10-Love Towards Men

X. LOVE TOWARDS MEN.

1Jn 4:21. “This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.”

IF the voice of Christian doctrine were entirely silenced, it cannot be alleged that there would be any lack in these days of teachers to enjoin benevolence and philanthropy. Love to man is earnestly enforced by some moralists who either affirm or imply that there is no God for us to love. They delight to draw a contrast between Religion, which they suppose to be occupied with vain guesses about the unseen world and with the selfish hopes and fears of men as to what may be awaiting them after death, and the purely human morality which studies the happiness of mankind in this present world and the means which may most effectually promote it. The central principle of this morality is that the world is evidently the better when human beings seek to promote the general welfare. What is good for the whole is good for the members.. Therefore they say, let each control his selfish propensities; let him keep in view the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the true progress of society; and let him cultivate the benevolent affections with skilful care. They urge that society should use all its influence, especially through the education of the young, to train individual men and women in unselfish benevolence; and they believe that benevolence may thus be bred to any point of perfection, as we see courage and other qualities to be bred.

I have no wish to deny that much may be accomplished by the steady cultivation of benevolence. A child may be so taught from infancy to consider the feelings of others, that a habit of kindness may become a part of the permanent texture of his character. Reverence for goodness and self-sacrifice may be cherished in boys and girls by holding up these qualities before them as ideals, and by treating with honour the more signal examples of generous devotion. The experiment of promoting love for humankind without that love of God and Christ which is the basis of it for Christians, when tried with enthusiasm by persons eagerly desiring it to succeed, has had some undeniable success. Do not wonder at it. The second of the two great commandments is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, and those who set themselves earnestly to fulfil one of the greatest of the Maker’s laws are not likely to go unrewarded. The moralists of whom I am speaking are teaching an integral part of what we Christians are bound to teach. Put the doctrine of the Christian Calling by the side of an exclusively human morality, and what do we see?

All that can really commend and establish itself in the latter has a place and a welcome in the former. The human morality says, Thou shalt prefer the promotion of the general well-being to the seeking of thine own pleasure. Well, that is what the Christian doctrine also says. It is evidently impossible for any morality to assert principles of benevolence wider or higher than those of the Christian Faith. But on the other hand the merely human morality does not even pretend to give an ultimate reason or authority for what it enjoins. It may say as emphatically or enthusiastically as it pleases to a man, “ Prefer the general good to thy own pleasure;” and the man is likely enough to listen with deference, taking the command as being really, what it is, the voice of the Maker: but if he is assured at the same time that there is no invisible Power to which he owes loyalty, he may have the courage to ask, “ Why should I prefer the pleasure of others to my own? Who are you that dictate to me?” And no satisfying answer can be given to him.

He may be told that the voice of the wisest and best of mankind is to be heard in this command, but it may occur to him to reply, “Yes, but those wisest and best men thought they were only echoing the voice of the Supreme Maker,” or he may simply refuse to submit his will to a tradition. Christianity gives the same command, and claims at the same time to surround it with authority and warmth and light drawn from the invisible world. i. The first and greater commandment is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. “ That means,” some have said, “that Religion is to take precedence of the service of mankind and to form the larger half of human duty. The service of mankind will therefore evidently be the gainer if we can get rid of Religion.” But that is a too hasty conclusion. The truer statement would be this: “ He to whom as our Maker and Spiritual Father we owe absolute allegiance tells us that he has made men to be his family, and that it is his will that we should love one another. The Eternal God has placed us here and given us the work and probation of life, that each may learn to subordinate himself and to live for his brethren.” Do you not feel that the command to love one another, when it is thus received as from God, instead of encountering a formidable rival, has on the contrary been ’reinforced by the most impressive authority imaginable? You might as well want to get rid of the steam-engine from the train, as to divorce duty to man from loyalty towards God. The belief that duty to man is a command of God brings to the aid of human goodwill and service all those feelings of reverence and awe and obligation which we know to be the most powerful by which the human soul is moved.

2. The Gospel, moreover, presenting Christ, the Divine Son of man, to men, offers to their homage a worthy and ideal human object. It makes man sacred, with a sanctity in which the meanest share. A point, surely, of incalculable importance. If you look at men as mere earthly creatures, knowing them after the flesh only, you may with much reason have a very poor opinion of them. In your own circle you may have much fault to find with most of those with whom you have to do. But how differently do men look when they are seen in CJirist! The habit of confessing Christ as Lord, and the feelings of reverence and love drawn out towards him, cause us in some degree to assume and act upon the relation of our fellow-men to Christ even when we do not distinctly or consciously realize it. Most certainly, to a true Christian, no man is entirely dissociated from his Lord. Our fellow-men are those for whom Christ died; their flesh and blood have been worn by the Son of God. If we know anything at all of him, we know that it was his glory to humble himself for the sake of his brethren, not separating himself from the weak or the defiled, but rather striving to raise them by sympathy and fellowship. In the lowest, Jesus Christ saw children of his Father, to be loved and sought and saved. It was his earnest desire and effort to persuade his followers to see men in him and him in men. Remember those words of judgment, “ Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto me.” What a violently strange notion it would have seemed to a St Paul or a St John, that the following of Christ should turn any man away best sense of the proverb, “Charity begins at home.”

