GIFT OF 
 Elisabeth Whitney Putndht 
 
 I L— ■ 
 
?s 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 Microsoft Corporation 
 
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The Empire of Love 
 
BY W. J. DAWSON 
 
 The Empire of Love. 
 
 i2mo, cloth, $1.00 net. 
 
 Nothing from Dr. Dawson's pen surpasses this mod- 
 erate sized volume. He tells the striking qualities of 
 Jesus' character and its effect on those who came or now 
 come under its spell. The pages seem like magnets draw- 
 ing you closer to the heart of the M aster. It is a book of 
 power, rare, beautiful and irresistible. 
 
 Makers of Modern English 
 
 3 vols., leather, boxed, per set, $6.00 net. 
 Makers of English Poetry. 8vo, cloth, gilt 
 top, $1.50 net. 
 
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 top, $130 net. 
 
 Makers of English Fiction. 3d edition. i2mo, 
 cloth, gilt top, $ijo net. 
 
 "Mr. Dawson knows his subject thoroughly. He is a 
 literary man of impressionable mind and acute judgment. 
 His style is a perpetual delight for clearness, variety, force 
 and rhythm. He is an informal and delightful critic and 
 his book is the work of a real critic and a master oi style ; 
 high praise, but deserved we believe."— N. Y. Evening Sun. 
 
 The Forgotten Secret. Art binding, 50 
 cents net. 
 
 "Sir Oliver Lodge recently declared prayer to be the 
 forgotten secret of the church. This then is ' The For- 
 gotten Secret ' treated and discussed in a practical and 
 helpful manner."— Christian Observer. 
 
 The Evangelistic Note. 3d edition. $/.2j net. 
 
 "One of the most remarkable and stirring of recent 
 books. It is really the story of a great crisis in the life of 
 a great preacher. The book is epoch-making in character." 
 — The Watchman. 
 
 The Reproach of Christ. With an Intro- 
 duction by Newell Dwight Hillis. Cloth, 
 $1.00 net. 
 
 "Marked by a distinctive literary quality, combined with 
 earnest evangelical zeal, they are models of homiletic 
 construction."— Church Economist. 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 
 
The Empire of Love 
 
 By 
 W. J. DAWSON 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revel I Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
 \ 3 3 ' ■ j j a , ' * i j » ■ 
 
 ;.\1 \i*i U>h\z : ,7, 
 
 ' > '> > y > » . ■ , 
 
Copyright, 1907, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 3^ 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
 1 * 1 
 
 « * * «« * « * 
 
 c * * t • « « 
 
 • C « « C 1 « I * 
 
 .*••.: ;*:«••:•.- "::..:••••*■ 
 
\ 
 
 To 
 M. M. D. y 
 
 who, during the last two years 
 
 of our residence in London , 
 
 practiced the teachings of this book 
 
 before I taught them : 
 
 proving daily 
 
 in her compassionate toil for others 
 
 the divine efficacy of simple love 
 
 to redeem the lives 
 
 thai were most estranged from virtue, 
 
 and most lost to hope. 
 
 412450 
 
Love feels no burden, regards not labours, would 
 willingly do more than it is able, pleads not impossi- 
 bility, because it feels that it can and may do all 
 things. 
 
 Thomas a Kempis. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 The Genius to be Loved 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 What is Christianity ? 
 
 21 
 
 III. 
 
 The Justice of Jesus 
 
 33 
 
 IV. 
 
 Love is Justice 
 
 45 
 
 V. 
 
 Love and Forgiveness . 
 
 55 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Practice of Love . 
 
 65 
 
 VII. 
 
 Love and Judgment 
 
 73 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Wisdom of the Simple . 
 
 83 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Revelations of Grief . 
 
 97 
 
 X. 
 
 A Confession . 
 
 109 
 
 XL 
 
 A Lover of Men . 
 
 121 
 
 XII, 
 
 The Law of Compassion 
 
 133 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Empire of Love . 
 
 147 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Builders of the Empire 
 
 167 
 
THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED 
 
» » • • * 1, > , > 
 
 WWF 77Z£y LOVED HIM 
 
 So kindly was His love to us, 
 
 ( W<? /*<2</ not heard of love before), 
 
 That all our life grew glorious 
 When He had halted at our door. 
 
 So meekly did He love us men, 
 
 Though blind we were with shameful sin, 
 He touched our eyes with tears, and then 
 
 Led God's tall angels flaming in. 
 
 He dwelt with us a little space. 
 As mothers do in childhoods years. 
 
 And still we can discern His face 
 Wherever Joy or Love appears. 
 
 He made our virtues all His own, 
 
 And lent them grace we could not give, 
 
 And now our world seems His alone, 
 And while we live He seems to live. 
 
 He took our sorrows and our pain, 
 And hid their torture in His breast, 
 
 Till we received them back again 
 To find on each His grief impressed. 
 
• ' r « 
 
 » * , r ' t 
 
 r « • * 
 
 r i i ' c 
 
 ' r « f C ' 
 
 c « t-t * 
 
 He clasped our children in His arms. 
 And showed us where their beauty shone. 
 
 He took from us our gray alarms, 
 And put Death's icy armour on. 
 
 So gentle were His ways with us, 
 
 That crippled souls had ceased to sigh f 
 
 On them He laid His hands, and thus 
 They gloried at His passing by. 
 
 Without reproof or word of blame, 
 As mothers do in childhood 's years, 
 
 He kissed our lips in spite of shame, 
 And stayed the passage of our tears. 
 
 So tender was His love to us, 
 
 ( We had not learned to love before), 
 
 That we grew like to Him, and thus 
 Men sought His grace in us once more. 
 
 Coningsby William Dawson. 
 
■>•)■>■> ■> 1 
 
 I 
 
 THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED 
 
 IN the history of the last two thousand 
 years there is but one Person who has 
 been, and is supremely loved. Many 
 have been loved by individuals, by groups of 
 persons, or by communities ; some have re- 
 ceived the pliant idolatries of nations, such 
 as heroes and national deliverers ; but in 
 every instance the sense of love thus excited 
 has been intimately associated with some 
 triumph of intellect, or some resounding 
 achievement in the world of action. In this 
 there is nothing unusual, for man is a natural 
 worshipper of heroes. But in Jesus Christ 
 we discover something very different ; He 
 possessed the genius to be loved in so trans- 
 cendent a degree that it appears His sole 
 genius. 
 
 Jesus is loved not for anything that He 
 taught, nor yet wholly for anything that He 
 
 13 
 
. u THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 HUH ..:.£...; 
 
 did, although His actions culminate in the 
 divine fascination of the Cross, but rather 
 for what He was in Himself. His very name 
 provokes in countless millions a reverent 
 tenderness of emotion usually associated 
 only with the most sacred and intimate of 
 human relationships. He is loved with a 
 certain purity and intensity of passion that 
 transcends even the most intimate expres- 
 sions of human emotion. The curious thing 
 is that He Himself anticipated this kind of 
 love as His eternal heritage with men. He 
 expected that men would love Him more than 
 father or mother, wife or child, and even 
 made such a love a condition of what He 
 called discipleship. The greatest marvel of 
 all human history is that this prognostication 
 has been strictly verified in the event. He 
 is the Supreme Lover, for whose love, un- 
 realizable as it is by touch, or glance, or 
 spoken word, or momentary presence, men 
 and women are still willing to sacrifice them- 
 selves, and surrender all things. The preg- 
 nant words of Napoleon, uttered in his last 
 
THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED 15 
 
 lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the 
 strangest thing in universal history : " Caesar, 
 Charlemagne, I, have founded empires. 
 They were founded on force, and have per- 
 ished. Jesus Christ has founded an empire 
 on love, and to this day there are millions 
 ready to die for Him." 
 
 Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the 
 baffling, inexplicable marvel. Were we able 
 to detach ourselves enough from use and 
 custom, to survey the movement of human 
 thought from some lonely height above the 
 floods of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea- 
 silences of St. Helena, we also might feel the 
 wonder of this most wonderful thing the world 
 has ever known. 
 
 That the majority of men, and even Chris- 
 tian men, do not perceive that the whole 
 meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a 
 thing too obvious to demand evidence or in- 
 vite contradiction. I say men, and Christian 
 men, thus limiting my statement, because 
 women and Christian women, frequently do 
 perceive it, being themselves the creatures of 
 
16 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 affection, and finding in affection the one 
 .ufficing symbol of life and of the universe. 
 It is a St. Catherine who thinks of herself as 
 the bride of Christ, and dreams the lovely 
 vision of the changed hearts — the heart of 
 Jesus placed by the hands that bled beneath 
 her pure bosom, and her heart hidden in the 
 side of Him who died for her. It is a St. 
 Theresa who melts into ecstasy at the brood- 
 ing presence of the heavenly Lover, and can 
 only think of the Evil One himself with com- 
 miseration as one who cannot love. It is 
 true that Francis of Assisi also thought and 
 spoke of Christ with a lover's ecstasy, but then 
 Francis in his exquisite tenderness of nature, 
 was more woman than man. No such 
 thought visited the stern heart of Dominic, 
 nor any of those makers of theology who 
 have built systems and disciplines upon the 
 divine poetry of the divine Life. 
 
 Love, as the perfect symbol of life and the 
 universe, does not content men, simply be- 
 cause for most men love is not the key to life, 
 nor an end worth living for in itself, nor any- 
 
THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED 17 
 
 thing but a complex and often troublesome 
 emotion, which must needs be subordinated 
 to other faculties and qualities, such as greed, 
 or pride, or the desire of power, or the domi- 
 nant demands of intellect. Among men the 
 poets alone have really understood Jesus : 
 and in the category of the poets must be in- 
 cluded the saints, whose religion has always 
 been interpreted to them through the im- 
 agination. The poets have understood ; the 
 theologians rarely or never. Thus it happens 
 that men, being the general and accepted in- 
 terpreters of Christ, have all but wholly misin- 
 terpreted Him. The lyric passion of that life, 
 and the lyric love which it excites, has been 
 to them a disregarded music. They have 
 rarely achieved more than to tell us what 
 Christ taught ; they have wholly failed to 
 make us feel what Christ was. But Mary 
 Magdalene knew this, and it was what she said 
 and felt in the Garden that has put Christ 
 upon the throne of the world. Was not her 
 vision after all the true one ? Is not a 
 Catherine a better guide to Jesus than a 
 
18 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 Dominic ? When all the strident theologies 
 fall silent, will not the world's whole worship 
 still utter itself in the lyric cry, 
 
 Jesu, Lover of my soul, 
 Let me to Thy bosom fly. 
 
