It is not for man to punish with his whip
+of scorn one who has already been flaggellated with a whip of scorpions
+in the desert places of disgrace and shame.  Jesus makes us feel also
+that whatever sins might be laid to the charge of the disgraced son,
+there is nevertheless in his heart a warmth of feeling of which the
+elder brother gives no sign.  The boy loves his father, otherwise he
+would not have turned to him in his anguish of distress.  The elder
+brother's attitude to his father is arrogant and harsh; the younger
+brother's is humble and tender.  Lastly the father himself is revealed
+as the embodiment of love.  He asks no questions, utters no reproaches,
+imposes no conditions; he simply takes his son back, in the rush of his
+affection cutting short the boy's pitiful confession, and calling for
+shoes and new robes and festal music, as though his son had returned in
+dignity and triumph.  In the last scene of all, implied rather than
+described, the restored prodigal sits at the feast, leaning on his
+father's bosom, but the respectable son stands without in a darkness of
+his own creation--the darkness which a harsh spirit and an unlovely
+temper never fail to create in men of his unhappy temperament.
+
+It is a very strange story, if we come to think of it; almost an
+immoral story, as no doubt it was considered by the Pharisees, and
+persons of their cold and mechanical type of virtue.  But Jesus
+anticipates their criticism with one of the most startling statements
+that ever fell from inspired lips, "There is more joy in heaven among
+the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and
+nine righteous persons who need no repentance."  Heaven approves the
+story, if they do not.  Thus God Himself would act, for God is love.
+Thus love must needs act, if it be the kind of love that "suffereth
+long and is kind, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own,
+is not provoked, taketh not account of evil, beareth all things,
+believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."  And if
+we ask what becomes of justice, Jesus assures us that love is the only
+real justice.  For the main object of justice is not punishment but
+reclamation.  A truly enlightened justice is less concerned with the
+punishment of wrong than its reparation.
+
+The gravest question in the case of this unhappy boy is not what he has
+made of himself by sin and folly, but what can yet be made of him by
+wise and tender treatment.  Had the father coldly dismissed the
+prodigal with some bitter verdict on his past folly, he himself would
+have been unjust to the boy's possibilities, and thus would have sinned
+against his son with a sin much less capable of excuse than the son's
+sin against him.  The worst sinner in the story is not the son who went
+wrong, but the son who had never done anything but right, yet had done
+it in such a way that it had begotten in him a vile, censorious,
+loveless temper.  No one can be just who does not love; and so, once
+more removing the story into that unseen world which Christ called in
+to redress the balance of this visible world, we sinful men and women
+build our hopes upon the great saying that God's forgiveness is God's
+justice: if we confess our sins, He is not only faithful, but JUST in
+forgiving us our sins.
+
+
+
+
+LOVE IS JUSTICE
+
+
+
+  _THE WAY OF WOUNDS_
+
+  _He touched the leper tenderly,
+  So in His hands there came to be
+    Wide wounds that were not wrought with nails.
+  Alas, my hands are smooth and fair,
+  No wound is on them anywhere,
+    Nor any scarlet scar of nails._
+
+  _His lips lay on the mouth of death,
+  God's healing dwelt within their breath,
+    Wherefore his lips grew pale with pain,
+  And no man shall that pain divine;
+  Alas, my lips are red with wine,
+    And they have scorned His draught of pain._
+
+  _His feet were torn of stone and thorn,
+  Full slow He moved on roads forlorn,
+    But joyous hearts accompanied Him;
+  Alas, my feet are softly shod,
+  And on the road that leads to God,
+    They have not sought to move with Him._
+
+  _And so all wounded by the way,
+  He came home at the close of day,
+    And angels met Him at the Gate.
+  Alas, His way I have not known--
+  The road forlorn, the wounding stone--
+    And no one waits me at the Gate._
+
+
+
+IV
+
+LOVE IS JUSTICE
+
+Love is the only real justice--never was there a more revolutionary
+ethic!  If Christianity is to be judged by its institutions, it must be
+reluctantly confessed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have
+almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind.
+The elder brother still makes broad his phylacteries in the home, in
+the Church, and on the seat of justice.  The elder brother's sense of
+offended respectability still masquerades as virtue.  Who forgives as
+this father forgave, with such completeness that he who has wrought the
+wrong is encouraged to forget that the wrong was ever wrought?  Where
+is the loving and tolerant spirit of the father less visible than in
+the Church, which crucifies men for a word, and makes a difference of
+opinion the ground for deadly enmity?  Of what administration of law
+can we say that its chief object is not the punishment of the
+wrong-doer, but his reclamation?  No existing society is organized on
+these principles, and the only defense the apologists of a bastard
+Christianity make is that it is totally impossible to apply the
+principles of Jesus to the administration of society.  That is, at all
+events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one?  Was Jesus
+merely a romantic dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love and
+justice?  Was He a moral anarchist, whose teachings, if interpreted in
+laws, would destroy the basis of society?  A strange thing indeed in
+human history if One who has been loved as no other was ever loved by
+multitudes of men and women through the ages, should prove after all to
+be an impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist!
+
+But if Jesus was a dreamer, He dreamed true, and the very reason why He
+is loved with such wide and deep devotion is that men do dimly, but
+instinctively, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern
+of life as it should be.  Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on
+a social system which any wise or good man can approve.  Hence the wise
+and good man is perpetually urged to the enquiry whether Jesus may not
+after all have been right?
+
+Jesus certainly acts as one who is right.  He acts always with the
+assured air of one for whom all debate is closed and henceforth
+impossible.  He knows His way, and the great moral dilemmas of life
+yield instantly to His touch.  He penetrates to their roots and makes
+us feel that He has touched the essential element in them.  The dreamer
+vindicates himself by making it manifest that he sees deeper into the
+problem than the moralist, and that his is after all the better
+morality because it is of higher social value, and makes more directly
+for social reconciliation.
+
+Let us take, for example, the judgment of Jesus upon the woman who was
+a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee.  The social dilemma of the
+fallen woman is much more difficult of solution than that of the
+prodigal son.  We expect a certain power of moral convalescence in
+youth which has been betrayed through folly.  Sooner or later the manly
+nature kindles with resentment at its own weakness.  Moreover, social
+law allows a certain opportunity of recuperation to man which it denies
+to woman.  The sin of the woman seems less pardonable, not because it
+is worse in itself, but because it outrages a higher convention.  Hence
+the strict moralist who might make some allowance for the hot blood of
+youth, makes none for woman when she is betrayed through the affections.
+
+But this is the very point on which Jesus fixes as essential.  "_The
+woman loved much, therefore let her many sins be forgiven_," He says.
