LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

_Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself._--ST MATTHEW xxii. 39.

The original here quoted by our Lord is to be found in the words of God

to Moses, (_Leviticus_ xix. 18:) _"Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any

grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy

neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord"_ Our Lord never thought of being

original. The older the saying the better, if it utters the truth he

wants to utter. In him it becomes fact: The _Word_ was made _flesh_.

And so, in the wondrous meeting of extremes, the words he spoke were no

more words, but spirit and life.

The same words are twice quoted by St Paul, and once by St James,

always in a similar mode: Love they represent as the fulfilling of the

law.

Is the converse true then? Is the fulfilling of the law love? The

apostle Paul says: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore

love is the fulfilling of the law." Does it follow that _working no

ill_ is love? Love will fulfil the law: will the law fulfil love? No,

verily. If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour.

But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law

because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love.

The law cannot fulfil love.

"But, at least, the law will be able to fulfil itself, though it

reaches not to love."

I do not believe it. I am certain that it is impossible to keep the law

towards one's neighbour except one loves him. The law itself is

infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action, that the man who tries

most will be the man most aware of defeat. We are not made for law, but

for love. Love is law, because it is infinitely more than law. It is of

an altogether higher region than law--is, in fact, the creator of law.

Had it not been for love, not one of the _shall-nots_ of the law would

have been uttered. True, once uttered, they shew themselves in the form

of justice, yea, even in the inferior and worldly forms of prudence and

self-preservation; but it was love that spoke them first. Were there no

love in us, what sense of justice could we have? Would not each be

filled with the sense of his own wants, and be for ever tearing to

himself? I do not say it is _conscious_ love that breeds justice, but I

do say that without love in our nature justice would never be born. For

I do not call that justice which consists only in a sense of _our own_

rights. True, there are poor and withered forms of love which are

immeasurably below justice now; but even now they are of speechless

worth, for they will grow into that which will supersede, because it

will necessitate, justice.

Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth,--to waken

in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely,

of God _in_ us, requires of us,--to let us know, in part by failure,

that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us

up even to the abstaining from wrong to our neighbour. What man, for

instance, who loves not his neighbour and yet wishes to keep the law,

will dare be confident that never by word, look, tone, gesture,

silence, will he bear false witness against that neighbour? What man

can judge his neighbour aright save him whose love makes him refuse to

judge him? Therefore are we told to love, and not judge. It is the sole

justice of which we are capable, and that perfected will comprise all

justice. Nay more, to refuse our neighbour love, is to do him the

greatest wrong. But of this afterwards. In order to fulfil the

commonest law, I repeat, we must rise into a loftier region altogether,

a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the

law: in order to keep the law towards our neighbour, we must love our

neighbour. We are not made for law, but for grace--or for faith, to use

another word so much misused. We are made on too large a scale

altogether to have any pure relation to mere justice, if indeed we can

say there is such a thing. It is but an abstract idea which, in

reality, will not be abstracted. The law comes to make us long for the

needful grace,--that is, for the divine condition, in which love is

all, for God is Love.

Though the fulfilling of the law is the practical form love will take,

and the neglect of it is the conviction of lovelessness; though it is

the mode in which a man's _will_ must begin at once to be love to his

neighbour, yet, that our Lord meant by the love of our neighbour; not

the fulfilling of the law towards him, but that condition of being

which results in the fulfilling of the law and more, is sufficiently

clear from his story of the good Samaritan. "Who is my neighbour?" said

the lawyer. And the Lord taught him that every one to whom he could be

or for whom he could do anything was his neighbour, therefore, that

each of the race, as he comes within the touch of one tentacle of our

nature, is our neighbour. Which of the inhibitions of the law is

illustrated in the tale? Not one. The love that is more than law, and

renders its breach impossible, lives in the endless story, coming out

in active kindness, that is, the recognition of kin, of _kind_, of

nighness, of _neighbourhood_; yea, in tenderness and loving-kindness--

the Samaritan-heart akin to the Jew-heart, the Samaritan hands

neighbours to the Jewish wounds.