 Is it then not within the competence of man 
 to interpret Christ aright, simply because the 
 masculine temperament is what it is ? By 
 no means, for such a statement would dis- 
 qualify the evangelists themselves, who are 
 the only biographers of Jesus. But in the 
 degree that a temperament is only masculine, 
 it will fail to understand Jesus. Napoleon 
 could not understand ; he was the child of 
 force, the son of the sword, the very type of 
 that hard efficiency of will and intellect 
 which turns the heart to flint, and scorns the 
 witness of the softer intuitions. Francis 
 could understand because he was in part femi- 
 nine — not weakly so, but nobly, as all poets 
 and dreamers and visionaries are. Paul 
 could understand for the same reason, and so 
 could John and Peter ; each, in varying de- 
 
THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED 19 
 
 grees, belonging to the same type ; but Pilate 
 could not understand, because he had been 
 trained in the hard efficiency of Rome ; nor 
 Judas, because the masculine vice of ambi- 
 tion had overgrown his affections, and de- 
 flowered his heart. What is it then in Paul 
 and John and Peter, what element or quality, 
 which we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or 
 Napoleon ? Clearly there is no lack of force, 
 for the personality of these three first apostles 
 lifted a world out of its groove and changed 
 the course of history. Was it not just this, 
 that each had beneath his masculine strength 
 a feminine tenderness, a power of loving and 
 of begetting love in others ? John lying on 
 the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of 
 love and sorrow at the last Supper ; Peter, 
 plunging naked into the Galilean sea, and 
 struggling to the shore at the mere suspicion 
 that the strange figure outlined there upon 
 the morning mist is the Lord ; Paul praying 
 not only to share the wounds of Jesus, but if 
 there be any pang left over, any anguish un- 
 fulfilled, that this anguish may be his — these 
 
20 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 are not alone immortal pictures, but they are 
 revelations of a temperament, the tempera- 
 ment that understands Jesus. He who could 
 not melt into an abandonment of grief and 
 love over one on whom the shadow of the last 
 hour rested ; he who would spring headlong 
 into no estranging sea to reach one loved 
 and lost and marvellously brought near 
 again ; he who can share the festal wine of 
 life, but has no appetite for agony, no thirst- 
 ing of the soul to bear another's pain — these 
 can never understand Jesus. They cannot 
 understand Him, simply because they cannot 
 understand love. 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANirr? 
 
TOWARDS GALILEE 
 
 The great obdurate world I know no more, 
 The clanging of the brazen wheels of greed, 
 The taloned hands that build the miser's store, 
 The stony streets where feeble feet must bleed. 
 No more I walk beneath thy ashen skies, 
 With pallid martyrs cruelly crucified 
 Upon thy predetermined Calvaries : 
 I, too, have suffered, yea, and I have died! 
 Now, at the last, another road I take 
 Thro' peaceful gardens, by a lilied way, 
 To those low eaves beside the silver lake, 
 Where Christ waits for me at the close of day. 
 Farewell, proud world ! In vain thou callest me* 
 I go to meet my Lord in Galilee. 
 
II 
 
 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 CHRISTIANITY, as it exists to-day, is 
 in the main a misrepresentation and a 
 misinterpretation of Christ ; not con- 
 sciously indeed — if it were so the remedy 
 would be easy; but unconsciously, which 
 makes the remedy difficult. One need not 
 stop to define Christianity, for there is only 
 one sincere meaning to the word ; it implies a 
 kind of life whose spirit and method reproduce 
 as accurately as possible the spirit and the 
 method of the life of Jesus. It would seem 
 that if this interpretation of the term be cor- 
 rect there could be no difficulty in adjust- 
 ing even unconscious misinterpretation of 
 Christ to the true facts of the case : but here 
 we are met by that perversity of vision which 
 springs not from ignorance, but from thought- 
 lessness, and is in its nature much more ob- 
 
 23 
 
24 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 durate than the worst perversity of ignorance. 
 Ignorance can be enlightened; thoughtless- 
 ness, being usually associated with vanity, rec- 
 ognizes no need of enlightenment. 
 
 The life of Jesus, freshly introduced to a 
 mind wholly ignorant of its existence may be 
 trusted to convey its own impression ; but the 
 thoughtless mind will be either too proud, or 
 too shallow, or too confident, to be sensitive 
 to right impressions. Thus the trouble with 
 most people who call themselves Christians 
 is not to educate them into right concep- 
 tions of the life of Christ, but to destroy the 
 growth of wrong impressions. "Surely," 
 they will say, " we know all about the life of 
 Christ. We have read the biographies of 
 J esus ever since the days of infancy. We have 
 heard the life of Jesus expounded through 
 long years by multitudes of teachers. We 
 have a church which claims to have extracted 
 from the life of Jesus a whole code of laws for 
 life and conduct ; is not this enough ? " But 
 what if the teachers themselves have never 
 found the true secret of Jesus? What if 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 25 
 
 they have but repeated the error of the 
 Pharisees in elaborating a code of laws in 
 which the vital spirit of the truth they would 
 impart is lost ? And does not the whole his- 
 tory of man's mind teach us that one simple 
 truth known at first-hand is worth more to 
 us, and is of greater influence on our con- 
 duct, than all the second-hand instruction we 
 may receive from the most competent of 
 teachers ? It is just this first-hand thought 
 which we most need. We need to see for 
 ourselves what Jesus was, and not through 
 the eyes of another, whatever his authority. 
 
 Suppose that we should read the Gospels 
 in this spirit, with an entirely unbiassed and 
 receptive mind, capable of first-hand im- 
 pressions, what would be the probable char- 
 acter of these impressions? The clearest 
 and deepest of all, I think, would be that the 
 Jesus therein depicted lived His life on 
 principles so novel that we are able to dis- 
 cover no life entirely like His in the best 
 lives round about us. We should probably 
 be struck first of all by certain outward dis- 
 
26 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 similarities. Thus He was not only poor, 
 but He did not resent poverty — He beatified 
 it. The things for which men naturally, and, 
 as we think, laudably strive, such as a settled 
 position in society and the consideration of 
 others, He did not think worth seeking at all. 
 He made no use of His abilities for private 
 ends, which has been the common principle 
 of social life since society began. He asked 
 nothing of the world, being apparently con- 
 vinced that nothing which the world could 
 give Him was worth having. Strangest 
 thing of all in one who must have been con- 
 scious of His own genius, and of the value 
 of His teachings to mankind, He made not 
 the least effort to perpetuate these teachings. 
 He wrote no book, provided no biographer, 
 did none of those things which the humblest 
 man of genius does to ensure that distant 
 generations shall comprehend and appreciate 
 his character and message. He was content 
 to speak His deepest truths to casual listen- 
 ers. He spent all His wealth of intellect 
 upon inferior persons, fishermen and the like, 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 27 
 
 who did not comprehend one tithe of what 
 He said. He was the friend of all who chose 
 to seek His friendship. He discriminated 
 so little that He even admitted a Judas to 
 His intimacy, and allowed women tainted 
 with dishonour and impurity to offer Him 
 public tokens of affection. In all these things 
 He differed absolutely from any other man 
 who ever lived beneath the public eye. In 
 all these things He still stands alone; for 
 who, among the saintliest men we know, has 
 not some innocent pride in his ability, or 
 some preference in friendship, or some in- 
 stinctive compliance with social usage, or 
 some worldly hopes and honourable aims 
 which he shares in common with the mass 
 of men ? 
 
 But these outward dissimilarities of con- 
 duct disclose a dissimilarity of soul. Men 
 live for something ; for what did Jesus live ? 
 And the answer that leaps upon us like a 
 great light from every page of the Gospels is 
 plain ; He lived for love. If He did not care 
 for praise or honour ; if He regarded even 
 
28 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 the preservation of His teachings with a 
 divine carelessness, it was because He had a 
 nobler end in view, the love of men. He 
 could not live without love, and His supreme 
 aim was to make Himself loved. And yet it 
 was less a conscious aim, than the natural 
 working out of His own character. Fisher- 
 men by the sea saw Him but once ; instantly 
 they left their boats and followed Him. A 
 man sitting at the receipt of custom, a hard 
 man we should suppose, little likely to be 
 swayed by sudden emotions, also sees Him 
 once, and finds his occupation gone. A 
 beautiful courtesan, beholding Him pass by, 
 breaks from her lovers, and follows Him into 
 an alien house, where she bathes His feet 
 with tears and wipes them with the hairs of 
 her head. Mature women without a word 
 spoken or a plea made, minister to Him of 
 their substance, and count their lives His. 
 When He sleeps wearied out upon a rude 
 fishing-boat, there is a pillow for His head, 
 placed there by some unknown adorer. The 
 men He makes apostles, all but one, count 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 29 
 
 His smile over-payment for the loss of home, 
 of wife, of children. Countless throngs of 
 ordinary men and women forget their 
 hunger, and are content to camp in desert 
 places only to listen to the music of His 
 voice. Wild and outlawed men, criminals 
 and lepers and madmen, become as little 
 children at His word, and all the wrongs and 
 bruises inflicted on them by a cruel world are 
 healed beneath His kindly glance. Does it 
 matter greatly what He taught? This is 
 how He lived. He lived in such a way that 
 men saw that love was the only thing worth 
 living for, that life had meaning only as it 
 had love. And this is the imperishable 
 tradition of Jesus : 
 
 This is His divinity, 
 This His universal plea, 
 Here is One that loveth thee. 
 