+And a true reading of the story would seem to show that in uttering
+this sublime verdict Jesus is not thinking of the woman's sudden and
+pure love for Him; He is rather reviewing the entire nature of her
+life.  She had loved much--that is her history in a sentence.  Cruelty
+and unkindness, malice and bitterness, had no part in her misdoing.
+She had been undone through the very sweetness of her nature, as
+multitudes of women are.  That which was her noblest attribute--her
+power of affection--had been the minister of her ruin through lack of
+wisdom and restraint.  By love she had fallen, by love also she shall
+be redeemed.  Her sins were indeed many, but behind all her sins there
+was an essential though perverted magnanimity of nature, and for the
+sake of an essential good in her, which lay like a shining pearl at the
+root of her debasement, she shall be forgiven.
+
+Again a strange verdict, and one that must have seemed to the Pharisees
+entirely immoral.  "What becomes of justice?" is their whispered
+comment.  Jesus asserts His sense of justice by an exposition of the
+character of Simon.  Simon is destitute of love, of magnanimity, even
+of courtesy.  In his hard and formal nature there has been no room for
+emotion; passion of any kind and he are strangers.  Which nature is
+radically the better, his or "this woman's"?  Which presents the more
+hopeful field to the moralist?  The soil of Simon's heart is thin and
+meagre; but in "this woman's" heart is a soil overgrown with weeds
+indeed, but delicately tempered, rich and deep, in which the roots of
+the fair tree of life may find abundant room and nourishment.
+Therefore she shall be forgiven for her possibilities, and such
+forgiveness is justice.  To ignore these possibilities, to allow what
+she has been utterly to overshadow the lovely vision of what she may
+be, when once the soil is clear of weeds, and the real magnanimity of
+her temperament is directed into noble uses, would be the most odious
+form of injustice.
+
+Such is the justice of Jesus, but, alas, after two thousand years we
+still stand astonished at it, more than half doubtful of its validity,
+and, if truth be told, secretly dismayed at its boldness.  It is
+romantic justice, we say, but is it practicable justice?  We might at
+least remember that what we call practicable justice has never yet
+attained the gracious results of Christ's romantic justice.  Simon the
+Pharisee knows no more how to deal with "this woman" than the elder
+brother knew how to deal with the prodigal.  Such sense of justice as
+they possessed would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to
+the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the
+barest chance of reformation.  Is not this enough to make the least
+discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all
+their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to
+pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no
+acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy?  Does not the
+entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment
+and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his
+sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the hope, that there
+must be some better method of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned
+by conventional justice?  There is another method--it is Christ's
+method.  And the thing to be observed is that whereas conventional
+justice must certainly have failed in either of these crucial
+instances, the romantic justice of Jesus--if we must so call
+it--completely succeeded.  The woman who was a sinner sinned no more,
+and the penitent son henceforth lived a new life of purity and
+obedience.  In each case love is justified, and proves itself the
+highest justice.
+
+
+
+
+LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
+
+
+
+  _LOVE'S PROFIT_
+
+  _What profits all the hate that we have known
+    The bitter words, not all unmerited?
+  Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown?
+  Have roses grown from thistles we have sown?
+    Or lucid dawns flowered out of sunsets red?
+        Lo, all in vain
+  The violence that added pain to pain,
+  And drove the sinner back to sin again._
+
+  _We had been wiser had we walked Love's way
+    We had been happier had we tenderer been,
+  We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day
+  Had we but loved the souls that went astray,
+    And sought from shame their many faults to screen
+        Lo, they and we
+  Had thus escaped Life's worst Gethsemane,
+  And found the Garden where the angels be._
+
+  _For One there was who, angry, drew no sword,
+    Derided, wept for those who wrought Him wrong,
+  And at the last attained this great reward,
+  That those who injured Him acclaimed Him Lord,
+    And wove His story into holiest song.
+        So sinners wrought
+  For Him the Kingdom He had vainly sought,
+  And to His feet the world's frankincense brought._
+
+
+
+V
+
+LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
+
+In these instances it is the singular completeness of Christ's
+forgiveness which is the most startling feature.  It would be a libel on
+human nature to say that men do not forgive each other, but human
+forgiveness usually has reservations, reticences, conditions.  Jesus
+taught unlimited forgiveness, and what He taught He practiced.
+
+"_Then came Peter, and said to Him, 'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin
+against me and I forgive him?  Until seven times?'  Jesus said unto him,
+'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.'_"
+
+It is a vehement reply, in which a quiet note of scorn vibrates; not
+scorn of Peter, but scorn of any kind of love that is less than
+limitless.  But whose love is limitless?  Do we not commonly speak of
+love as being outworn by offense or neglect?  In the compacts which we
+make with one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name
+certain offenses as unpardonable?  Thus one man will say, "I can forgive
+anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive
+perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is
+held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem.  Now and
+again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different
+music.  Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth
+sonnet, boldly states that
+
+      Love is not love
+  Which alters when it alteration finds,
+  Or bends with the remover to remove.
+
+But who listens, who believes?  Yet, if it should happen to us to be
+placed in the position of the offender, we need no one to convince us
+that a true love should be, in its very nature, unalterable.  How
+astonished and dismayed are we, when eyes that have so many times met
+ours in tenderness harden at our presence, and lips which have uttered so
+many pledges of affection, speak harshly!  We do not deny our fault,
+indeed; but we think we can discern reasons why it should be regarded
+mercifully, why the very memory and sacredness of old affection should
+make harsh judgment impossible; nay, more, why a deeply generous love
+should even rejoice in the opportunity to forgive, and so should sanctify
+our very shame with the healing touch of pity, and pour our tears into
+the sacramental cup which ratifies a new fidelity.
+
+It is so the sinner argues, his vision of what love ought to be growing
+clearer by his offense against love.  It is he alone, the sinner, who can
+really sympathize with Christ's conception of love, for he alone feels
+that this is the kind of love he needs.  The elder brother does not
+understand, Simon the Pharisee does not understand, because neither has
+sinned in such a way as to be flung helpless at the feet of love.  Peter
+did not understand when he put his question to Christ.  He spoke just as
+the average man would speak, who has never sounded the tragic depths in
+life, has never known the misery of weakness, and therefore has no fellow
+feeling for the weak.  Love as such men know it is less a passion than a
+compact.  It is a bond of mutual advantage, guarded from abuse by swift
+penalty and forfeit.  It is the reward of qualities, it gives no more
+than it gets, it exists by an equal equipoise of service.  If this
+equipoise is disturbed its obligations are dissolved.  It is easily
+affronted, and under affront becomes resentful, bitter, even vindictive.