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

So direct and complete is this parable of our Lord, that one becomes

almost ashamed of further talk about it. Suppose a man of the company

had put the same question to our Lord that we have been considering,

had said, "But I may keep the law and yet not love my neighbour," would

he not have returned: "Keep thou the law thus, not in the letter, but

in the spirit, that is, in the truth of action, and thou wilt soon

find, O Jew, that thou lovest thy Samaritan"? And yet, when thoughts

and questions arise in our minds, he desires that we should follow

them. He will not check us with a word of heavenly wisdom scornfully

uttered. He knows that not even his words will apply to every question

of the willing soul; and we know that his spirit will reply. When we

want to know more, that more will be there for us. Not every man, for

instance, finds his neighbour in need of help, and he would gladly

hasten the slow results of opportunity by true thinking. Thus would we

be ready for further teaching from that Spirit who is the Lord.

"But how," says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal

neighbourhead, but finds himself unable to fulfil the bare law towards

the woman even whom he loves best,--"How am I then to rise into that

higher region, that empyrean of love?" And, beginning straightway to

try to love his neighbour, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke

is no more to be reached in itself than the law was to be reached in

itself. As he cannot keep the law without first rising into the love of

his neighbour, so he cannot love his neighbour without first rising

higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this law--the

driving of things upward towards the centre. The man who will love his

neighbour can do so by no immediately operative exercise of the will.

It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and by whom he is, who

alone can as himself love his neighbour who came from God too and is by

God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent relation is deep

as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence arising can be

solved only by him who has, practically, at least, solved the holy

necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man.

In him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not.

When the mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that

atom which the man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive

too, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life. From

Christ through the neighbours comes the life that makes him a part of

the body.

It _is_ possible to love our neighbour as ourselves. Our Lord _never_

spoke hyperbolically, although, indeed, that is the supposition on

which many unconsciously interpret his words, in order to be able to

persuade themselves that they believe them. We may see that it is

possible before we attain to it; for our perceptions of truth are

always in advance of our condition. True, no man can see it perfectly

until he is it; but we must see it, that we may be it. A man who knows

that he does not yet love his neighbour as himself may believe in such

a condition, may even see that there is no other goal of human

perfection, nothing else to which the universe is speeding, propelled

by the Father's will. Let him labour on, and not faint at the thought

that God's day is a thousand years: his millennium is likewise one

day--yea, this day, for we have him, The Love, in us, working even now

the far end.

But while it is true that only when a man loves God with all his heart,

will he love his neighbour as himself, yet there are mingled processes

in the attainment of this final result. Let us try to aid such

operation of truth by looking farther. Let us suppose that the man who

believes our Lord both meant what he said, and knew the truth of the

matter, proceeds to endeavour obedience in this of loving his neighbour

as himself. He begins to think about his neighbours generally, and he

tries to feel love towards them. He finds at once that they begin to

classify themselves. With some he feels no difficulty, for he loves

them already, not indeed because they _are_, but because they have, by

friendly qualities, by showing themselves lovable, that is loving,

already, moved his feelings as the wind moves the waters, that is

without any self-generated action on his part. And he feels that this

is nothing much to the point; though, of course, he would be farther

from the desired end if he had none such to love, and farther still if

he loved none such. He recalls the words of our Lord, "If ye love them

which love you, what reward have ye?" and his mind fixes upon--let us

say--one of a second class, and he tries to love him. The man is no

enemy--we have not come to that class of neighbours yet--but he is

dull, uninteresting--in a negative way, he thinks, unlovable. What is

he to do with him? With all his effort, he finds the goal as far off as

ever.

Naturally, in his failure, the question arises, "Is it my duty to love

him who is unlovable?"

Certainly not, if he is unlovable. But that is a begging of the

question.

Thereupon the man falls back on the primary foundation of things, and

asks--

"How, then, is the man to be loved by me? Why should I love my

neighbour as myself?"