 What then is a true Christianity but the 
 accurate reproduction of this spirit of love, 
 the creation of loving and lovable men and 
 women, who attract and uplift all around 
 
30 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 them by the subtle fascination of the love 
 that animates them? What is a Christian 
 Church but a confraternity of such men and 
 women ? What is a Christian society, but a 
 society permeated by this spirit, and bringing 
 all the affairs of life to its test ? And what 
 place have social superiorities and inferior- 
 ities ; pride, scorn, or coldness ; harsh 
 theologies, breeding harsh tempers and 
 infinite disputes; the egoism that wounds 
 the humble, the strength that disregards the 
 weak, the vanity that hurts the simple, in 
 any company of men and women who dare 
 to wear the name of such a Founder? It 
 was as a Bridegroom Christ came, anointed 
 with all the perfumes of a dedicated love, 
 and until the last bitter hour of His rejection, 
 He moved with such lyric joyousness across 
 the earth, that life became festive in His 
 presence. It is as a Bride the church ex- 
 ists on earth, and if no festive smiles are 
 awakened by its presence, and no gracious 
 unsealing of the founts of love in human 
 hearts, then is it not Christ's Church, for He 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 31 
 
 has passed elsewhere with another company 
 to the marriage-feast, and His Church stands 
 without, before a barred and darkened 
 door. 
 
THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 
 
HOW HE CAME 
 
 When the golden evening gathered on the shore of 
 
 Galilee, 
 When the fishing boats lay quiet by the sea, 
 Long ago the people wondered, thtf no sign was in the 
 
 sky, 
 For the glory of the Lord was passing by. 
 
 Not in robes of purple splendour, not in silken softness 
 
 shod, 
 But in raiment worn with travel came their God, 
 And the people knew His presence by the heart that 
 
 ceased to sigh 
 When the glory of the Lord was passing by. 
 
 For He healed their sick at even, and He cured the 
 
 leper's sore, 
 And sinful men and women sinned no more, 
 And thi world grew mirthful hearted, and forgot its 
 
 misery 
 When the glory of the Lord was passing by. 
 
 Not in robes of purple splendour, but in lives that do 
 
 His will, 
 In patient acts of kindness He comes still; 
 And the people cry with wonder, tho 9 no sign is in the 
 
 sky, 
 That the glory of the Lord is passing by. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 
 
 ONE strong peculiarity of the teach- 
 ing of Jesus — we might even call it 
 its outstanding feature — is that it is 
 frequently disclosed in a series of incidents. 
 Unlike most teachers He philosophizes little 
 about life. A single chapter of the Gospels, 
 or at most two, would contain all the maxims 
 about life which He thought necessary for 
 wise and lofty conduct. His method is 
 rather to put Himself in relation to the 
 crucial occurrences of life, and to reveal the 
 true way of regarding them by His own 
 attitude towards them. When He would 
 teach the beauty of humility it is by putting 
 a little child in the midst of His arrogant 
 and vainglorious disciples, that the child 
 may become the living and memorable 
 parable of His sentiments. When He would 
 35 
 
36 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 teach humanity, He does so by His own con- 
 duct to lepers. When He would discredit 
 and expose the barbarism of the Mosaic 
 Sabbatarian laws as interpreted by scribes 
 and Pharisees, He does so by healing the 
 sick and blind upon the Sabbath day. He 
 is all for the concrete, teaching not by theory, 
 but by example. The method is novel, and 
 its advantages are obvious. The best con- 
 ceived discourses on humility, mercy, or 
 sympathy, might be forgotten, but no one 
 can forget the child among the disciples, nor 
 the raptured gaze of the blind man when his 
 purged eyes open to behold the face of his 
 miraculous Physician, nor the picture of Jesus 
 touching without fear or disgust the leper 
 whose unclean contagion made him an object 
 of aversion even to the pitiful. 
 
 It is a wonderful method of instruction ; it 
 makes every other method seem trite and 
 wearisome. Its effect is to make the Gospels 
 a series of tableaux, which dwell in the 
 memory as things actually seen. The groups 
 upon the stage perpetually shift and re- 
 
THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 37 
 
 arrange themselves; each represents some 
 phase of life, some problem, some combina- 
 tion of circumstance more or less common 
 in the experience of men, something that is 
 typical, for Jesus chooses only the typical and 
 essential things of life for these occasions. 
 The lesser things of life He passes over ; it 
 is the great and crucial matters which attract 
 Him. 
 
 But what are the great things of life? 
 They all fall into one category, they all 
 present problems in human relationship. No 
 problems are so difficult. They are not 
 speculative, but practical. A man who may 
 be wise as the world counts wisdom, and able 
 to pierce with acute analysis to the depth of 
 the abstrusest philosophic problem, may 
 nevertheless find himself hopelessly baffled 
 by some quite common fact of life, such as 
 how to treat a wayward son, or a sinful 
 woman. I am not likely to lose a night's 
 rest because I am unable to define the Trinity 
 but with what sore travail of heart do I toss 
 through midnight hours when I have to 
 
38 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 settle some course of action towards the 
 friend who has betrayed me, the brother who 
 has brought me shame, the child who scoffs 
 at my restraint, and hears the call of the far 
 country in every swift pulsation of his pas- 
 sionate heart ! And why cannot I settle my 
 course of action ? Because my mind is con- 
 fused by something which I call justice, to 
 which custom has given authority and con- 
 secration. Justice prescribes one course of 
 action, affection another. The convention of 
 the world insists that wrong-doing should be 
 punished, which is manifestly right ; but 
 when it insists that I should be the punisher, 
 I suspect something wrong. The more 
 closely I study conventional justice the more 
 I am conscious of something in myself that 
 distrusts and revolts from it. The more I 
 incline to the voice of affection the more I 
 fear it, lest I should be guilty of weakness 
 which would merit my own contempt. The 
 struggle is one between convention and in- 
 stinct, and I know not which side to take. 
 But one thing I do know ; it is that I have 
 
THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 39 
 
 no certain clue to guide me, no clear de- 
 termining principle that divides the darkness 
 with a sword of light, no voice within myself 
 that is authoritative. 
 
 Now the wonderful thing in Jesus is that 
 He is always sure of Himself. Nothing takes 
 Him by surprise, nothing produces the least 
 hesitation in His judgment. Therefore He 
 must have had an unfailing clue to which He 
 trusted in the maze of life. Behind all con- 
 sistency of judgment there must exist con- 
 sistency of principle. The principle that 
 governed all the thoughts of Jesus was that 
 love was the only real justice. He came not 
 to condemn, not to destroy men's lives, but 
 to save them. There was no problem of 
 human relationship that could not be solved 
 by love ; there was no other principle needed 
 for the regulation of society ; and no other 
 could produce that general peace and good- 
 will which He called the Kingdom of God. 
 
 Thus, on one occasion Jesus tells a story 
 which is so lifelike in every touch that we 
 may accept it, without doubt, as less a par- 
 
40 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 able than an incident. A father has two 
 sons, one of whom is industrious and dutiful, 
 the other wayward and rebellious. The way- 
 ward son finally casts off all pretense of filial 
 obedience, goes into a far country, and 
 wastes his substance in riotous living. Here 
 we have one of the saddest of all problems 
 in human relationship, for presently the dis- 
 graced son comes home a beggar. The 
 elder brother who represents the average 
 social view, has no doubt whatever as to 
 what should be done. He is offended that 
 the disgraced son should come home at all ; 
 he would have thought better of him if he 
 had hidden his shame in the country that 
 had witnessed it. Probably his sense of 
 pride and respectability is offended more 
 than his love of virtue, though he character- 
 istically gives his jealous anger the illusion 
 of morality. This, I say, is the average 
 social view. There are few things more 
 cruel than affronted respectability. The 
 elder brother is an eminently respectable 
 person, totally unacquainted with wayward 
 
THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 41 
 
 passions, and his only feeling for his brother 
 is disdain. 
 
 Jesus tells the story, however, in such a 
 way as to discredit the average social view. 
 He begins by making us feel that whatever 
 follies the prodigal had committed, he had 
 already been punished for them in the 
 miseries he had endured. It is not for man 
 to punish with his whip of scorn one who has 
 already been flaggellated with a whip of 
 scorpions in the desert places of disgrace and 
 shame. Jesus makes us feel also that what- 
 ever sins might be laid to the charge of the 
 disgraced son, there is nevertheless in his 
 heart a warmth of feeling of which the elder 
 brother gives no sign. The boy loves his 
 father, otherwise he would not have turned 
 to him in his anguish of distress. The elder 
 brother's attitude to his father is arrogant and 
 harsh ; the younger brother's is humble and 
 tender. Lastly the father himself is revealed 
 as the embodiment of love. He asks no 
 questions, utters no reproaches, imposes no 
 conditions ; he simply takes his son back, in 
 
42 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 the rush of his affection cutting short the 
 boy's pitiful confession, and calling for shoes 
 and new robes and festal music, as though 
 his son had returned in dignity and triumph. 
 In the last scene of all, implied rather than 
 described, the restored prodigal sits at the 
 feast, leaning on his father's bosom, but the 
 respectable son stands without in a darkness 
 of his own creation — the darkness which a 
 harsh spirit and an unlovely temper never 
 fail to create in men of his unhappy tempera- 
 ment 
 
 It is a very strange story, if we come to 
 think of it ; almost an immoral story, as no 
 doubt it was considered by the Pharisees, and 
 persons of their cold and mechanical type of 
 virtue. But Jesus anticipates their criticism 
 with one of the most startling statements that 
 ever fell from inspired lips, " There is more 
 joy in heaven among the angels of God over 
 one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and 
 nine righteous persons who need no repent- 
 ance." Heaven approves the story, if they 
 do not. Thus God Himself would act, for 
 
THE JUSTICE OF JESUS 43 
 
 God is love. Thus love must needs act, if it 
 be the kind of love that " suflereth long and 
 is kind, doth not behave itself unseemly, 
 seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh 
 not account of evil, beareth all things, be- 
 lieveth all things, hopeth all things, endureth 
 all things." And if we ask what becomes of 
 justice, Jesus assures us that love is the only- 
 real justice. For the main object of justice 
 is not punishment but reclamation. A truly 
 enlightened justice is less concerned with the 
 punishment of wrong than its reparation. 
 The gravest question in the case of this un- 
 happy boy is not what he has made of him- 
 self by sin and folly, but what can yet be 
 made of him by wise and tender treatment. 
 Had the father coldly dismissed the prodigal 
 with some bitter verdict on his past folly, he 
 himself would have been unjust to the boy's 
 possibilities, and thus would have sinned 
 against his son with a sin much less capable 
 of excuse than the son's sin against him. 
 The worst sinner in the story is not the son 
 who went wrong, but the son who had never 
 
44 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 done anything but right, yet had done it in 
 such a way that it had begotten in him a 
 vile, censorious, loveless temper. No one can 
 be just who does not love ; and so, once 
 more removing the story into that unseen 
 world which Christ called in to redress the 
 balance of this visible world, we sinful men 
 and women build our hopes upon the great 
 saying that God's forgiveness is God's justice : 
 if we confess our sins, He is not only faithful, 
 but JUST in forgiving us our sins. 
 