+How oft shall I forgive my brother?  Only as oft as a sense of duty shall
+demand, only up to the point which is sanctioned by social custom, so
+that I may save my reputation for magnanimity, always excepting certain
+sins for which no pardon can be legitimately asked.  But the hour was not
+far off when Peter himself was to commit the very sins for which
+customary love has no pardon.  He was to be guilty of those offenses
+which just and good men say they cannot forgive--meanness, cowardice,
+perfidy, denial.  That bitter hour revealed the true nature of love to
+Peter.  He knew that in spite of his sin against Jesus, he still loved
+Him, and since love was unalterable in him, he expected an unalterable
+love in Christ.  It was the seventy times seven forgiveness that he
+needed then; and how sweet to recollect in that hour that Jesus had
+taught a love that knew no limit.  "_Lovest thou Me_?" was the one word
+his Master uttered when they met in the quiet morning light beside the
+sea.  "_Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee_," was the
+swift reply.  Storms disturb the sea but the central tides run on.  Peter
+found with equal astonishment and gratitude that not even perfidy was
+able to separate him from the love of Christ, for that love was
+unalterable as the morning star which hung above the lake, and cleansing
+as the soft waves that lapped its shore.
+
+The self-righteous man will never understand these things.  Men and women
+of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a passion, will
+vehemently disapprove them.  People of smooth lives, ignorant of strong
+temptations, will refuse even to discuss them.  Jesus was well aware of
+their implacable indifference or cold hostility, and boldly said that for
+such people He had no gospel.  His mission was not to the whole, but to
+the sick.  The Gospel of Jesus is in truth not designed for people of
+comfortable lives.  He has little to say to the children of compromise,
+whose emasculated lives attain the semblance of virtue by the cautious
+exercise of niggard passions.  They can take care of one another, these
+righteous ones, whose very righteousness is a negation.
+
+But Christ's Gospel is for a tragic world.  It is for the disinherited,
+the weak, and the strong who have become weak; for those who have been
+wrecked by folly and passion, and too much love of living; for those
+whose capacities for good and evil, being both rooted in passion, are
+equally a peril and a potency--it is to these Christ chiefly speaks.  To
+them the Gospel of unlimited forgiveness and unalterable love is the only
+vital, because the only efficacious Gospel.  The man whose very virility
+of nature makes him the easy prey of murderous joy; the man shut up in
+prison, who hears from the lips that once spake love to him, the sentence
+of inexpiable disgrace; the outcast from honour, gnawing the bitter husks
+of hated sin in far lands, and tortured in his dreams by the sweetness of
+recollected happiness; these, and all like these, will understand Jesus,
+for it is to them He speaks.  Their very sin interprets Him.  To their
+forlorn ears the love He teaches will sound not strange, for it is the
+only kind of love that can redeem them; nor foolish, for it is the only
+love that dare stoop low enough to lift them up.  These will not fail to
+understand what conventional righteousness finds so difficult; these, and
+also all good women who have had acquaintance with either deep love or
+real grief, because it is a loving woman's sweet prerogative and divine
+disposition to forgive, and to draw from her grace of forgiveness a more
+tender and maternal power of loving.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRACTICE OF LOVE
+
+
+
+  _FELLOW SUFFERERS_
+
+  _When men of malice wrought the crown for Thee
+    Didst Thou complain?
+  Nay; in each thorn God's finger Thou didst see,
+    His love thro' pain._
+
+  _His finger did but press the ripened Vine,
+    Thy fruit to prove,
+  That henceforth all the world might drink the wine
+    Of Thy great love._
+
+  _So when the darkness rose about Thy feet
+    Thy lips met His,
+  Amid the upper light, in Death's long sweet,
+    Releasing kiss._
+
+  _And shall I cry aloud in anger when
+    Men make for me
+  A Cross less harsh?  Nay, I'll remember then
+    Thy constancy._
+
+  _And if the darkness hide me from Thy sight
+    At God's command,
+  I'll talk with Thee all thro' the prayerful night,
+    And touch Thy hand;_
+
+  _Greatly content, if I whose life has been
+    So long unwise,
+  May, wounded, on Thy wounded bosom lean
+    In Paradise._
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE PRACTICE OF LOVE
+
+So convinced was Jesus that love alone was the master law of life, that
+He based His own life wholly on His conviction, cheerfully accepting
+all the risks which were implied.  He was perfectly aware of the
+consequences to Himself and His reputation when He made Himself the
+friend of publicans and sinners.  These consequences He ignored, making
+Himself of no reputation, that He might uplift by His love those who
+needed His love the most.  Under the constant contradiction of those
+who mistook His spirit, and even libelled His character, He manifested
+neither bitterness nor resentment.  He suffered injuries without
+retaliation, and went so far as to denounce all forms of retaliation as
+a wasteful expenditure of spirit, wrong in themselves, and attaining no
+end but the worse injury of those who employed them.  He might easily
+have used the miraculous power which He possessed for His own defense,
+and for the confusion of His enemies.  Had He been selfishly ambitious,
+He might have organized a party so strong, that it would have become an
+irresistible force, which would have shattered the old order whose
+evils He denounced, and have made Him the dictator of a new order,
+based on the ideals in which He believed.  He did none of these things,
+not through lassitude of spirit or failure to perceive their possible
+issues, but simply because these were not the things to do.  In His
+judgment the only abiding kingdom belonged to the meek.  He who
+suffered injustice with patience would prove the ultimate conqueror.
+There was an irresistible might in love and meekness against which the
+people raged in vain.  Love was a working and practicable law of life;
+in the long issue of things it was the only law that justified itself.
+
+Was Jesus right in these conclusions?  Can human life proceed along the
+lines He indicated?  Certainly it has never yet done so.  The woman who
+is a sinner finds no Jesus to absolve her utterly among the priests of
+His religion.  The resentment of injury is regarded even by good men as
+entirely justified when injury to the person involves the rights of
+social order.  Force is regarded by persons of the highest amiability
+as necessary to the defense of society, and the Church applauds the
+punishments inflicted by the civil magistrate, and even hastens to
+bless the banners and baptize the deadly weapons of the warrior.
+Meekness, which endures injury without resentment, is regarded as the
+sign of a servile and cowardly spirit, and is the subject of ridicule
+and contempt.  No Christian society exists in which a Peter would be
+freely pardoned his offense; the best that could be hoped would be the
+infliction of humiliating penance, and a reluctant reinstatement in the
+apostleship after a long period of bitter ostracism.  Yet who would
+venture to challenge the conduct of Jesus in these respects?  Who would
+not find his opinion of Jesus tragically lowered, and his adoration
+practically destroyed, if some new and more authentic Gospel were
+discovered by which we learned that Jesus smote with leprosy the
+Pharisees who resisted Him, as Elisha smote Gehazi: that He sanctioned
+the stoning of the adultress taken in the act of sin; or that He
+branded Simon Peter for his perfidy, and drove him out forever from the
+apostleship he had disgraced, denouncing him as a son of hell and a
+predestined citizen of the outer darkness?  Could such acts be
+attributed to Jesus, though each act in itself would precisely
+represent the common temper of Christian courts and so-called Christian
+men under circumstances of similar and equal provocation, the worship
+of Jesus would at once cease throughout the world.
