of giving up his rights.
Yet Paul does not summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes much
deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate
the personal element altogether from our calculations.
It is not hard to give up our rights. They are often eternal. The
difficult thing is to give up _ourselves_. The more difficult thing
still is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have sought
them, bought them, won them, deserved them, we have taken the cream
off them for ourselves already. Little cross then to give them up. But
not to seek them, to look every man not on his own things, but on the
things of others--that is the difficulty. "Seekest thou great things
for thyself?" said the prophet; "_seek them not_." Why? Because there
is no greatness in _things_. Things cannot be great. The only
greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is
almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify
the waste.
It is more difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all than,
having sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only
true of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to Love, and
nothing is hard. I believe that Christ's "yoke" is easy. Christ's yoke
is just His way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than
any other. I believe it is a happier way than any other. The most
obvious lesson in Christ's teaching is that there is no happiness in
having and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, _there is
no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving_. Half the
world is on the wrong scent in pursuit of happiness. They think it
consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It
consists in giving, and in serving others. "He that would be great
among you," said Christ, "let him serve." He that would be happy, let
him remember that there is but one way--"it is more blessed, it is
more happy, to give than to receive."
The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: _Good temper._ "Love is
not provoked."
Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined
to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as
a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament,
not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's
character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love,
it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it
as one of the most destructive elements in human nature.
The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous.
It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men
who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but
for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This
compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the
strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is, there are two
great classes of sins--sins of the _Body_ and sins of the
_Disposition_. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first,
the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society has no doubt whatever as
to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge,
upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one
another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults
in the higher nature may be less venal than those in the lower, and to
the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred
times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold,
not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil
temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for
destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for
withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in
short,