LOVE IS JUSTICE 
 
THE WAY OF WOUNDS 
 
 He touched the leper tenderly, 
 So in His hands there came to be 
 
 Wide wounds that were not wrought with nails, 
 Alas, my hands are smooth and fair, 
 No wound is on them anywhere, 
 
 Nor any scarlet scar of nails. 
 
 His lips lay on the mouth of death, 
 God's healing dwelt within their breath, 
 
 Wherefore his lips grew pale with pain, 
 And no man shall that pain divine ; 
 Alas, my lips are red with wine, 
 
 And they have scorned His draught of pain. 
 
 His feet were torn of stone and thorn, 
 Full slow He moved on roads forlorn, 
 
 But joyous hearts accompanied Him ,* 
 Alas, my feet are softly shod, 
 And on the road that leads to God, 
 
 They have not sought to move with Him, 
 
 And so all wounded by the way, 
 He came home at the close of day, 
 
 And angels met Him at the Gate, 
 Alas, His way I have not known — 
 The road forlorn, the wounding stone — 
 
 And no one waits me at the Gate, 
 
IV 
 
 LOVE IS JUSTICE 
 
 LOVE is the only real justice — never 
 was there a more revolutionary 
 ethic ! If Christianity is to be judged 
 by its institutions, it must be reluctantly con- 
 fessed that twenty centuries of Christian 
 teaching have almost wholly failed to make 
 this strange ethic acceptable to mankind. 
 The elder brother still makes broad his phy- 
 lacteries in the home, in the Church, and on 
 the seat of justice. The elder brother's sense 
 of offended respectability still masquerades as 
 virtue. Who forgives as this father forgave, 
 with such completeness that he who has 
 wrought the wrong is encouraged to forget 
 that the wrong was ever wrought ? Where is 
 the loving and tolerant spirit of the father less 
 visible than in the Church, which crucifies 
 men for a word, and makes a difference of 
 opinion the ground for deadly enmity ? Of 
 47 
 
48 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 what administration of law can we say that 
 its chief object is not the punishment of the 
 wrong-doer, but his reclamation ? No exist- 
 ing society is organized on these principles, 
 and the only defense the apologists of a bas- 
 tard Christianity make is that it is totally im- 
 possible to apply the principles of Jesus to 
 the administration of society. That is, at all 
 events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legit- 
 imate one? Was Jesus merely a romantic 
 dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love 
 and justice? Was He a moral anarchist, 
 whose teachings, if interpreted in laws, would 
 destroy the basis of society? A strange 
 thing indeed in human history if One who 
 has been loved as no other was ever loved 
 by multitudes of men and women through 
 the ages, should prove after all to be an 
 impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist ! 
 But if Jesus was a dreamer, He dreamed 
 true, and the very reason why He is loved 
 with such wide and deep devotion is that 
 men do dimly, but instinctively, perceive that 
 His life presents the only perfect pattern of 
 
LOVE IS JUSTICE 49 
 
 life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is 
 clearly not ordered on a social system which 
 any wise or good man can approve. Hence 
 the wise and good man is perpetually urged 
 to the enquiry whether Jesus may not after 
 all have been right ? 
 
 Jesus certainly acts as one who is right. 
 He acts always with the assured air of one 
 for whom all debate is closed and henceforth 
 impossible. He knows His way, and the 
 great moral dilemmas of life yield instantly to 
 His touch. He penetrates to their roots and 
 makes us feel that He has touched the essential 
 element in them. The dreamer vindicates 
 himself by making it manifest that he sees 
 deeper into the problem than the moralist, and 
 that his is after all the better morality because 
 it is of higher social value, and makes more 
 directly for social reconciliation. 
 
 Let us take, for example, the judgment of 
 Jesus upon the woman who was a sinner in 
 the house of Simon the Pharisee. The social 
 dilemma of the fallen woman is much more 
 difficult of solution than that of the prodigal 
 
50 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 son. We expect a certain power of moral 
 convalescence in youth which has been be- 
 trayed through folly. Sooner or later the 
 manly nature kindles with resentment at its 
 own weakness. Moreover, social law allows 
 a certain opportunity of recuperation to man 
 which it denies to woman. The sin of the 
 woman seems less pardonable, not because it 
 is worse in itself, but because it outrages a 
 higher convention. Hence the strict moralist 
 who might make some allowance for the hot 
 blood of youth, makes none for woman when 
 she is betrayed through the affections. 
 
 But this is the very point on which Jesus fixes 
 as essential. " The woman loved mucky there- 
 fore let her many sins be forgiven" He says. 
 And a true reading of the story would seem 
 to show that in uttering this sublime verdict 
 Jesus is not thinking of the woman's sudden 
 and pure love for Him ; He is rather review- 
 ing the entire nature of her life. She had 
 loved much — that is her history in a sentence. 
 Cruelty and unkindness, malice and bitterness, 
 had no part in her misdoing. She had been 
 
LOVE IS JUSTICE 51 
 
 undone through the very sweetness of her 
 nature, as multitudes of women are. That 
 which was her noblest attribute — her power 
 of affection — had been the minister of her ruin 
 through lack of wisdom and restraint. By 
 love she had fallen, by love also she shall be 
 redeemed. Her sins were indeed many, but 
 behind all her sins there was an essential 
 though perverted magnanimity of nature, and 
 for the sake of an essential good in her, 
 which lay like a shining pearl at the root of 
 her debasement, she shall be forgiven. 
 
 Again a strange verdict, and one that must 
 have seemed to the Pharisees entirely im- 
 moral. " What becomes of justice ? " is their 
 whispered comment. Jesus asserts His sense 
 of justice by an exposition of the character of 
 Simon. Simon is destitute of love, of mag- 
 nanimity, even of courtesy. In his hard and 
 formal nature there has been no room for 
 emotion ; passion of any kind and he are 
 strangers. Which nature is radically the bet- 
 ter, his or " this woman's " ? Which presents 
 the more hopeful field to the moralist ? The 
 
52 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 soil of Simon's heart is thin and meagre ; but 
 in " this woman's " heart is a soil overgrown 
 with weeds indeed, but delicately tempered, 
 rich and deep, in which the roots of the fair 
 tree of life may find abundant room and 
 nourishment. Therefore she shall be forgiven 
 for her possibilities, and such forgiveness is 
 justice. To ignore these possibilities, to allow 
 what she has been utterly to overshadow the 
 lovely vision of what she may be, when once 
 the soil is clear of weeds, and the real mag- 
 nanimity of her temperament is directed into 
 noble uses, would be the most odious form of 
 injustice. 
 
 Such is the justice of Jesus, but, alas, after 
 two thousand years we still stand astonished 
 at it, more than half doubtful of its validity, 
 and, if truth be told, secretly dismayed at its 
 boldness. It is romantic justice, we say, but 
 is it practicable justice ? We might at least 
 remember that what we call practicable jus- 
 tice has never yet attained the gracious results 
 of Christ's romantic justice. Simon the Phari- 
 see knows no more how to deal with " this 
 
LOVE IS JUSTICE 53 
 
 woman " than the elder brother knew how to 
 deal with the prodigal. Such sense of justice 
 as they possessed would have infallibly driven 
 the penitent boy back to the comradeship of 
 harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot 
 the barest chance of reformation. Is not this 
 enough to make the least discerning of us all 
 suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for 
 all their immaculate respectability of life, are 
 by no means qualified to pass judgment on 
 these tragedies of life with which they have 
 no acquaintance, and cannot have an under- 
 standing sympathy? Does not the entire 
 failure of legal justice with all its apparatus 
 of punishment and repression, to give the sin- 
 ner a vital impulse to withdraw from his sin, 
 drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the 
 hope, that there must be some better method 
 of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned by 
 conventional justice ? There is another 
 method — it is Christ's method. And the 
 thing to be observed is that whereas conven- 
 tional justice must certainly have failed in 
 either of these crucial instances, the romantic 
 
54 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 justice of Jesus — if we must so call it — com- 
 pletely succeeded. The woman who was a 
 sinner sinned no more, and the penitent son 
 henceforth lived a new life of purity and 
 obedience. In each case love is justified, and 
 proves itself the highest justice. 
 
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS 
 
LOVE'S PROFIT 
 
 What profits all the hate that we have known 
 The bitter words, not all unmerited t 
 
 Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown ? 
 
 Have roses grown from thistles we have sown? 
 Or lucid dawns flowered out of sunsets red? 
 Lo, all in vain 
 
 The violence that added pain to pain, 
 
 And drove the sinner back to sin again. 
 
 We had been wiser had we walked Love's way 
 
 We had been happier had we tenderer been, 
 We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day 
 Had we but loved the souls that went astray, 
 And sought from shame their many faults to screen, 
 Lo, they and we 
 Had thus escaped Life's worst Gethsemane, 
 And found the Garden where the angels be. 
 
 For One there was who, angry, drew no sword, 
 
 Derided, wept for those who wrought Him wrong, 
 And at the last attained this great reward, 
 That those who injured Him acclaimed Him Lord, 
 And wove His story into holiest song. 
 So sinners wrought 
 For Him the Kingdom He had vainly sought, 
 And to His feet the world } s frankincense brought. 
 
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS 
 
 IN these instances it is the singular com- 
 pleteness 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 forgive- 
 ness usually has reservations, reticences, con- 
 ditions. Jesus taught unlimited forgiveness, 
 and what He taught He practiced. 
 