+
+The dilemma is truly tragic.  A Jesus who should be proved to have
+lived according to the conventions we respect, who did not rise above
+conventional ideals of either love or justice, who approved force, and
+resented injuries, who repudiated the friend who had betrayed Him, who
+shunned the contact of persons whose touch dishonoured Him--such a
+Jesus would cease to be our Jesus.  He would no longer attract us, He
+would not touch our hearts, He would barely command our respect.
+Astounding fact!  Those very things in the life of Jesus which we
+disapprove are the things for which we love Him; and those tempers
+which we ourselves disallow are in Him the sources of our adoration.
+
+We are bound therefore to ask, can that method of conduct be wrong
+which has won this triumphant issue?  It may be ironically true that we
+love Him most for those very acts of His which we are least likely to
+imitate; but is not this our tacit testimony to the essential rightness
+of these acts?  In our better, or our softer moments; or in those
+moments when we are most conscious of the cruelty of life, and most in
+need of love, do we not feel, as the life of Jesus grows before us,
+that this is how life should be lived?  Dare we question that a world
+governed wholly by the ideals of Jesus would be a far happier world
+than this we know?  Love, as the one necessary law of life, clearly
+stands justified in Jesus, since it has produced the most adorable
+character in history.  If we admit this, it is foolish to speak of
+Christ's ideals as impracticable.  What we approve in another's life we
+cannot wholly repudiate in our own.  Let it be added also, that a life
+lived by another is always a life that others can live.  We may seek to
+cover our failure, and the world's failure, to reproduce the life of
+Jesus, by the plea of incompetence, but against our plea Jesus records
+His verdict, "_Behold I have left you an example_."
+
+From that verdict there is no appeal.
+
+
+
+
+LOVE AND JUDGMENT
+
+
+
+  _MOTHER AND SON_
+
+  _When, for the last time, from His Mother's home
+    The Son went forth, foreseeing perfectly
+  What doom would happen, and what things would come,
+    Was there upon His lips no stifled sigh
+  For happy hours that should return no more,
+    Long days among the lilies, pure delights
+  Of wanderings by Galilee's fair shore,
+    And converse with His friends on starry nights?
+      Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun
+      With this one word, "Father, Thy will be done!"_
+
+  _With a low voice the stooping olive-trees
+    Whispered to Him of His Gethsemane;
+  The cruel thorn-bush, clinging to His knees,
+    Proclaimed, "I shall be made a crown for Thee!"
+  And, looking back, His eyes made dim with loss,
+    He saw the lintel of the cottage grow
+  In shape against the sunset, like a cross,
+    And knew He had not very far to go.
+      Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun,
+      Still saying this one word, "Thy will be done!"_
+
+  _So, when the last time, from His Mother's home
+    The Son passed out, no choir of angels came,
+  As long before at Bethlehem they had come,
+    To comfort Him upon the road of shame.
+  Alone He went, and stopped a little space,
+    As one overburdened, stopped to look again
+  Upon His Mother's pleading form and face,
+    And wept for her, that she should know this pain.
+      Then, silently, He faced the setting sun
+      And said, "Oh, Father, let Thy will be done!"_
+
+
+
+VII
+
+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.
+
+Let us turn to Christ's vision of the Judgment, as recorded by St.
+Matthew, and what do we find?  First that the same Son of Man, whose
+whole life was an exposition of the law of love, is Himself the final
+judge of men and nations.  "_The Son of Man shall sit on the throne of
+His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations, and He
+shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the
+sheep from the goats_."  No alien judge, observe, unacquainted with the
+nature of man, but one who knows human life so thoroughly that He is
+the representative man--"the Son of Man"; and although He is now the
+Judge, yet He still calls Himself by the tender name of the Shepherd.
+The tribunal is therefore the tribunal of love, and the court is the
+court of love.  He who shall judge mankind is He who judges Peter and
+the woman who was a sinner, He of whose tenderness and sympathy we have
+assurance in a hundred acts of mercy, pity, and magnanimity.  Yet for
+centuries the Church has sung its terrible _Dies Irae_, has clothed the
+judgment seat with thunder, has put into the hands of Jesus bolts of
+flame, and has applauded and enthroned in His sanctuaries such
+pictorial blasphemies as Michael Angelo's _Last Judgment_, which
+represents Jesus as an angry Hercules, and even gratifies the private
+spite of the artist by overwhelming in a sea of fire one who had
+offered him a personal affront.
+
+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
+
+
+
+  _THE WELL_
+
+  _When Galilee took morning's flame
+  Thro' fields of flowers the Master came.
+  He stopped before a cottage door,
+  And took from humble hands the store
+  Of crumbs that from the table fell,
+  And water from the living well.
+  He smiled, and with a great content
+  Upon the road of flowers went._
+
+  _Foredoomed upon the road of shame
+  With bleeding feet the Master came,
+  And found the cottage door again.
+  "No wine have we to ease Thy pain,
+  But only water in a cup."
+  The Master slowly drank it up.
+  "Thy kindness turns it into wine,"
+  He said, "and makes the gift divine."_
+
+  _Upon a day the Master trod
+  The road of stars that leads to God,
+  All tasks for men accomplished.
+  "They gave Me hate," He softly said,
+  "But Love in larger measure gave,
+  And therefore was I strong to save.
+  I had not reached the Cross that day
+  But for the Well beside the way."_
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+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.
+
+The reason why simple and natural people readily understand Jesus is
+that in the kind of life they live the primal emotions are supreme.
+The very narrowness of their social outlook intensifies those emotions.
+They have little to distract them; they are not bewildered by endless
+disquisitions on conduct, and religion itself is for them an emotion
+rather than a systematized creed.  For the poor man home, children,
+fireside affection, mean more than for the rich man, because they are
+his only wealth.  This is the lesson which Wordsworth has so nobly
+taught in his "_Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_,"--
+
+  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
+
+
+
+  _THE HOUSE OF PRIDE_
+
+  _I lived with Pride; the house was hung
+    With tapestries of rich design.
+  Of many houses, this among
+    Them all was richest, and 'twas mine.
+  But in the chambers burned no fire,
+    Tho' all the furniture was gold,
+  I sickened of fulfilled desire,
+    The House of Pride was very cold._
+
+  _I lived with Knowledge; very high
+    Her house rose on a mountain's side.
+  I watched the stars roll through the sky,
+    I read the scroll of Time flung wide.
