It is quite idle, by force of will, to seek to empty the angry passions
out of our life. Who has not made a thousand resolutions in this direction,
only and with unutterable mortification to behold them dashed to pieces with
the first temptation? The soul is to be made sweet not by taking the
acidulous fluids out, but by putting something in--a great love, God's great
love. This is to work a chemical change upon them, to renovate and
regenerate them, to dissolve them in its own rich fragrant substance. If a
man let this into his life, his cure is complete; if not, it is hopeless.
The character most hard to comprehend in the New Testament is the
unmerciful servant. For his base extravagance his wife and children were to
be sold, and himself imprisoned. He cries for mercy on his knees, and the
10,000 talents, hopeless and enormous debt, is freely cancelled. He goes
straight from the kind presence of his lord, and, meeting some poor wretch
who owes him a hundred pence, seizes him by the throat and hales him to the
prison-cell, from which he himself had just escaped. How a man can rise from
his knees, where, forgiven much already, he has just been forgiven more, and
go straight from the audience chamber of his God to speak hard words and do
hard things, is all but incredible. This servant truly in wasting his
master's money must have wasted away his own soul. But grant a man any soul
at all, love must follow forgiveness.
Being forgiven much, he must love much, not as a duty, but as a
necessary consequence; he must become a humbler, tenderer man, generous and
brotherly. Rooted and grounded in love, his love will grow till it embraces
the earth. Then only he dimly begins to understand his father's gift--"All
that I have is thine." The world is his: he cannot injure his own. The
ground of benevolence is proprietorship. And all who love God are the
proprietors of the world. The meek inherit the earth-- all that He has is
theirs. All that God has--what is that? Mountain and field, tree and sky,
castle and cottage, white man, black man, genius and dullard, prisoner and
pauper, sick and aged--all these are mine. If noble and happy, I must enjoy
them; if great and beautiful, I must delight in them; if poor and hungry, I
must clothe them; if sick and in prison, I must visit them. For they are all
mine, all these, and all that God has beside, and I must love all and give
myself for all.
Here the theme widens. From Plato to Herbert Spencer reformers have
toiled to frame new schemes of Sociology. There is none so grand as the
Sociology of Jesus. But we have not found out the New Testament Sociology
yet; we have spent the centuries over its theology. Surely man's relation to
God may be held as settled now. It is time to take up the other problem,
man's relation to man. With a former theology, man as man, as a human being,
was of no account. He was a mere theological unit, the x of doctrine, an
unknown quantity. He was taught to believe, therefore, not to love. Now we
are learning slowly that to believe is to love; that the first commandment
is to love God, and the second like unto it--another version of it--is to
love man. Not only the happiness but the efficiency of the passive virtues,
love as a power, as a practical success in the world, is coming to be
recognised. The fact that Christ led no army, that He wrote no book, built
no church, spent no money, but that He loved, and so conquered, this is
beginning to strike men. And Paul's argument is gaining adherents that when
all prophecies are fulfilled, and all our knowledge becomes obsolete, and
all tongues grow unintelligible, this thing, Love, will abide and see them
all out one by one into the oblivious past. This is the hope for the world,
that we shall learn to love, and in learning that, unlearn all anger and
wrath and evil-speaking and malice and bitterness.