 " Then came Peter, and said to Him, i Lord, 
 
 how oft shall my brother sin against me and 1 
 
 forgive him ? Until seven times f ' fesus said 
 
 unto him, ' I say not unto thee, until seven 
 
 times ; but until seventy times seven. 1 " 
 
 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 out- 
 worn by offense or neglect ? In the compacts 
 57 
 
58 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 mean- 
 ness," and another says, " no friendship can 
 survive perfidy " ; and in the relations be- 
 tween 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 fa- 
 mous 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 posi- 
 tion of the offender, we need no one to con- 
 vince 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 
 
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS 59 
 
 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 of- 
 fense against love. It is he alone, the sinner, 
 who can really sympathize with Christ's con- 
 ception 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 
 
60 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 passion 
 than a compact. It is a bond of mutual ad- 
 vantage, 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 mag- 
 nanimity, always excepting certain sins for 
 which no pardon can be legitimately asked. 
 But the hour was not far off when Peter him- 
 self 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 — mean- 
 ness, cowardice, perfidy, denial. That bitter 
 
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS 61 
 
 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 unal- 
 terable 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 thing s,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 gratitude that not 
 even perfidy was able to separate him from 
 the love of Christ, for that love was unaltera- 
 ble as the morning star which hung above the 
 lake, and cleansing as the soft waves that 
 lapped its shore. 
 
 The self-righteous man will never under- 
 stand these things. Men and women of 
 meagre natures, with whom love is a com- 
 pact, not a passion, will vehemently disap- 
 
62 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 prove them. People of smooth lives, ig- 
 norant 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 com- 
 fortable lives. He has little to say to the 
 children of compromise, whose emasculated 
 lives attain the semblance of virtue by the 
 cautious exercise of niggard passions. 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 passion, 
 and too much love of living ; for those whose 
 capacities for good and evil, being both rooted 
 in passion, 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 
 
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS 63 
 
 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 under- 
 stand 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 dispo- 
 sition 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 God'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 God'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 con- 
 viction, 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 conse- 
 quences 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 mis- 
 took His spirit, and even libelled His charac- 
 ter, He manifested neither bitterness nor re- 
 sentment. He suffered injuries without re- 
 taliation, 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 
 67 
 
68 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 am- 
 bitious, He might have organized a party so 
 strong, that it would have become an irre- 
 sistible 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 las- 
 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 
 
THE PRACTICE OF LOVE 69 
 
 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 justi- 
 fied 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 ap- 
 plauds 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 sub- 
 ject 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 humiliat- 
 ing penance, and a reluctant reinstatement 
 in the apostleship after a long period of bitter 
 ostracism. Yet who would venture to chal- 
 lenge the conduct of Jesus in these respects ? 
 Who would not find his opinion of Jesus 
 
yo THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 tragically lowered, and his adoration prac- 
 tically destroyed, if some new and more au- 
 thentic 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 hell and a predestined citizen of the outer 
 darkness ? Could such acts be attributed to 
 Jesus, though each act in itself would pre- 
 cisely represent the common temper of Chris- 
 tian courts and so-called Christian men under 
 circumstances of similar and equal provoca- 
 tion, 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 
 
THE PRACTICE OF LOVE 71 
 
 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 com- 
 mand our respect. Astounding fact ! Those 
 very things in the life of Jesus which we dis- 
 approve are the things for which we love 
 Him ; and those tempers which we ourselves 
 disallow are in Him the sources of our adora- 
 tion. 
 
 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 Tightness 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 gov- 
 
72 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 erned 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 can- 
 not wholly repudiate in our own. Let it be 
 added also, that a life lived by another is al- 
 ways 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 shore, 
 
 And converse with His friends on starry nights ? 
 Tet 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, " / 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 againt the sunset, like a cross, 
 
 And knew He had not very far to go. 
 
 Tet 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 passed 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 space, 
 
 As one o 9 erburdened, 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 peni- 
 tent sinner than over ninety and nine just men 
 who needed no repentance, so in His final 
 addresses to His followers He again dis- 
 closes the unseen world. These final ad- 
 dresses 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 pre- 
 cisely those elements which are least intel- 
 ligible, and least capable of strict definition. 
 It is around the word "eternal" and the 
 nature of the punishment suggested, that the 
 
 77 
 
78 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 passion with which men have 
 opposed one another over the interpretation 
 of words and phrases which must always re- 
 main enigmatic. 
 
 Let us turn to Christ's vision of the Judg- 
 ment, 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 shep- 
 herd 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 representa- 
 tive 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 
 
LOVE AND JUDGMENT 79 
 
 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 assurance 
 in a hundred acts of mercy, pity, and mag- 
 nanimity. Yet for centuries the Church has 
 sung its terrible Dies Irce, has clothed the 
 judgment seat with thunder, has put into the 
 hands of Jesus bolts of flame, and has ap- 
 plauded and enthroned in His sanctuaries 
 such pictorial blasphemies as Michael An- 
 gelo'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 
 
80 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 were to them so natural and simple that they 
 do not so much as recollect them, find them- 
 selves mysteriously selected for infinite re- 
 wards. The men and women of opposite 
 disposition, in spite of all their outward recti- 
 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 re- 
 membered need. It is love alone that is 
 divine, love alone that prepares the soul for 
 divine felicity. With a beautiful uncon- 
 sciousness 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 God ; and the reward 
 of these humble servitors of love now is that 
 having added to the joy of God, henceforth 
 they shall share that joy forever. 
 
LOVE AND JUDGMENT 81 
 
 Never was there vision at once so ex- 
 quisite and so surprising. It is like a child's 
 dream of heaven and judgment, so un- 
 touched is it by the conventions of the 
 world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly 
 imagined, and so impossibly probable. Alas, 
 that most of us are too wise to understand 
 it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in 
 nothing that Jesus uttered is there clearer 
 evidence of deliberation. And it is of a piece 
 with all He taught ; so much so indeed that 
 without it, His teaching would be incom- 
 plete. 
 
 Truly, we may say, the Heaven of Jesus 
 is a strangely ordered Kingdom ; for in 
 it beggars are comforted for apparently 
 no other reason than that they need com- 
 fort ; the doers of forgotten kindnesses are 
 crowned with sudden splendours of divine 
 approval while the lords of genius and the 
 makers of empire are forgotten ; and the 
 very anthems of the blessed are hushed into 
 silent wondering and joy when solitary pen- 
 itents turn homewards from the roads of sin ! 
 
82 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 But it is not stranger than that kingdom in 
 which Jesus lived habitually, the kingdom He 
 created round Him in His earthly life. In 
 that kingdom also love was lord, and she 
 who anointed the tired feet of the Master 
 against His burial was promised everlasting 
 remembrance, and she who out of her penury 
 gave her mite to the poor was praised as 
 having done more than all the rich, who 
 from their abundance distributed careless 
 and unmissed benefactions. In all that 
 Jesus says and does the same sequence of 
 thought runs clear, the same master principle 
 rules the various result. Life is a unity 
 either here or hereafter, and love is, and 
 must evermore remain, the one temper that 
 gives significance to life. 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 
 
THE WELL 
 
 IVhen Galilee took morning* s flame 
 Thro y fields of flowers the Master came. 
 He stopped before a cottage door, 
 And took from humble hands the store 
 Of crumbs that from the table fell, 
 And water from the living well. 
 He smiled, and with a great content 
 Upon the road of flowers went. 
 
 Foredoomed upon the road of shame 
 With bleeding feet the Master came, 
 And found the cottage door again, 
 u No wine have we to ease Thy pain, 
 But only water in a cup." 
 The Master slowly drank it up. 
 " Thy kindness turns it into wine," 
 He said, " and makes the gift divine,'* 
 
 Upon a day the Master trod 
 
 The road of stars that leads to God, 
 
 All tasks for men accomplished. 
 
 " They gave Me hate," He softly said, 
 
 " But Love in larger measure gave, 
 
 And therefore was I strong to save. 
 
 I had not reached the Cross that day 
 
 But for the Well beside the way," 
 
VIII 
 
 THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 
 
 IF these things be true, if the whole tra- 
 dition of Jesus is an exposition of love 
 as the law of life, the deduction is en- 
 tirely simple, and as logical as it is simple. 
 That deduction has been already stated. It 
 is that Christianity is a method of life by 
 which men and women are taught and in- 
 spired to love as Jesus loved, and to live 
 loving and lovable lives. It has little to do 
 with creeds, and still less with formal codes 
 of conduct. For this reason such a defini- 
 tion of Christianity will satisfy neither the 
 theologian nor the philosopher. Jesus never 
 expected that it would. He knew that the one 
 would regard it as heretical, and the other as 
 so deficient in subtlety as to seem foolish. 
 Therefore He made His appeal to simple 
 and natural people, saying that what was 
 85 
 
86 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 hidden from the wise and prudent, was re- 
 vealed to babes. 
 
 The simple and natural people under- 
 stood Jesus; they always do. The sophis- 
 ticated and artificial people did not under- 
 stand Him ; they never will. With scarcely 
 an exception the people of intelligence and 
 culture regarded Him with disdain, with- 
 drew from Him, or violently opposed Him. 
 The reason for their conduct lay not so 
 much in either their culture or their intelli- 
 gence, as in the kind of life that seemed to be 
 necessary to them as the expression of their 
 culture. 
 
 Thus, they were full of prejudices, pre- 
 possessions, and foregone conclusions, all of 
 which had the sanction of their culture. It 
 was enough for them to know that Jesus 
 came from Nazareth and was unlettered ; 
 this produced in them violent scorn and 
 antipathy. They were still further offended 
 because He used none of the shibboleths 
 with which they were familiar. Nor could 
 they conceive of any life as satisfactory but 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 87 
 
 the kind of life they lived, and that was a 
 life of social complexity, ruled by conven- 
 tional usages and maxims, and essentially 
 artificial in ideal and practice. Jesus, there- 
 fore, turned from them to the simple and 
 natural people, fishermen, artisans, and 
 humble women, in whom the natural in- 
 stincts had fuller play. His reward was im- 
 mediate ; then, and ever since, the Common 
 People heard Him gladly. 
 
