1.J 03. Love, Not mere Good-Nature

Love, Not mere Good-Nature. A great many persons, when you say such things as these, feel at once “ That is rny doctrine. I do not believe in these always dry, metaphysical men, arguing and arguing and arguing.” Another man says, “ That is my idea about it. I do not like these men who are always combative. I like a mild, meek, and lowly man.” But I do not mean any such thing as that. I do not mean these lazy, sunshiny, good-natured men, who have no particular opinions, and who would about as soon have things go one way as another; who are without sharp and discriminating thought, have no preferences, no indignation, no conscience, no fire. I do not believe in any such men. I like to see a man who has got snap in every part of him, who knows how to think and to speak, and to put on the screw, if that is his particular mode of working. This sweet and beneficent heart-quality that I am speaking of is the atmosphere in which every other faculty works, and which is generic to them all. It is Christian sympathy, benevolence, and love. Do you not suppose that love has anger?

There is no such anger as that which a mother’s love furnishes. Do you suppose that when she sees the child that is both herself and him whom she loves better than herself, the child in whom her hope is bound up, the child that is God’s glass through which she sees immortality, the child that is more to her than her own life, doing a detestable meanness, that she is not angry and indignant, and that the child does not feel the smart of physical advice? Do you not suppose that the child knows what anger is? I tell you there is no such indignation possible as the indignation that means rescue, help, hope, and betterment. You might as well say that a summer shower has no thunder as to say that love has no anger. It is full of it, or may be. Has love no specialty or discrimination in removing error, nor any continuing, intense regard for specific and exact truth? God has it, and we are like him.

We are his children, and know it by that. Love is simply that which overhangs all these powers, which gives them quality and direction, and gives to us a larger power through these lower instruments. And so a man who is purely intellectual, without any special sympathy or love, cannot deal rightly in moral truth. He may in physical truth, because that is not at all a question of influence; but all moral truth and with that you have mainly to deal is truth that springs out of experience. Un less you have love, you cannot go right by pure intellect; while the intellect working in an atmosphere of love can rarely go wrong in moral things.

You cannot long go right where it is the sense of beauty alone that you are appealing to. He who preaches mainly to taste and the sense of the beau tiful he who sees God especially in forms and colours and sounds, and all the sweet elements of grace in the world has one portion of the truth, but he is apt to run out, through feebleness, into sentimentality. He lacks that strength, that power, and that continuity which come from the real divine love-temperament.