Part 5 (1/2)
_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 wors.h.i.+pping, 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 disciples.h.i.+p. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He proposed instead real comrades.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pwreck; 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 hards.h.i.+p 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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._