 The reason why simple and natural people 
 readily understand Jesus is that in the kind 
 of life they live the primal emotions are su- 
 preme. The very narrowness of their social 
 outlook intensifies those emotions. They 
 have little to distract them ; they are not be- 
 wildered by endless disquisitions on conduct,, 
 and religion itself is for them an emotion 
 rather than a systematized creed. For the 
 poor man home, children, fireside affection, 
 mean more than for the rich man, because 
 they are his only wealth. This is the lesson 
 which Wordsworth has so nobly taught in 
 his " Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" — 
 
88 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 How, by heaven's grace this Clifford's heart was 
 
 framed, 
 How he, long forced in humble walks to go, 
 Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed. 
 
 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills. 
 
 People who live thus, in wise simplicity, 
 undistracted by the numerous illusions of an 
 artificial life, have no difficulty in accepting 
 Christ's teaching that love is the supreme 
 law of life, because love means everything to 
 them in the kind of life they lead. In the 
 wisdom of the heart they are more learned 
 than the wisest Pharisee, who is rarely " soft- 
 ened into feeling," whose whole social life in- 
 deed imposes a restraint on feeling. What 
 peasant father would not welcome a return- 
 ing prodigal, what peasant mother would not 
 open her arms wide to gather to her bosom a 
 penitent daughter, recovered from the cruel 
 snare of cities ? Certainly one is much more 
 likely to find such acts of pure feeling among 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 89 
 
 peasant folk than among the rich and cultured, 
 for the peasant cares less for opinion, is less 
 respectful of social etiquette, and follows more 
 closely in his actions the instincts of primal 
 affection. Who has not discovered among 
 poor and humble folk a strange and beauti- 
 ful lenience, the lenience of a great compas- 
 sion, towards those sins which in more artifi- 
 cial conditions of society are held to justify 
 the most violent condemnation, and do in- 
 deed close the heart to pity ? In poor men's 
 huts beside the Sea of Galilee Jesus Himself 
 had found love, love in all its divine daring, 
 lenience, and magnanimity, and He knew 
 that among people like these He would be 
 understood. He also knew that the only 
 people fitted to interpret His doctrine of 
 sovereign love to the world were these simple 
 folk of the lake and field, and therefore to 
 them He committed His Gospel, and from 
 them He chose His disciples. 
 
 It needed a peasant Christ to teach these 
 things, for no other could have imagined 
 them, no other could have had the daring and 
 
90 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 simplicity to utter them. A peasant Christ 
 He was, living, thinking, and acting as a peas- 
 ant even in His highest moments of inspira- 
 tion. It was because He always remained 
 a peasant that He was able to see so clearly 
 the defects of that more intricate social system 
 to which His ministry introduced Him. He 
 brought with Him a new scale of values, 
 which He had learned in the school of a more 
 primal life than could be found in cities. 
 Nature always spoke in Him, convention 
 never. In His treatment of sin it is always 
 the voice of Nature that we hear triumphing 
 over the verdicts of convention. The sins 
 which convention regards as inexpiable are 
 sins of passion ; the sins which it excuses are 
 sins of temper, such as greed, malice, craft, 
 unkindness, cruelty. Jesus entirely reverses 
 the scale. His pity is reserved for outcasts, 
 His harshest words are addressed to those 
 whom the world calls good. Folly He views 
 with infinite compassion — the foolish man is 
 as a lost sheep whose very helplessness in- 
 vokes our pity. But for the man of hard and 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 91 
 
 self-sufficient nature, whose very righteous- 
 ness is a mixture of prudence and egoism, He 
 has only words of flame. An offense against 
 virtue counts for less with Him than an offense 
 against love. No wonder the Pharisees called 
 Him a blasphemer ! Were the true nature of 
 Christ's teaching understood to-day many 
 who profess to revere Him would join in the 
 same accusation. What more offensive and 
 unpalatable truth could be presented to man- 
 kind than this on which Jesus constantly in- 
 sists, that sins of temper are much more harm- 
 ful than sins of passion, that they spring from 
 a more incurable malignancy of nature, that 
 they produce far wider and more disastrous 
 suffering ? 
 
 Yet the truth is clear enough to all broadly 
 truthful and simple natures, which are not 
 bewildered by conventional views of right 
 and wrong. Who has occasioned more suf- 
 fering, the youth who has sinned against 
 himself in wild folly and repented, or the 
 man who has planned his life with that cold 
 craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices 
 
92 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 everything to self-advantage ? Can any hu- 
 man mind measure the various and almost 
 infinite wrongs committed by the man who 
 piles up through years of sordid avarice an 
 unjust fortune? Who can count the broken 
 hearts in the pathway of that implacable 
 ambition which "wades through slaughter 
 to a throne " ? These things may not be ap- 
 parent to the man whose nature is subdued 
 to the hue of that artificial society in which 
 he lives, a society which permits such crimes 
 to pass unquestioned. They are certainly 
 not perceived by the criminals themselves. 
 To-day, as in the day of Christ, they " devour 
 widows' houses, and for a pretense make 
 long prayers/' save, perhaps, that more blind 
 than the ancient Pharisees, their prayers 
 seem real, and they themselves are uncon- 
 scious of pretense. Now also, as then, they 
 give their tithes in conventional benevolence, 
 forgetting, and hoping to make others forget, 
 the sources of their wealth in their use of it. 
 How is it that such men are so unconscious 
 of offense ? Simply because they have never 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 93 
 
 grasped Christ's deliberate statement that 
 sins of temper are much worse than sins of 
 passion ; that cruelty is a worse thing than 
 folly ; that the wrong wrought by squander- 
 ing the substance in a far country is more 
 quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, 
 than the wrong of hoarding one's substance 
 in the avarice which neglects the poor, or 
 adding to it by methods which trample the 
 weak and humble in the dust, as deserving 
 neither pity nor attention. 
 
 Yet it needs but a very brief examination 
 of society to prove the truth of Christ's con- 
 tention ; very little experience of life to dis- 
 cover that the utmost corruption of the 
 human heart lies in lovelessness. The 
 spiteful and rancorous temper, always seek- 
 ing occasions of offense ; the jealous spirit 
 which cannot bear the spectacle of another's 
 joy ; the bitter nagging tongue, darting 
 hither and thither like a serpent's fang full 
 of poison, and diabolically skilled in wound- 
 ing ; the sour and grudging disposition, 
 which seems most contented with itself when 
 
94 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 it has produced the utmost misery in others ; 
 the narrow mind and heart destitute of 
 magnanimity ; the cold and egoistic tem- 
 perament, which demands subservience of 
 others and receives their service without 
 thanks, as though the acknowledgment of 
 gratitude were weakness — these are common 
 and typical forms of lovelessness, and who 
 can estimate the sum of suffering they in- 
 flict ? Their fruit is everywhere the same ; 
 love repressed, children estranged, the home 
 made intolerable. It does but add to the 
 offense of these unlovely people that in what 
 the world calls morality they are above re- 
 proach, for they instill a hatred of morality 
 itself by their appropriation of it. Before 
 them love flies aghast, and the tenderest 
 emotions of the heart fall withered. Could 
 the annals of human misery be fairly written, 
 it might appear that not all the lusts and 
 crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye 
 have wrought such wide-spread misery, have 
 inflicted such general unhappiness, as these 
 sins of temper, so common in their operation 
 
THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE 95 
 
 that they pass almost unrebuked, but so 
 wide-spread in their effects that their havoc 
 is discovered in every feature of our social 
 life. 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF 
 
THE HOUSE OF PRIDE 
 
 I lived with Pride ; the house was hung 
 
 With tapestries of rich design. 
 Of many houses, this among 
 
 Them all was richest, and 'twas mine. 
 But in the chambers burned no fire, 
 
 Tho' all the furniture was gold ; 
 I sickened of fulfilled desire, 
 
 The House of Pride was very cold. 
 
 I lived with Knowledge ; very high 
 - Her house rose on a mountain's side. 
 I watched the stars roll through the sky, 
 
 I read the scroll of Time flung wide. 
 But in that house, austere and bare, 
 
 No children played, no laughter clear 
 Was heard, no voice of mirth was there, 
 
 The House was high but very drear. 
 
 I lived with Love ; all she possest 
 
 Was but a tent beside a stream. 
 She warmed my cold hands in her breast, 
 
 She wove around my sleep a dream. 
 And One there was with face divine 
 
 Who softly came, when day was spent^ 
 And turned our water into wine, 
 
 And made our life a sacrament. 
 
IX 
 
 THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF 
 
 NEVERTHELESS there are occa- 
 sions in life when these things be- 
 come evident to even the least ob- 
 servant of us. When we stand beside the 
 newly dead the most intolerable reflection of 
 countless mourners is that their tears fall on 
 quiet lips to which they gave scant caresses, 
 in the days of health : their passionate words 
 of love are uttered to unhearing ears, which 
 in life waited eagerly for such assurances as 
 these, and waited vainly. All the purity and 
 beauty of the vanished human soul is re- 
 vealed to us now, when it is no longer in our 
 power to gladden or delight it with our kind- 
 ness or our praise. All the willing service 
 rendered to us by those folded hands and 
 resting feet, which we so thanklessly ac- 
 cepted, is seen as a thing dear and precious 
 to us now, when the opportunity of thanks is 
 99 
 
ioo THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 past forever. What would we give now if but 
 for one brief hour we might recall our dead just 
 to say the tender things we might have said 
 and did not say, through all those days and 
 years when they were with us, — presences fa- 
 miliar and accustomed, moving round us with 
 so soft a tread that we scarce regarded them, 
 nor laid on them detaining hands, nor lifted 
 our preoccupied and careless eyes to theirs ! 
 