We must not answer "Because the Lord says so." It is because the Lord

says so that the man is inquiring after some help to obey. No man can

love his neighbour merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so

because it is right and necessary and natural, and the man wants to

feel it thus right and necessary and natural. Although the Lord would

be pleased with any man for doing a thing because he said it, he would

show his pleasure by making the man more and more dissatisfied until he

knew why the Lord had said it. He would make him see that he could not

in the deepest sense--in the way the Lord loves--obey any command until

he saw the reasonableness of it. Observe I do not say the man ought to

put off obeying the command until he see its reasonableness: that is

another thing quite, and does not lie in the scope of my present

supposition. It is a beautiful thing to obey the rightful source of a

command: it is a more beautiful thing to worship the radiant source of

our light, and it is for the sake of obedient vision that our Lord

commands us. For then our heart meets his: we see God.

Let me represent in the form of a conversation what might pass in the

man's mind on the opposing sides of the question.--"Why should I love

my neighbour?"

"He is the same as I, and therefore I ought to love him."

"Why? I am I. He is he."

"He has the same thoughts, feelings, hopes, sorrows, joys, as I."

"Yes; but why should I love him for that? He must mind his, I can only

do with mine."

"He has the same consciousness as I have. As things look to me, so

things look to him."

"Yes; but I cannot get into his consciousness, nor he into mine. I feel

myself, I do not feel him. My life flows through my veins, not through

his. The world shines into my consciousness, and I am not conscious of

his consciousness. I wish I could love him, but I do not see why. I am

an individual; he is an individual. My self must be closer to me than

he can be. Two bodies keep me apart from his self. I am isolated with

myself."

Now, here lies the mistake at last. While the thinker supposes a

duality in himself which does not exist, he falsely judges the

individuality a separation. On the contrary, it is the sole possibility

and very bond of love. _Otherness_ is the essential ground of

affection. But in spiritual things, such a unity is pre-supposed in the

very contemplation of them by the spirit of man, that wherever anything

does not exist that ought to be there, the space it ought to occupy,

even if but a blank, assumes the appearance of a separating gulf. The

negative looks a positive. Where a man does not love, the not-loving

must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because

he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of

divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above

downwards. A man must just feel this necessity, and then questioning is

over. It justifies itself. But he who has not felt has it not to argue

about. He has but its phantom, which he created himself in a vain

effort to understand, and which he supposes to be it. Love cannot be

argued about in its absence, for there is no reflex, no symbol of it

near enough to the fact of it, to admit of just treatment by the

algebra of the reason or imagination. Indeed, the very talking about it

raises a mist between the mind and the vision of it. But let a man once

love, and all those difficulties which appeared opposed to love, will

just be so many arguments for loving.

Let a man once find another who has fallen among thieves; let him be a

neighbour to him, pouring oil and wine into his wounds, and binding

them up, and setting him on his own beast, and paying for him at the

inn; let him do all this merely from a sense of duty; let him even, in

the pride of his fancied, and the ignorance of his true calling, bate

no jot of his Jewish superiority; let him condescend to the very

baseness of his own lowest nature; yet such will be the virtue of

obeying an eternal truth even to his poor measure, of putting in

actuality what he has not even seen in theory, of doing the truth even

without believing it, that even if the truth does not after the deed

give the faintest glimmer as truth in the man, he will yet be ages

nearer the truth than before, for he will go on his way loving that

Samaritan neighbour a little more than his Jewish dignity will justify.

Nor will he question the reasonableness of so doing, although he may

not care to spend any logic upon its support. How much more if he be a

man who would love his neighbour if he could, will the higher condition

unsought have been found in the action! For man is a whole; and so soon

as he _unites himself_ by obedient action, the truth that is in him

makes itself known to him, shining from the new whole. For his action

is his response to his maker's design, his individual part in the

creation of himself, his yielding to the All in all, to the tides of

whose harmonious cosmoplastic life all his being thenceforward lies

open for interpenetration and assimilation. When will once begins to

aspire, it will soon find that action must precede feeling, that the

man may know the foundation itself of feeling.

With those who recognize no authority as the ground of tentative

action, a doubt, a suspicion of truth ought to be ground enough for

putting it to the test.

The whole system of divine education as regards the relation of man and

man, has for its end that a man should love his neighbour as himself.

It is not a lesson that he can learn by itself, or a duty the

obligation of which can be shown by argument, any more than the

difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms than

their own. "But that difference," it may be objected, "manifests

itself of itself to every mind: it is self-evident; whereas the loving

of one's neighbour is _not_ seen to be a primary truth; so far from it,

that far the greater number of those who hope for an eternity of

blessedness through him who taught it, do not really believe it to be a

truth; believe, on the contrary, that the paramount obligation is to

take care of one's self at much risk of forgetting one's neighbour."