+  But in that house, austere and bare,
+    No children played, no laughter clear
+  Was heard, no voice of mirth was there,
+    The House was high but very drear._
+
+  _I lived with Love; all she possest
+    Was but a tent beside a stream.
+  She warmed my cold hands in her breast,
+    She wove around my sleep a dream.
+  And One there was with face divine
+    Who softly came, when day was spent,
+  And turned our water into wine,
+    And made our life a sacrament._
+
+
+
+IX
+
+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
+
+
+
+  _THE NOBLEST GRACE_
+
+  _'Tis something, when the day draws to its close,
+  To say, "Tho' I have borne a burdened mind,
+  Have tasted neither pleasure nor repose,
+  Yet this remains--to all men, friends or foes,
+        I have been kind."_
+
+  _'Tis something, when I hear Death's awful tread
+  Upon the stair, that his swift eye shall find
+  Upon my heart old wounds that often bled
+  For others, but no heart I injurèd--
+        I have been kind._
+
+  _Praise will not comfort me when I am dead;
+  Yet should one come, by tenderness inclined,
+  My heart would know if he stooped o'er my bed
+  And kissed my lips for memory, and said
+        "This man was kind."_
+
+  _O Lord, when from Thy throne Thou judgest me,
+  Remember, tho' I was perverse and blind,
+  My heart went out to men in misery,
+  I gave what little store I had to Thee,
+        My life was kind._
+
+
+
+X
+
+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?
+
+So the years went on, and the sense of unreality in my teaching grew
+steadily more intense and intolerable.  I saw myself continually
+expending all the forces of my mind on theories which left me and my
+hearers alike unchanged in the essential characteristics of our lives.
+I felt myself, like St. Augustine, but a "seller of rhetoric."  I was
+inculcating a method of life which I myself did not obey, or obeyed
+only in those respects that caused me neither sacrifice nor
+inconvenience.  In order to continue such labours at all various forms
+of excuse and self-deception were required.  Thus I flattered myself
+that I was at least maintaining the authority of morals.  I did not
+perceive that morals are of no value to the world until vitalized by
+emotion.  At other times I preached with strenuous zeal the superiority
+of the Christian religion, and dilated on its early triumphs.  This
+pleased my hearers, for it always flatters men to find themselves upon
+the winning side.  What I wonder at now is that they did not perceive
+that my zeal to prove Christianity true was exactly proportioned to my
+fear that it was false.  Men do not seek to prove that of which they
+are assured.  Jesus never sought to prove the existence of a God
+because He was assured of it; He simply asserted and commanded.  In my
+heart of hearts I knew that I was not sure.  But I did not easily
+discover the reason of my uncertainty.  I supposed the source to be the
+destructive criticism of the Gospels which had reduced Jesus Himself to
+a probability.  In my private thoughts I argued that it was no longer
+possible to feel the intense reality of Christ.  Francis might feel it,
+Catherine might feel it, because they lived in an atmosphere of poetry,
+unchilled by criticism.  I could never feel as they felt because I
+could not transport myself into their atmosphere.  Yet as often as I
+turned to these great lives, something thrilled within me, some living
+responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien
+to them.  Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could
+make me, of their company?  But how could I attain to their faith?
+What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand
+perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of
+Christ which they possessed?  And then the answer came--not suddenly,
+but as a still small voice slowly growing louder, more positive, more
+intense--_Live the Life_.  Try to do some at least of the things that
+Jesus did.  Seek through experience what can never come through
+ratiocination.  _Be_ a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like
+him, and know Jesus as he knew Him.  Live the life--there is no other
+way.
+
+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
+
+
+
+  _THE CRADLE CROSS_
+
+  _"What shall I ask for Thee, my child?"
+    Said Mary Mother, stooping dawn
+  Above the Babe all undefiled.
+    "O let Him wear a kingly crown."_
+
+  _From wise men's gifts she wrought the crown,
+    The robe inwove with many a gem,
+  Beside the Babe she laid them down.
+    He wept, and would have none of them._
+
+  _"What shall I get for Thee, my Child?"
+    Unto the door she slowly went,
+  And wove a crown of thorn-boughs wild,
+    He took it up, and was content._
+
+  _Upon the floor she gathered wood,
+    And made a little Cross for Him;
+  The Child smiled for He understood,
+    And Mary watched with eyes grown dim._
+
+  _"Since these He doth prefer to gold,"
+    She sadly said, "Let it be so;
+  He sees what I cannot behold,
+    He knows what I can never know."_
+
+  _That night the eyes of Mary saw
+    A Cross of stars set in the sky,
+  Which after it the heavens did draw,
+    And this to her was God's reply._
+
+
+
+XI
+
+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
+
+
+
+  _THE TRUE MUSIC_
+
+  _Not for the things we sing or say
+    He listens, who beside us stoops;
+  Too worn the feet, too hard the way,
+    Too sore the Cross wherewith He droops,
+      And much too great the need that cries
+      From these bruised eyelids and dim eyes._
+
+  _He waits the water from the spring
+    Of kindness in the human heart,
+  The touch of hands, whose touches bring
+    A coolness to the wounds that smart,
+      The warm tears falling on His feet
+      Than precious ointment much more sweet._
+
+  _O Lord, the way is hard and steep,
+    Help me to walk that way with Thee,
+  To watch with Thee, and not to sleep
+    Heedless of Thy Gethsemane,
+      Till love becomes my worshipping,
+      Who have no other gift to bring._
+
+  _It is no hour for angel-harp,
+    The sky is dark, the Cross is near,
+  The agony of Death is sharp,
+    The scorn of men upbraids Thine ear.
+      Fain would I leave all empty creeds,
+      And make a music of my deeds._
+
+
+
+XII
+
+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.
+
+We may waive the question of whether the advice of Jesus to the young
+ruler was meant to be of particular or universal application, but we
+cannot ignore the new law of life which Jesus formulated when He made
+compassion the supreme social virtue.  For it is only through
+compassion that we learn to understand those who differ from us in
+social station or temperament, and can at all come to love them.  Let
+me examine my own natural tendencies, and I am soon made aware of how
+impossible it is to love _all_ my fellow men.  I commence my life, for
+instance, under conditions which permit me to see only a small section
+of society, which I imagine to be the world itself.  I know nothing,
+and am told nothing, of those whose lives do not lie in the direct line
+of my limited vision.  The process of education removes me at each
+stage further from the likelihood of knowing them.  I acquire ideals,
+habits, and manners of which they are destitute.  I come to regard an
+acquaintance with various forms of knowledge as essential to life, and
+I am naturally disdainful of those who do not possess this knowledge.
