_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 COMPa.s.sION
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 compa.s.sion which is the most beautiful of all features in the character of Jesus. When He looked upon the mult.i.tude He was "moved with compa.s.sion"--never was there more illuminative sentence. It reveals an att.i.tude of mind absolutely original. For the general att.i.tude towards the mult.i.tude 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 mult.i.tude 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 n.o.ble 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 compa.s.sion the supreme social virtue. For it is only through compa.s.sion 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 dest.i.tute. 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 compa.s.sion, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 fort.i.tude, in patience and endurance, in all the final qualities that compose the finest manhood?
The spirit of compa.s.sion 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 succ.u.mbed.
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 compa.s.sion 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 compa.s.sion on the mult.i.tude.
Jesus had compa.s.sion on the mult.i.tude, 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 compa.s.sion 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 compa.s.sion 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 dest.i.tute 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 p.r.o.nounce among the loftiest and n.o.blest 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, compa.s.sion, 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 a.s.sociates 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 inst.i.tutions, of a philanthropic character, is attempting this very work. But this is an evasion of the point, for such inst.i.tutions only begin their work of redemption when the existing social systems have accomplished their work of destruction. Moreover, no inst.i.tution, however admirable, can be a subst.i.tute for the general action of the Church. It is precisely this practice of subst.i.tution 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 mult.i.tudes 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 mult.i.tude 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 compa.s.sionate, 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 prost.i.tutes 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 mult.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sionate love of virtue is, in its obverse, an equally pa.s.sionate hatred of vice. In the same way the pa.s.sionate love of our kind has for its obverse an equally pa.s.sionate 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 compa.s.sion, nor will they put virtue in opposition to compa.s.sion. 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 G.o.d 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._