 For most of us, alas, it is not Grief and 
 Love alone who conduct us to the cham- 
 bers of the dead ; the sad and silent Angel 
 of Reproach also stands beside the bed, 
 and the shadow of his wings falls upon the 
 features fixed in their immutable appeal, their 
 pathetic and unwilling accusation. Then it is 
 that veil after veil is lifted from the past, till 
 in the pitiless light we read ourselves with a 
 new understanding of our faults. We see that 
 through some element of hardness in our- 
 selves which we allowed to grow unchecked ; 
 through vain pride, or obstinate perversity, 
 or mere thoughtless disregard, we repulsed 
 love from the dominion of our hearts, and 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF QFLIfiF ioi 
 
 » » » > . > '•''''> • , > « > 
 
 made him the servitor of our desires, but no' ' 
 longer the lord of our behaviour and the 
 spirit of our lives. And now as we gaze on 
 these things across the gulf of the irreparable, 
 we see our sin and how it came to pass ; how 
 we were unkind not in the things we did but 
 in those we failed to do ; how, without being 
 cruel, our denied response to hearts that 
 craved our tenderness became a more subtle 
 cruelty than angry word or hasty blow ; how 
 with every duty accurately measured and ful- 
 filled, yet love evaporated in the cold and 
 cheerless atmosphere of repression and aloof- 
 ness with which we clothed ourselves ; and 
 then the significance of Christ's teaching 
 comes home to us, for we know too late, that 
 kindness is more than righteousness, and 
 tenderness more than duty, and that to have 
 loved with all our hearts is the only fulfilling 
 of the law which heaven approves. None, 
 bowed beside the newly dead, ever regretted 
 that they had loved too well ; millions have 
 wept the bitterest tears known to mortals be- 
 cause they loved too little, and wronged by 
 
i<W ' the: empire of love 
 
 ' r ' -their poverty of love the sacred human pres- 
 ences now withdrawn forever from their vision. 
 But there are other and more joyous ways 
 of learning the truth of Christ's teaching, 
 ways that are accessible to all of us. The 
 best and most joyous way of all is to make 
 experiment of it. Here is a law of life which 
 to the sophisticated mind seems impossible, 
 impracticable, and even absurd. No amount 
 of argument will convince us that we can find 
 in love a sufficient rule of life, or that " to re- 
 nounce joy for our fellow's sake is joy beyond 
 joy." How are we to be convinced ? Only 
 by making the experiment, for we really be- 
 lieve only that which we practice. " I wish I 
 had your creed, then I would live your life," 
 said a seeker after truth to Pascal, the great 
 French thinker. " Live my life, and you will 
 soon have my creed," was the swift reply. 
 The solution of all difficulties of faith lies in 
 Pascal's answer, which is after all but a vari- 
 ant of Christ's greater saying, " He that will- 
 eth to do the will of God, shall know the doc- 
 trine." Is not the whole reason why, for so 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF 103 
 
 many of us, the religion of Christ which we 
 profess has so little in it to content us, simply 
 this, that we have never heartily and honestly 
 tried to practice it? We have accepted 
 Christ's religion indeed, as one which upon the 
 whole should be accepted by virtuous men, or 
 as one which has sufficient superiorities to cer- 
 tain other forms of religion to turn the scale 
 of our intellectual hesitation, and win from us 
 reluctant acquiescence. But have we ac- 
 cepted it as the only authoritative rule of 
 practice? Have we ever tried to live one 
 day of our life so that it should resemble one 
 of the days of the Son of Man ? Knowing 
 what He thought and did, and how He felt, 
 have we ever tried to think and act and feel 
 as He did — and if we have not, what wonder 
 that our religion, being wholly theoretical, 
 appears to us tainted with unreality, a thin- 
 spun web of barren, fragile idealism which 
 leaves us querulous and discontented ? 
 
 Such a sense of discontent should be for 
 us, as it really is, the signal of some deep 
 mistake in our conception of religion. It 
 
104 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 should at least cause us alarm, for what can 
 be more alarming than that we should be 
 haunted with a sense of unreality in religion, 
 yet still profess religion for reasons which 
 leave the heart indifferent and barely serve to 
 satisfy the intellect ? And what can produce 
 a keener torture in a sincere mind than this 
 eternal suspicion of unreality in a religion 
 whose conventional authority is acknowl- 
 edged and accepted ? 
 
 I am convinced that these feelings are gen- 
 eral among great multitudes of the more 
 thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Chris- 
 tianity. Religion rests with them upon a 
 certain intellectual acquiescence, or upon the 
 equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the 
 compromise of intellectual hesitations. Their 
 tastes are gratified by the normal forms of 
 worship, and their sentiments are softly stirred 
 and stimulated. But when the voice of the 
 orator dies upon the porches of the ear, and 
 the music of the Church is silent, and the 
 seduction of splendid ceremonial is forgotten, 
 there remains the uneasy sense that between 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF 105 
 
 all this and the actual Carpenter-Redeemer 
 there is a wide gulf fixed ; that Jesus scarcely 
 lived and died to produce only such results 
 as these ; that there must be some other 
 method of interpreting His life, much simpler, 
 much truer, and much more satisfying. Is it 
 wonderful that among such men the current 
 forms of Christianity excite no enthusiasm, 
 and that the bonds of their attachment to it 
 are lax and easily dissolved ? And what is 
 felt by these men within the Church is felt 
 with much greater strength by multitudes of 
 sincere men outside the Church, who do not 
 hesitate to express their feeling and to pro- 
 nounce current Christianity a burlesque and 
 tragic travesty upon the real religion of the 
 Nazarene. 
 
 But the moment we do begin to live, how- 
 ever inefficiently, as Jesus lived, the sublime 
 reality of His religion is revealed to us. We 
 do actually find that in the postponement of 
 our own desires for the sake of others ; in the 
 abandonment of our own apparently legiti- 
 mate ambitions for the service of the poor ; in 
 
106 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 the patient endurance of affront and injury ; 
 in the forgiveness of those whose wrong seems 
 inexpiable ; in the daily exercise of love that 
 " seeketh not itself to please," but hopeth all 
 things, and believeth all things, — there is a 
 joy beyond joy, and an exceeding great re- 
 ward. We do actually find that to forgive 
 our brother freely is better both for him and 
 us than to judge him harshly, and the wisdom 
 of Jesus is thus justified in its moral and social 
 efficacy. We do actually find that in ceas- 
 ing to live by worldly maxims and by living 
 instead according to the maxims of Jesus, we 
 have attained a form of happiness so incredi- 
 bly sweet and pure that the world holds noth- 
 ing that resembles it, and nothing that we 
 would exchange for it. For this is now our 
 great reward, that peace attends our footsteps, 
 and that our hearts are no longer vexed with 
 the perturbations of vanity and self-love, of 
 envy and revenge. We find human nature 
 answering to our touch even as it answered 
 to the touch of Jesus, and revealing to us all 
 its best and purest treasure. We find the 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF 107 
 
 very natures we thought intractable and des- 
 titute of all affinity with ours, brought near 
 our own ; the very men and women we 
 thought wholly alien to us suddenly made 
 lovable, and full of qualities that claim our 
 love. And as we thus humbly follow in the 
 steps of Jesus, trying to live each day as He 
 lived, we know that sublimest joy of all — we 
 feel Jesus acting once more through our ac- 
 tions, and we see in the eyes that meet our 
 own the same look that Jesus saw in the eyes 
 of those whom He had cured of misery and 
 redeemed from sin. 
 
A CONFESSION 
 
THE NOBLEST GRACE 
 
 ' Tts something, when the day draws to its close, 
 To say, " Tho' I have borne a burdened mind, 
 Have tasted neither pleasure nor repose, 
 Yet this remains — to all men, friends or foes, 
 1 have been kind." 
 
 9 Tis something, when I hear Death's awful tread 
 Upon the stair, that his swift eye shall find 
 Upon my heart old wounds that often bled 
 
 For others, but no heart I injured — 
 I have been kind. 
 
 Praise will not comfort me when I am dead ; 
 Yet should one come, by tenderness inclined, 
 My heart would know if he stooped o'er my bed 
 And kissed my lips for memory, and said 
 " This man was kind." 
 
 Lord, when from Thy throne Thou judgest me, 
 Remember, tho' I was perverse and blind, 
 
 My heart went out to men in misery, 
 
 1 gave what little store I had to Thee, 
 
 My life was kind. 
 
X 
 
 A CONFESSION 
 
 IN speaking thus I do but speak of those 
 things which have been revealed to me 
 in my own experience. For many years 
 I preached the truths of Christianity with a 
 real sincerity, but with a fluctuating sense of 
 their authority and value. Sometimes their 
 authority seemed supreme, and then I trod 
 on bright clouds high above the world ; at 
 other times they appeared to crumble at my 
 touch, and then I walked in darkness. One 
 thing I saw at intervals, and at last with com- 
 plete and agonized distinctness, that however 
 I preached these truths, they had little visible 
 effect upon the lives of others. Those to 
 whom I preached lived after all much as 
 other people lived. I did not find them more 
 magnanimous than the ordinary men and 
 women of the world, nor less liable to take 
 
 offense, to utter harsh words, to indulge in re- 
 iii 
 
ii2 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 sentments, and to retaliate on those who in- 
 jured them. I did not find that they loved 
 humanity any better than their fellows ; like 
 all mankind they loved those who loved 
 them, and had domestic virtues and affections, 
 but little more. It was impossible to say that 
 Christianity had produced in them any type 
 of character wholly and radically different 
 from that which might be found in multi- 
 tudes of men and women who made no pre- 
 tense of Christian sentiment. Christianity 
 had no doubt imposed upon them many 
 valuable restraints, so that without it they 
 might have been worse men and women, but 
 this was a merely negative result. Where 
 was the spectacle of a character composed of 
 new qualities, a life wholly governed by novel 
 impulses and principles? I could not find 
 such a life ; nor ought I to have been sur- 
 prised ; for I could not find it in myself. I 
 also lived much as other people did, except 
 that I had a higher theory of conduct. Put 
 to the test, I also showed resentment and was 
 moved with the spirit of retaliation towards 
 