+In the same way I regard a certain code of manners as binding, and the
+lack of this code of manners in others as an outrage.  My very thoughts
+have their own dialect, and I am totally unacquainted with the dialect
+of those whose thoughts differ from my own.  Thus with the growth of my
+culture there is the equal growth of prejudice; with the enjoyment of
+my privilege, a tacit rejection and repudiation of the unprivileged.
+
+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
+
+
+
+  _THE WOMAN WHO WAITED_
+
+  _She wrought warm garments for the poor,
+    From morn to eve unwearied she
+  Went with her gifts from door to door;
+    And when the night drew silently
+  Along the streets, and she came home,
+  She prayed, "O Lord, when wilt Thou come?"_
+
+  _She was but loving, she could please
+    With no rare art of speech or song.
+  The art she knew was how to ease
+    The sick man's pain, the weak man's wrong;
+  And every night as she came home
+  She said, "O Lord, when wilt Thou come?"_
+
+  _The truths men praised she deemed untrue,
+    The light they hailed to her was dim,
+  But that the Christ was kind she knew,
+    She knew that she must be like Him.
+  Like Mary, in her darkened home,
+  She sighed, "O Christ, that thou would'st come!"_
+
+  _Her hair grew white, her house was bare,
+    Yet still her step was firm and glad,
+  The feet of Hunger climbed the stair,
+    For she had given all she had.
+  She died within her empty home
+  Still seeking One who did not come._
+
+  _She rose from out the wave of death,
+    A Stranger stood beside the shore;
+  The robe she wrought with failing breath,
+    And staining tears, the Stranger wore.
+  He drew her tired heart with His smile,
+  "Lo, I was with thee all the while."_
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+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?
+
+It may appear impossible and inexpedient for the human judge to say to
+the offender, "Neither do I condemn thee; go, sin no more"; but it is
+very clear that the opposite course does by no means lead to a
+cessation of sin.  For what is the total result of all our punishments
+in the name of law but the manufacture of criminals?  According to our
+theory of punishment a jail should be a seminary of virtue and
+reformation.  Men submitted to its discipline should come out new
+creatures, cured of every tendency to crime.  On the contrary, in nine
+cases out of ten, they come out a thousandfold worse than they went in.
+If this is not the case, it is because some Christian influence, not
+included in our legal system, has reached them.  But such influences
+reach very few.  The influences that operate in the great majority of
+cases are wholly demoralizing.  Those who enter a jail with genuine
+intentions of reform speedily discover that they are not expected to
+reform.  They are branded indelibly.  They are exposed to the
+corruption of associates a hundredfold worse than themselves.  They
+leave the jail with every avenue of honest industry closed to them,
+every man's hand against them, and no career possible to them but a
+life of crime.  When we consider these things we have little cause to
+congratulate ourselves upon the results of our systems of justice.
+Even a general amnesty towards every form of crime could scarcely
+produce results more deplorable.  Fantastic as it may appear, yet it
+seems not improbable that the abolition of the jail and of all penal
+law, might produce benefits for humanity such as centuries of
+punishment on crime have wholly failed to produce.
+
+But no one asks this at present, though the day may come sooner than we
+think, when society, tired of the long failure and absolute futility of
+all its attempts to cleanse the world of crime by penal enactments,
+will make this demand.  It is enough now if we press the question
+whether there is not good ground in all this dreary history of futility
+and failure, to make some attempt to govern society by the ideals of
+Jesus?  Why should not the Church replace the jail?  Why should not the
+offender be handed over to a company of Christian people, instead of a
+company of jailers, paid to be harsh, and by the very nature of their
+occupation trained to harsh tempers and cruel acts?  Who are better
+fitted for the custody of the criminal than people whose lives are
+based on the merciful ideals of Jesus?  How could such persons be
+better employed than in devoting themselves to the restoration of
+self-respect in the fallen, than in the attempt to nurture into vigour
+his bruised or dormant instincts of right, than in the organized effort
+to restore him to some place in society which should give him honest
+bread in return for honest labour?  Few men are criminals by choice.
+Crime is more often the fruit of weakness than intention.  Almost every
+criminal would prefer an honourable life if he knew how to set about
+it.  Can we doubt that if Jesus presided in the councils of His Church
+to-day, this would be one of the first directions in which He would
+apply His energy?  And who that surveys the modern Church with
+undeflected judgment would not say that the Church would be a thousand
+times dearer to the world, a thousand times more sacred, respected, and
+authoritative, if instead of spending its time in spiritual
+self-gratification, and its riches in the adornment of its worship, it
+became the true Hospice of the Fallen and Unfortunate, thus
+exemplifying in its action that love for men which was the essential
+spirit of its Founder?
+
+It will no doubt be replied that the Church already, by a thousand
+institutions, of a philanthropic character, is attempting this very
+work.  But this is an evasion of the point, for such institutions only
+begin their work of redemption when the existing social systems have
+accomplished their work of destruction.  Moreover, no institution,
+however admirable, can be a substitute for the general action of the
+Church.  It is precisely this practice of substitution that accounts
+for so much of the weakness of the Church.  It is so much more easy and
+pleasant to devolve upon others duties which to us are disagreeable, to
+buy ourselves out of the conscription of personal duty, to persuade
+ourselves that we have done all that can be asked of us when we have
+given money for some worthy end, that it is not surprising that
+multitudes of excellent and kindly people adopt such views and
+practices.  But, in doing so, they miss not only the joy of personal
+well-doing, but also the sense of reality in the good that is done.
+And the spectator and critic of the life of the Church, although he may
+not be ignorant of the kind of work done by these institutions,
+nevertheless is keenly conscious of the lack of reality in the work of
+the Church, when he finds that its individual members are leading lives
+in no way distinguishable by any active love for their fellows.  For
+the main reason why thoughtful men manifest aversion to the Church is
+not found in dislike for her worship, or rejection of her creeds; it is
+found rather in the sense of unreality in her life.  Who, such men will
+ask, among all this multitude of well-dressed worshippers, offering
+their adoration to the Deity, visits the fatherless and widow in their
+affliction, lays restraining hands upon the tempted, uplifts the fallen
+or instructs the depraved, and so fulfills the true ideal of religion
+pure and undefiled?  What is the exact nature of their impact upon
+society?  Are they more merciful, more compassionate, more sympathetic
+than average mankind?  Do they not share the same social prejudices,
+and guide their lives by the same social traditions as the bulk of men
+and women?  And if nothing more than this can be predicated of them,
+how is it possible to avoid that impression of essential unreality
+which is inseparable from the subscription to social ideals infinitely
+loftier and purer than any others in human history, united with lives
+which in no way rise above the average?  Here is the true reason why
+thoughtful men think lightly, and even scornfully of the Church.  It is
+not the truths and ideals of Jesus that offend them, but the travesty
+of those truths and ideals in the average life of Christians.