It is in the home that love has its first place. The child’s primary love is due to the parent; and as the infant grows into the man, he finds other bonds which claim according to their degree the feeling appropriate to each. In accepting our various domestic and social relations as having Divine authority, we learn through experience what is the best form for our love in each case to take. Children are to honour their parents, parents to govern their children; the husband is to be as the stronger partner, the wife as the weaker, in the closest of all unions; there is an ideal affection of brothers and sisters, friend and friend, of fellow-citizens, and of fellow-Christians. Love begins in the home; and from thence it spreads, as in the water-circles which become gradually larger and less strongly marked, till it embraces all mankind.

There is one form of love to man, which is at the same time thrown out into prominence by natural causes, and specially characteristic of Christianity I mean kindness towards the unprosperous and the afflicted. I have desired that this should be considered as one form of that love due from man to man which has its more important life in the closer relations of human beings. It is most ndesirable that we should fall into a habit of thinking the second great commandment to be fulfilled in compassion towards the poor. But there is no claim more conspicuous and undeniable than that which the condition of the miserable makes upon the goodwill of the prosperous. On the one side there is need, on the other side there is power to relieve. The law of Christ takes note of these differences in the external lot of those whom Christ calls his brethren, and imperatively requires the happy to sympathize with and help those who suffer. “ Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” When the Son of man sits on his throne of glory and judges the nations, he dispenses blessing to those who have given meat to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, who have taken the stranger in and clothed the naked and visited the sick and imprisoned, whilst a terrible curse is pronounced on those who have done none of these things. There is nothing peculiar to Christianity in its commendation of this simple kindness towards the unfortunate.

Every religion, every system of morality, has some maxims of pity and philanthropy. What Christ has done is to build up practical compassion upon the foundation of sonship to God. He, the Son of God, makes the cause of the afflicted his own. “If you would please the Father,” he says to us, “ see that you do not harden yourselves against your brothers who are in need.” The teaching of Christ and of his Apostles has not been without fruits. It has been the glory of Christendom that those who have cared for their Christian calling and profession, amidst all differences and errors of belief have never been callous to the cry of distress. Hospitals, orphanages, almshouses, countless agencies for the relief of suffering and destitution, spring up like flowers over all ground which the Gospel has conquered for the name of Christ.

Experience has taught us that there is another need, besides that of urging the claim of the hungry and the naked upon Christian charity. Every precept of the Gospel requires to be understood spiritually, and to be applied with reasonable regard to the conditions of particular cases. We are under a dispensation, not of letter, but of spirit. This being a principle of supreme importance for all Christian life, the neglect of it is visited by a Nemesis which often seems hard to comprehend. The very best and most characteristic precepts, when they are followed literally, are smitten as it were with disease, of paralysis or of corruption. There are two alternative forms of legislation, either of which it was open so to speak to Christ to choose. He might have laid down nothing about the spirit, but have given every command surrounded with qualifications relating to all possible circumstances, so that his disciples might have found in the books handed down to them an immense directory of conduct. This method Christ did not choose, but preferred the other. He impressed upon his hearers that they were, first of all, subjects of the Spirit. This was their essential and characteristic privilege; their difficulty, it might prove to be, but a glory of which they could not divest themselves. To disciples who were thus pledged to think and live and act in the spirit, Christ delivered precepts in bold and trenchant form. He threw aside qualifying conditions; these were needless for those who would use spiritual discernment; the absence of them would be an abiding witness against unspiritual and literal discipleship. But the one comprehensive perversion of Christianity and all its maxims and practices is the materializing, which is also the literalizing, tendency. Christians have always been forgetting and refusing to live in the Spirit. And what does Gospel teaching become to those who take it and judge it “ after the flesh “?