But the human race generally has got as far as the recognition of right

and wrong; and therefore most men are born capable of making the

distinction. The race has not yet lived long enough for its latest

offspring to be born with the perception of the truth of love to the

neighbour. It is to be seen by the present individual only after a long

reception of and submission to the education of life. And once seen, it

is believed.

The whole constitution of human society exists for the express end, I

say, of teaching the two truths by which man lives, Love to God and

Love to Man. I will say nothing more of the mysteries of the parental

relation, because they belong to the teaching of the former truth, than

that we come into the world as we do, to look up to the love over us,

and see in it a symbol, poor and weak, yet the best we can have or

receive of the divine love. [Footnote: It might be expressed after a

deeper and truer fashion by saying that, God making human affairs after

his own thoughts, they are therefore such as to be the best teachers of

love to him and love to our neighbour. This is an immeasurably nobler

and truer manner of regarding them than as a scheme or plan invented by

the divine intellect.] And thousands more would find it easy to love

God if they had not such miserable types of him in the self-seeking,

impulse-driven, purposeless, faithless beings who are all they have for

father and mother, and to whom their children are no dearer than her

litter is to the unthinking dam. What I want to speak of now, with

regard to the second great commandment, is the relation of brotherhood

and sisterhood. Why does my brother come of the same father and mother?

Why do I behold the helplessness and confidence of his infancy? Why is

the infant laid on the knee of the child? Why do we grow up with the

same nurture? Why do we behold the wonder of the sunset and the mystery

of the growing moon together? Why do we share one bed, join in the same

games, and attempt the same exploits? Why do we quarrel, vow revenge

and silence and endless enmity, and, unable to resist the brotherhood

within us, wind arm in arm and forget all within the hour? Is it not

that Love may grow lord of all between him and me? Is it not that I may

feel towards him what there are no words or forms of words to express--

a love namely, in which the divine self rushes forth in utter

self-forgetfulness to live in the contemplation of the brother--a love

that is stronger than death,--glad and proud and satisfied? But if love

stop there, what will be the result? Ruin to itself; loss of the

brotherhood. He who loves not his brother for deeper reasons than those

of a common parentage will cease to love him at all. The love that

enlarges not its borders, that is not ever spreading and including, and

deepening, will contract, shrivel, decay, die. I have had the sons of

my mother that I may learn the universal brotherhood. For there is a

bond between me and the most wretched liar that ever died for the

murder he would not even confess, closer infinitely than that which

springs only from having one father and mother. That we are the sons

and the daughters of God born from his heart, the outcoming offspring

of his love, is a bond closer than all other bonds in one. No man ever

loved his own child aright who did not love him for his humanity, for

his divinity, to the utter forgetting of his origin from himself. The

son of my mother is indeed my brother by this greater and closer bond

as well; but if I recognize that bond between him and me at all, I

recognize it for my race. True, and thank God! the greater excludes not

the less; it makes all the weaker bonds stronger and truer, nor forbids

that where all are brothers, some should be those of our bosom. Still

my brother according to the flesh is my first neighbour, that we may be

very nigh to each other, whether we will or no, while our hearts are

tender, and so may learn _brotherhood_. For our love to each other is

but the throbbing of the heart of the great brotherhood, and could come

only from the eternal Father, not from our parents. Then my second

neighbour appears, and who is he? Whom I come in contact with soever.

He with whom I have any transactions, any human dealings whatever. Not

the man only with whom I dine; not the friend only with whom I share my

thoughts; not the man only whom my compassion would lift from some

slough; but the man who makes my clothes; the man who prints my book;

the man who drives me in his cab; the man who begs from me in the

street, to whom, it may be, for brotherhood's sake, I must not give;

yea, even the man who condescends to me. With all and each there is a

chance of doing the part of a neighbour, if in no other way yet by

speaking truly, acting justly, and thinking kindly. Even these deeds

will help to that love which is born of righteousness. All true action

clears the springs of right feeling, and lets their waters rise and

flow. A man must not choose his neighbour; he must take the neighbour

that God sends him. In him, whoever he be, lies, hidden or revealed, a

beautiful brother. The neighbour is just the man who is next to you at

the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you in contact.

Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the

whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink-debased,

vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared, they will

yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbours. Any

rough-hewn semblance of humanity will at length be enough to move the

man to reverence and affection. It is harder for some to learn thus

than for others. There are whose first impulse is ever to repel and not

to receive. But learn they may, and learn they must. Even these may

grow in this grace until a countenance unknown will awake in them a

yearning of affection rising to pain, because there is for it no

expression, and they can only give the man to God and be still.

And now will come in all the arguments out of which the man tried in

vain before to build a stair up to the sunny heights of love. "Ah

brother! thou hast a soul like mine," he will say. "Out of thine eyes

thou lookest, and sights and sounds and odours visit thy soul as mine,

with wonder and tender comforting. Thou too lovest the faces of thy

neighbours. Thou art oppressed with thy sorrows, uplifted with thy

joys. Perhaps thou knowest not so well as I, that a region of gladness

surrounds all thy grief, of light all thy darkness, of peace all thy

tumult. Oh, my brother! I will love thee. I cannot come very near thee:

I will love thee the more. It may be thou dost not love thy neighbour;

it may be thou thinkest only how to get from him, how to gain by him.

How lonely then must thou be! how shut up in thy poverty-stricken room,

with the bare walls of thy selfishness, and the hard couch of thy

unsatisfaction! I will love thee the more. Thou shalt not be alone with

thyself. Thou art not me; thou art another life--a second self;

therefore I can, may, and will love thee."

When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the

hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand

what St Paul meant when he said, "I could wish that myself were

accursed from Christ for my brethren." But he will no longer understand

those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential

of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to

come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its

expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its

battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each

other, "Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our

neighbours no more." St Paul would be wretched before the throne of

God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and

that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we

say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not,

upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off

time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the

blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with

the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself

more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who,

in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one

of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were

taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far

below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he

must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird

his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire,

travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his

brother?--who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love

of the Father?

But it is a wild question. God is, and shall be, All in all. Father of

our brothers and sisters! thou wilt not be less glorious than we,

taught of Christ, are able to think thee. When thou goest into the

wilderness to seek, thou wilt not come home until thou hast found. It

is because we hope not for them in thee, not knowing thee, not knowing

thy love, that we are so hard and so heartless to the brothers and

sisters whom thou hast given us.

One word more: This love of our neighbour is the only door out of the

dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing

phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our

own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet

winds of the universe. The man thinks his consciousness is himself;

whereas his life consisteth in the inbreathing of God, and the

consciousness of the universe of truth. To have himself, to know

himself, to enjoy himself, he calls life; whereas, if he would forget

himself, tenfold would be his life in God and his neighbours. The

region of man's life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his

neighbours, his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone his

spirit can find room. Himself is his dungeon. If he feels it not now,

he will yet feel it one day--feel it as a living soul would feel being

prisoned in a dead body, wrapped in sevenfold cerements, and buried in

a stone-ribbed vault within the last ripple of the sound of the

chanting people in the church above. His life is not in knowing that he

lives, but in loving all forms of life. He is made for the All, for

God, who is the All, is his life. And the essential joy of his life

lies abroad in the liberty of the All. His delights, like those of the

Ideal Wisdom, are with the sons of men. His health is in the body of

which the Son of Man is the head. The whole region of life is open to

him--nay, he must live in it or perish.

Nor thus shall a man lose the consciousness of well-being. Far deeper

and more complete, God and his neighbour will flash it back upon him--

pure as life. No more will he agonize "with sick assay" to generate it

in the light of his own decadence. For he shall know the glory of his

own being in the light of God and of his brother.

But he may have begun to love his neighbour, with the hope of ere long

loving him as himself, and notwithstanding start back affrighted at yet

another word of our Lord, seeming to be another law yet harder than the

first, although in truth it is not another, for without obedience to it

the former cannot be attained unto. He has not yet learned to love his

neighbour as himself whose heart sinks within him at the word, _I say

unto you, Love your enemies_.