+
+But whenever any man attempts to live in the spirit of Jesus, the first
+to rally to him are the sincere recusants from the church.  He may be
+satirised, and probably will be, as a moral anarchist, a fanatic, and a
+hare-brained enthusiast; but nevertheless the best men will rally to
+him.  They rallied to a Father Dolling, they rally to a General Booth.
+The types represented by such men lie far apart.  One was so high a
+ritualist as to be almost Catholic, the other is an ecclesiastic
+anarchist so extreme that he dispenses with the sacraments.  But these
+things count for little; what the world sees in such men is the
+essential reality of their life.  One of the severest critics of
+Dolling once went to hear him with the bitterest prejudice.  He found
+him with a couple of hundred thieves and prostitutes gathered round
+him, to whom he was telling the love of Jesus in the simplest language.
+"Dolling may be a Roman Catholic, or anything else he pleases," said
+his critic; "all I know is that I never heard any one speak of Christ
+like that," and from that hour he was his warmest friend.  No doubt
+similar conversions of sentiment have attended the ministries of all
+apostolic men and women, of Francis and Catherine, of Wesley and
+Whitfield, of Moody and General Booth.  Men know by instinct the lover
+of his kind.  Men forgive a hundred defects for the sake of reality.
+Perhaps the sublimest of all justifications of Christ's law of love is
+that no man has truly practiced it in any age without himself rising
+into a life of memorable significance, without immediate attestations
+of its virtue in the transformation of society, without attracting to
+himself the reverence and affection of multitudes of fellow workers who
+have rendered him the same adoring discipleship that the friends of
+Jesus gave to Him.
+
+No doubt it will also be said that were the ideals thus indicated to
+triumph, there would be nothing left for the direction of society but a
+mischievous and sentimental spirit of amiability.  The general fibre of
+virtue would disintegrate.  Pity for the sinner, pushed to such
+extremes, would in the end mean tolerance for sin.  But to such an
+objection the character of Jesus furnishes its own reply.  The
+character of Jesus displays love in its supreme type, but it is wholly
+lacking in that weak-featured travesty of love which we call
+amiability.  His hatred of sin was at times a furious rage.  His lips
+breathed flame as well as tenderness; "Out of His mouth proceeded a
+sharp two-edged sword."  We may search literature in vain to discover
+any words half as terrible and scathing as the words in which Jesus
+described sin.  The psychological explanation is that great powers of
+love are twin with great powers of hatred.  The passionate love of
+virtue is, in its obverse, an equally passionate hatred of vice.  In
+the same way the passionate love of our kind has for its obverse an
+equally passionate hatred for the wrongs they endure.  For this reason
+justice and virtue are nowhere so secure as in the hands of men who
+love their kind intensely.  They are most insecure in the hands of the
+cynic, who despises his kind, and therefore misapprehends their
+conduct.  For love, in its last analysis, is understanding, and where
+there is understanding of our fellows there can hardly fail to be
+wisdom in our method of treating them.  That was the great secret of
+Jesus in these examples which we have reviewed.  He understood Simon
+Peter.  He understood the woman who was a sinner.  He therefore knew
+the only wise method of treating them.  One with less pity might have
+sent the harlot back to her shame, one with less love might have driven
+Peter into permanent apostasy.  But Jesus, in His understanding of the
+human heart, knew the exact limit of reproof, the exact point at which
+magnanimity became efficacious in redemption.  Those who follow His
+spirit will attain the same rare wisdom.  They will never sacrifice
+virtue to compassion, nor will they put virtue in opposition to
+compassion.  One question may suffice.  Would we be content to leave
+the administration of society in the hands of Jesus?  Would we
+confidently submit our own case to His jurisdiction?  If, in every
+dispute between men and nations, in every case of wrong and crime,
+Jesus were the one Arbiter, would the world be better ruled, would the
+probable course of events be such as to increase the sum of human
+happiness?  We can scarcely hesitate in the reply--we, who daily pray
+that His kingdom may come.  And if to such questions we return our
+inevitable affirmative, we cannot doubt that society has everything to
+gain in being governed by those who live most closely in the spirit of
+Jesus; that they, and they only, are the true leaders and judges of the
+nations.
+
+
+
+
+THE BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE
+
+
+
+  _THE PRAYER_
+
+  _Lover of souls, indeed,
+    But Lover of bodies too,
+  Seeing in human flesh
+    The God shine through;
+  Hallowed be Thy name,
+    And, for the sake of Thee,
+  Hallowed be all men,
+    For Thine they be._
+
+  _Doer of deeds divine,
+    Thou, the Father's Son,
+  In all Thy children may
+    Thy will be done,
+  Till each works miracles
+    On poor and sick and blind,
+  Learning from Thee the art
+    Of being kind._
+
+  _For Thine is the glory of love,
+    And Thine the tender power,
+  Touching the barren heart
+    To leaf and flower,
+  Till not the lilies alone,
+    Beneath Thy gentle feet,
+  But human lives for Thee
+    Grow white and sweet._
+
+  _And Thine shall the Kingdom be,
+    Thou Lord of Love and Pain,
+  Conqueror over death
+    By being slain.
+  And we, with the lives like Thine
+    Shall cry in the great day when
+  Thou earnest to claim Thine own,
+    "All Hail!  Amen."_
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE
+
+It may be long before the world recognizes this leadership of the
+loving, and accepts their judgment, but nevertheless the world is
+debtor to them for all that sweetens life, and makes society tolerable.
+Such men and women move unrecognized, doing their kindly work without
+praise, and not so much as asking praise from men; but theirs is a
+securer triumph than earth can give, and on their brows rests a rarer
+crown than earthly monarchs wear.  I know many of these men and women,
+and I never meet them without the sense that the seamless robe of
+Christ has touched me.  I meet them in unlikely places; I overtake them
+on the road of life, oftenest in the places where the shadows lie most
+thickly; but on each brow is the white stone which is the sign of
+peace, and in each voice is that deep note of harmony that belongs
+alone to those who walk through tribulations which they overcome,
+griefs of which they know the meaning, sorrows which they have the
+skill to heal.  Their very footsteps move more evenly than other men's,
+as though guided by the rhythm of a music others do not hear; their
+very hands have a softness only known to hands that bind up wounds and
+wipe men's tears away; and in all their movements and their aspect is a
+stillness and a sweet composure, as of hearts at rest.  Whence are
+these, and why are they arrayed in white robes?  And we know the
+answer, though no angel-voice may speak to us; these are they on whose
+bowed heads the starlight of Gethsemane has fallen, in whose hands are
+the wounds of service, in whose breasts is the heart that breaks with
+love for men.