It cannot, thank God, altogether lose its virtue; but it does become in a very considerable degree unintelligible and unpractical, and in a very painful degree misleading. The subject is too large a one to illustrate now, except by the single instance of the New Testament precepts of almsgiving. These are very direct. “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.” “ He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.” Precepts like these ought to have protected themselves against a merely literal interpretation. But most unfortunately, instead of seeing that they were to be understood in the spirit, people have assumed that they were expressed hyperbolically, and were to be discounted. They have said, “ I will not go so far as to keep to myself but one coat, or to lend to any one who would like a loan; but if I see any one who has not a sixpence, I cannot as a Christian refuse to give him something.” And so all the way down the course of Christianity, people have given away money, bread, coals, blankets, tickets, without regard to consequences, as a Christian duty. But it is never a Christian duty to act without regard to consequences. And it has been found out that a great deal of moral and social and physical mischief has been done by alms- giving; and some cry out that Christianity has been proved to be wrong, and others retort that political economy is hard and unfeeling, and tell themselves that they have at any rate to save their souls by obedience and charity, and that God who gave the precepts must take care of the consequences. But the only mistake is that the precepts have not been understood as they were intended to be, in the spirit. It may easily happen that a precept can only be fulfilled in the spirit by doing the opposite of it in the letter. Our hearts, my Christian brethren, ought to be such as would gladly share our superfluities with those who are less fortunate. Do not think that there is anything hyperbolical or extravagant in this principle. If there is a rich man in this land who would not willingly give up his wealth to make many of the poor in city or country less wretched, he is not fulfilling the law of Christ. This needs still to be proclaimed unflinchingly, as Christ proclaimed it. But would he then fulfil the law of Christ by selling all that he has and dividing it amongst the needy refuse of some great population? No, he would not; and for this simple reason, that we know with absolute certainty that such an act would do more harm than good to the very persons who were made partakers of the gift As to the careless giving of doles to those who ask for them, so as to maintain a certain number of persons in idle and degraded mendicancy, that is not only a social mischief, but it is so easy that it has been not undeservingly stigmatized as a culpable form of self-indulgence. I suppose there is no one here who has not learnt that it will cost him more under certain circumstances to refuse aid than to give it. It is beyond all question that the law of Christian charity often requires us to incur for our brother’s sake the pain of refusing what he asks. It is plain to the eye of the most moderate intelligence that to give relief is often and often to place a stumbling-block or occasion of falling m the way of a weak brother. And our Saviour has said with the gravest solemnity, “Woe unto him through whom stumbling-blocks come!”

Let me exhort you then, brethren, to give earnest rational heed to what our Lord and his Apostles have enjoined concerning brotherly kindness. Do not think that there is anything extravagant, obsolete, or unpractical, in these injunctions. They tell us, in the simplest possible manner, what the mind of the true Christian should be. You will never fulfil them as thoroughly as we ought to do. In striving to be utterly unselfish and compassionate according to the mind of Christ, you will be on your guard against acts which, however they may be prompted by pity, have a proved injurious tendency. You will interpret the obligations of those who have this world’s good, not with more laxity, but with more severity.

Whatever can be done with money, whether by restriction or by expenditure, to lessen effectually the more painful inequalities between Christian and Christian, tJiat the law of Christ requires to be done. Christ points to the miseries of the wretched, and says to those who care to listen to his voice, not “ Bestow in charity and offerings some fiftieth or twentieth part of your income,” but, “Give thought, give effort, give considerate and respectful kindness, give things more precious than money, but do not spare money, to heal these sorrows. Those toiling multitudes, those ignorant and reckless creatures, are children of your heavenly Father. Say not, Am I my brother’s keeper? for the Father has made all responsible, according to their opportunities, for their brethren.

You will lay up treasure in heaven, treasure to which all the gold of earth is dross, if you can minister light and hope to any that are down and draw them with a helping hand into the freedom and blessedness of sonship.” And now, dear brethren, I bring to a close the course of sermons which I have been permitted to deliver in this place. I have preached to you, not as I could have wished, but as I have been able, upon great and inspiring subjects. I have endeavoured to shew you how glorious is the calling with which we Christians are called, how solid the foundation on which we stand, how various and fruitful the works which God has prepared for us to walk in. God grant to you to feel, with some quickened energy of conviction and hope, that the promise of the future still belongs to the Christian faith. We have entered into a time of sifting, a time, to many, of perplexity and discouragement. Such a time has been necessary, in order that we may be freed from some things that were temporary in our religion, from some that were dishonouring to the name of the heavenly Father, from a general artificiality and dependence on tradition. Let us be thankful if through any discipline we are thrown back on the centre of our faith, and brought nearer to him who not only was, but is, and is to be. It is a time to be cautious and discriminating, but not to give up hope. Be careful how you pledge the heart of your faith to the more secondary and outward traditions of our religion. Your safety is with Christ and the Father. Pray that God will uphold you with his free Spirit. Let your inward life be one of faith, nourished by the invisible dews and rains of heaven, and your outward life will grow in strength and usefulness and dignity. In one word, be Christians; you may well be content to be nothing more; resolve that with God’s help you will be nothing less. And may he who has called and is calling you sustain and reward your endeavour!