A CONFESSION 113 
 
 those who wronged me. Nor, save as a 
 matter of theory and sentiment, did I love 
 my fellows any better than the average of 
 mankind. I sought those who were congen- 
 ial to me, and had no pleasure in the com- 
 pany of the common and the ignorant. I 
 liked clever people. I gave them my best, 
 but I had nothing to bestow upon the dull 
 and stupid. How many times have I borne 
 the society of inferior people with ungra- 
 cious tolerance, and hastened from them with 
 undisguised relief? How often when deal- 
 ing with the poor and ignorant in the exer- 
 cise of conventional philanthropy, have I 
 been careful to preserve the sense of a great 
 gulf that yawned between me and them ? 
 And what was my daily life after all but a 
 life existing for its own purposes, as most 
 other men's lives were ; and what credit could 
 I take for the fact that the nature of those 
 purposes was a trifle more consonant with 
 what the world calls high ideals than theirs ? 
 So the years went on, and the sense of un- 
 reality in my teaching grew steadily more in- 
 
ii 4 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 tense and intolerable. I saw myself continu- 
 ally 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 per- 
 ceive that my zeal to prove Christianity 
 true was exactly proportioned to my fear 
 that it was false. Men do not seek to 
 
A CONFESSION 115 
 
 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 atmos- 
 phere 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 re- 
 sponsive 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 
 
n6 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 cir- 
 cumference 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 in- 
 credibly, miraculously, so that I scarcely 
 recognized myself. I no longer stood aloof 
 from men, and found pleasure in intellectual 
 
A CONFESSION 117 
 
 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 an- 
 other 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 
 
n8 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 uncer- 
 tainties, 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, 
 
A CONFESSION 119 
 
 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 down 
 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 1 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. 9 * 
 
 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 con- 
 cealed 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 pro- 
 cessions 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 spec- 
 tator, never comrade ? 
 123 
 
124 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 Partly through a kind of mischievous hu- 
 mility 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 gratifica- 
 tions, 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 
 
A LOVER OF MEN 125 
 
 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 hap- 
 
126 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 pen, 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, recog- 
 nize 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 
 
A LOVER OF MEN 127 
 
 drudge, the helot, the social pariah ; love for 
 people who had no beauty that men should 
 desire them, nor any grace of mind or per- 
 son, 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 be- 
 gins 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 immemora- 
 ble 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 
 
128 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 ac- 
 cent 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 dis- 
 cern the Light and Life of men beneath His 
 gray disguise of circumstance? Should 1 
 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 Jerusa- 
 lem or Galilee, I should have rejected Jesus 
 
A LOVER OF MEN 129 
 
 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 culti- 
 vated, 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 un- 
 derstanding 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 mag- 
 nificence of human nature as men discover 
 the hidden temple beneath the sand-drift of 
 the desert. He was able to love all men be- 
 cause all men were to Him living souls. 
 
130 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 ex- 
 aggeration or an enigmatic sentence, now 
 became a rational principle, a saying that had 
 
A LOVER OF MEN 131 
 
 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 those 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 dif- 
 ficult 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 char- 
 acter of Jesus. When He looked upon the 
 multitude He was " moved with compas- 
 sion " — never was there more illuminative 
 sentence. It reveals an attitude of mind ab- 
 solutely original. For the general attitude 
 towards the multitude in Christ's day was 
 harsh and scornful. All the splendid intel- 
 lectualism 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 
 i35 
 
i 3 6 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 exclusive- 
 ness. 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 be- 
 tween such lives was as wide as that which 
 separates the scholar, the artist, or the aristo- 
 crat 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 or- 
 der. He proposed instead real comradeship 
 
THE LAW OF COMPASSION 137 
 
 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 com- 
 passion 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 noth- 
 ing, and am told nothing, of those whose 
 lives do not lie in the direct line of my lim- 
 ited vision. The process of education re- 
 
138 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 moves 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 man- 
 ners 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 enjoy- 
 ment 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 per- 
 haps disgust. I shall find them coarse, crude, 
 
THE LAW OF COMPASSION 139 
 
 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 in- 
 capacity to share the thoughts which com- 
 pose 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 man- 
 ners. If I am at all fastidious I am more 
 likely to be repelled by coarse language, 
 gross habits, or vulgar behaviour in my fel- 
 low 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 misinter- 
 preted, or something equally slight, the prod- 
 uct 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 
 
140 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 de- 
 test 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 igno- 
 rance 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 minis- 
 ters to my ease and comfort? To-day, not 
 less than in earlier generations, society re- 
 sembles the palaces of the Italian Renaissance, 
 — the feast of life in the painted hall, and the 
 groaning of the prisoner in the depths below. 
 
THE LAW OF COMPASSION 141 
 
 For every comfort that I have, some one has 
 sweated. My fire is lit not only with coal 
 from the mine, but with the miners 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 un- 
 lettered 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 be- 
 come the organ of intelligence. Nay, I 
 should see yet more ; for would it not appear 
 that these nameless toilers are richer in essen- 
 tial 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 
 
i 4 2 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 re- 
 pay them with affection and devotion. For 
 it is so decreed that the sacred magnanimi- 
 ties 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 lan- 
 guage so different from mine have neverthe- 
 less known the sacramental wine of love. 
 Were my life weighed with theirs might it 
 not appear that theirs was the richer in es- 
 sential 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 dis- 
 parities, but in their deep-lying kinship with 
 mine and all other lives. And the same 
 
THE LAW OF COMPASSION 143 
 
 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 be- 
 cause 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 wake- 
 ful 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, 
 
144 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 hung over gulfs of wild disaster, courted ruin, 
 and escaped I know not how ? Remember- 
 ing 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 regard- 
 ing 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 
 
THE LAW OF COMPASSION 145 
 
 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 com- 
 passion 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 ele- 
 ment 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 
 
i 4 6 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 could we unravel all the secrecies of his dis- 
 aster 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 y 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! 1 * 
 
 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 struc- 
 ture 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 absol- 
 utism, all believers in force as the true 
 dynamic of stable social government. To 
 reason with such persons is impossible, be- 
 cause their opinions are the fruit of temper, 
 and are therefore irrational. But even such 
 persons are not destitute of powers of ob- 
 151 
 
152 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 servation, 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 pro- 
 duce a world consonant with her ideas of 
 truth ; she was all but destroyed by the re- 
 coil of her prolonged persecutions. The 
 Puritans were persecuted in the name of 
 truth and virtue ; they triumphed. The Pu- 
 ritans 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 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 153 
 
 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 disem- 
 bowelled for treasonable practices ; theft, sedi- 
 tion, 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, irrespec- 
 tive 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 
 
154 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 his- 
 tory, that society has attained its greatest 
 happiness and has reached its highest condi- 
 tion 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 so- 
 ciety 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 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 155 
 
 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 manu- 
 facture 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 crea- 
 tures, 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 
 
156 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 157 
 
 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 re- 
 store 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 
 
158 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 phil- 
 anthropic 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 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 159 
 
 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 excel- 
 lent 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 wor- 
 ship, 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 mul- 
 titude of well-dressed worshippers, offering 
 
160 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 their adoration to the Deity, visits the father- 
 less and widow in their affliction, lays re- 
 straining hands upon the tempted, uplifts the 
 fallen or instructs the depraved, and so ful- 
 fills the true ideal of religion pure and unde- 
 nted ? What is the exact nature of their im- 
 pact upon society ? Are they more merci- 
 ful, 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 impres- 
 sion 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. 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 161 
 
 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 Doll- 
 ing, 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 sacra- 
 ments. But these things count for little ; 
 what the world sees in such men is the es- 
 sential reality of their life. One of the sever- 
 est critics of Dolling once went to hear him 
 with the bitterest prejudice. He found him 
 with a couple of hundred thieves and prosti- 
 tutes gathered round him, to whom he was 
 telling the love of Jesus in the simplest lan- 
 guage. " Dolling may be a Roman Catho- 
 lic, 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 
 
162 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 hour he was his warmest friend. No doubt 
 similar conversions of sentiment have at- 
 tended 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 justifi- 
 cations of Christ's law of love is that no man 
 has truly practiced it in any age without him- 
 self rising into a life of memorable signifi- 
 cance, without immediate attestations of its 
 virtue in the transformation of society, with- 
 out attracting to himself the reverence and af- 
 fection of multitudes of fellow workers who 
 have rendered him the same adoring disciple- 
 ship 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 toler- 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 163 
 
 ance 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 ex- 
 planation is that great powers of love 
 are twin with great powers of hatred. 
 The passionate love of virtue is, in its ob- 
 verse, 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 se- 
 cure 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. 
 
164 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 For love, in its last analysis, is under- 
 standing, 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 compas- 
 sion, nor will they put virtue in opposition to 
 compassion. One question may suffice. 
 Would we be content to leave the adminis- 
 tration of society in the hands of Jesus? 
 Would we confidently submit our own case 
 to His jurisdiction ? If, in every dispute be- 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 165 
 
 tween 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 in- 
 crease 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 in- 
 evitable 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 PRATER 
 
 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 contest to claim Thine own, 
 
 "All Hail! Amen." 
 
XIV 
 
 THE BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 IT may be long before the world recog- 
 nizes this leadership of the loving, and 
 accepts their judgment, but nevertheless 
 the world is debtor to them for all that sweet- 
 ens 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 
 171 
 
172 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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 sup- 
 pose anything that he had done remarkable. 
 
BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE 173 
 
 After wild and careless years of wasted youth, 
 Christ had found him, and from the day of 
 his regeneration he gave himself to the re- 
 demption 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 mur- 
 derers, who had fled from justice to the ref- 
 uge 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 ex- 
 
174 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 treme 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 heav- 
 ens 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 mar- 
 velled 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 part- 
 ing 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 
 
BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE 175 
 
 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 ex- 
 
176 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 quisite 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 for- 
 feited career, with an ample income. He put 
 the case to his wife and to his boys ; with in- 
 stant 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 
 
BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE 177 
 
 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, in- 
 sult, violence, hardship and pain, that their 
 gain exceeds their loss by measureless in- 
 finitudes 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 under- 
 standing of conflicting theologies and philos- 
 ophies, 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 
 
ij8 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 know now why He is loved as no other has 
 been loved. We know now what His re- 
 ligion 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 re- 
 tains 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, remem- 
 bering 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, combin- 
 ing the vital elements into a new synthesis, 
 
BUILDERS OF THE EMPIRE 179 
 
 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 equiv- 
 alent of religion ? 
 
 May we not even anticipate that the visible 
 decay of many symbols that once were au- 
 thoritative, 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 in- 
 tellectual 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 dis- 
 solution 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 
 
180 THE EMPIRE OF LOVE 
 
 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. 
 
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