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 pa.s.sion 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 grat.i.tude 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 sh.o.r.e.
The self-righteous man will never understand these things. Men and women of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a pa.s.sion, 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 n.i.g.g.ard pa.s.sions. 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 pa.s.sion, and too much love of living; for those whose capacities for good and evil, being both rooted in pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d"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 la.s.situde 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 h.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.surance 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 rect.i.tude 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 G.o.d; and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having added to the joy of G.o.d, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.