+
+One such man I met some months ago, fresh from the forests of
+Wisconsin.  Through a long spring day he told me his story, or rather
+let me draw it from him episode by episode, for he was much too modest
+to suppose anything that he had done remarkable.  After wild and
+careless years of wasted youth, Christ had found him, and from the day
+of his regeneration he gave himself to the redemption of his fellow
+men.  He became a "lumber-jack," a preacher to the rough sons of the
+Wisconsin forests.  He told me how he first won their respect by
+sharing their toil--he, a fragile slip of a man, and they giants in
+thew and muscle: how by tact and kindness he got a hearing for his
+Master; how he travelled scores of miles through the winter snows to
+nurse dying men, wrecked by wild excesses; how he had sat for hours
+together with the heads of drunken men, on whom the terror had fallen,
+resting on his knees, performing for them offices of help which no
+other would attempt; how he had heard the confessions of thieves and
+murderers, who had fled from justice to the refuge of the forest; how
+he had stood pale, and apprehensive of violence in an angry drunken
+mob, and had quelled their rage by singing to them "Anywhere with
+Jesus"; how, finally, he had fallen ill, and had hoped in his extreme
+weariness for the great release, but had come back from the gates of
+death with a new hope for the success of his work; and as he spoke,
+that light which fell upon the face of the dying Stephen rested also on
+his face; for he also saw, and made me see, the heavens opened, and
+Jesus standing at the right hand of the throne of God.  He was only a
+lumber-jack, but to these men he was a Christ.  He was poor, so poor,
+that I marvelled how he lived; but he had adopted into his home the
+forsaken child of a drunken lumberman, whose wife was dead.  His life
+was full of hardship, but never have I met a happier man.  For he had
+found the one secret of all noble and tranquil living, the life of
+service; and as I grasped his hand at parting and remembered how often
+it had rested in healing sympathy upon the evil and the weary, I
+thought of the words of the blessed Master, "He laid His hands upon
+her, and the fever left her, and she rose and ministered unto Him."
+
+Another man of the same order I have talked with as these concluding
+lines were written.  He had begun life with brilliant prospects as a
+lawyer, had been wrecked by drink, and one night while drunk had fallen
+overboard into deep water, and had with difficulty been brought back to
+life.  From that hour his life was changed.  He went to a Western city
+and became a missionary to drunkards and harlots.  He told me of a
+youth of nineteen he had recently visited in prison.  The youth was a
+murderer, and the woman he had loved had committed suicide.  He was
+utterly impervious to reproof, did not want to live, and said that if
+his mistress had gone to hell he wanted to go there too, for she was
+the only human creature who had ever loved him.  "God loves you," said
+my friend; "yes, and I love you too.  I know how you feel.  You want
+just to be loved.  Come, my poor boy, let me love you."  And at that
+appeal this youth, with triple murder on his conscience, melted, and
+flung his arms round the neck of his visitor, and sobbed out all the
+story of his sin and shame.  O exquisite moment when the heart melts at
+the touch of love--could all the heaped-up gains of a life of pleasure
+or ambition yield such felicity as this?  For this man's face, rough
+and plain as it was, glowed as he spoke with the same light that
+beatified the features of my friend the lumber-jack--"the Lord God gave
+them light," and the Lamb upon the throne was the light of all their
+seeing.
+
+A little while ago to this man came the offer of restoration to the
+social place which he has lost.  He might have gone back to his
+forfeited career, with an ample income.  He put the case to his wife
+and to his boys; with instant unanimity they said, "Never; this work is
+the best work in the world."  And so the once brilliant lawyer is happy
+on a pittance, happier than he ever could be on a fortune, because he
+is doing Christ's work of love among his fellow men.  And these
+instances are typical.  In every corner of the world are those who
+belong to the true Society of Jesus--the Order of Love and
+Service,--and the happiest lives lived on earth are lived by these men
+and women.  For Jesus will not suffer any man to be the loser by Him;
+He overpays those who truly follow Him with a happiness that worlds
+could not buy; and "even in the present time," so enriches with the
+love of others those who love, that they are unconscious of any
+deprivation in their lot, knowing in all things, amid poverty, insult,
+violence, hardship and pain, that their gain exceeds their loss by
+measureless infinitudes of joy.
+
+We may be neither wise nor great, but we may be loving, and he who
+loves is already "born of God, and knoweth God, for God is love."  We
+may have but a poor understanding of conflicting theologies and
+philosophies, and may even find our minds hostile to accepted creeds;
+but we can live lives of pitiful and serviceable love.  He who does
+these things is the true Christian and no other is.  Against the man
+who loves his fellows Heaven cannot close its doors, for He who reigns
+in Heaven is the Lover of men, and the greatest Lover of them all.  We
+know now why He is loved as no other has been loved.  We know now what
+His religion truly is; it is the religion of Love.  To accept this
+religion requires in us but one quality, the heart of the little child
+which retains the freshness and obeys the authority of the emotions;
+but unless we become as little children we cannot enter this kingdom.
+This is the condition of entrance, and the method is equally simple.
+It is to follow Jesus in all our acts and thoughts, to allow no temper
+that we do not find in Him, to build our lives upon His ideals of love
+and justice, remembering always that He is more than the Truth,--He is
+the Way in which men may confidently tread, and the Life which they may
+share.
+
+All things in the intellectual and social life of men move, as by a
+fixed law, towards simplification.  May we not hope that this same
+tendency may permeate the universal Church of Christ, dissolving the
+accretions of mistaken and conventional piety, combining the vital
+elements into a new synthesis, at once simple and convincing,--the new
+which is the oldest and the earliest,--that the Church is the organ of
+the Divine Love, and that love alone is the Christian equivalent of
+religion?
+
+May we not even anticipate that the visible decay of many symbols that
+once were authoritative, of many forms of creed that are now barely
+tolerated rather than respected, may work towards this issue; that
+gradually the test of service will supplant the test of intellectual
+belief, and that a new Church will arise founded not on creed at all,
+but on a real imitation of the life of Jesus?  If this should happen we
+need not regret the dissolution of the forms of religious life which is
+so evident to-day, for though the older kingdom be shaken, we shall
+arrive in God's time at the better kingdom which cannot be shaken.
+
+When the Church does manifestly become the organ of the Divine Love,
+visibly creating a type of loving and lovable men and women found
+nowhere else, whose lives are as lamps borne before the feet of the
+weary and the lost, then the world, now hostile or indifferent to the
+Church, will love the Church even as by instinct it loves the Christ.
+Such lives have been lived, and they are, even to those who have the
+least instinct for religion, the most sacred memories of history, and
+the most inspiring.  Such lives may still be lived by all who love the
+Lord Christ Jesus in sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Empire of Love, by W. J. Dawson
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