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.

THE END