_Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour,
and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them
that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even
the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore
perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect._--St
Matthew v. 43-48.
Is not this at length _too_ much to expect? Will a man ever love his
enemies? He may come to do good to them that hate him; but when will he
pray for them that despitefully use him and persecute him? When? When
he is the child of his Father in heaven. Then shall he love his
neighbour as himself, even if that neighbour be his enemy. In the
passage in Leviticus (xix. 18,) already referred to as quoted by our
Lord and his apostles, we find the neighbour and the enemy are one.
"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."
Look at the glorious way in which Jesus interprets the scripture that
went before him. "_I am the Lord_,"--"That ye may be perfect, as your
Father in heaven is perfect."
Is it then reasonable to love our enemies? God does; therefore it must
be the highest reason. But is it reasonable to expect that man should
become capable of doing so? Yes; on one ground: that the divine energy
is at work in man, to render at length man's doing divine as his nature
is. For this our Lord prayed when he said: "That they all may be one,
as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in
us." Nothing could be less likely to human judgment: our Lord knows
that one day it will come.
Why should we love our enemies? The deepest reason for this we cannot
put in words, for it lies in the absolute reality of their being, where
our enemies are of one nature with us, even of the divine nature. Into
this we cannot see, save as into a dark abyss. But we can adumbrate
something of the form of this deepest reason, if we let the thoughts of
our heart move upon the face of the dim profound.
"Are our enemies men like ourselves?" let me begin by asking. "Yes."
"Upon what ground? The ground of their enmity? The ground of the wrong
they do us?" "No." "In virtue of cruelty, heartlessness, injustice,
disrespect, misrepresentation?" "Certainly not. _Humanum est errare_ is
a truism; but it possesses, like most truisms, a latent germ of worthy
truth. The very word _errare_ is a sign that there is a way so truly
the human that, for a man to leave it, is to _wander_. If it be human
to wander, yet the wandering is not humanity. The very words _humane_
and _humanity_ denote some shadow of that loving-kindness which, when
perfected after the divine fashion, shall include even our enemies. We
do not call the offering of human sacrifices, the torturing of
captives, cannibalism--humanity. Not because they do such deeds are
they men. Their humanity must be deeper than those. It is in virtue of
the divine essence which is in them, that pure essential humanity, that
we call our enemies men and women. It is this humanity that we are to
love--a something, I say, deeper altogether than and independent of the
region of hate. It is the humanity that originates the claim of
neighbourhead; the neighbourhood only determines the occasion of its
exercise." "Is this humanity in every one of our enemies?" "Else there
were nothing to love." "Is it there in very deed?--Then we _must_ love
it, come between us and it what may."
But how can we love a man or a woman who is cruel and unjust to us?--
who sears with contempt, or cuts off with wrong every tendril we would
put forth to embrace?--who is mean, unlovely, carping, uncertain,
self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?--who can even sneer,
the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than mere
murder?
These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the worst
man cannot love them. But are these the man? Does a woman bear that
form in virtue of these? Lies there not within the man and the woman a
divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood, a something lovely and
lovable,--slowly fading, it may be,--dying away under the fierce heat
of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral
selfishness--but there? Shall that divine something, which, once
awakened to be its own holy self in the man, will loathe these unlovely
things tenfold more than we loathe them now--shall this divine thing
have no recognition from us? It is the very presence of this fading
humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal
only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we
should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from
loving him. We push over the verge of the creation--_we damn_--just
because we cannot embrace. For to embrace is the necessity of our
deepest being. That foiled, we hate. Instead of admonishing ourselves
that there is our enchained brother, that there lies our enchanted,
disfigured, scarce recognizable sister, captive of the devil, to break,
how much sooner, from their bonds, that we love them!--we recoil into
the hate which would fix them there; and the dearly lovable reality of
them we sacrifice to the outer falsehood of Satan's incantations, thus
leaving them to perish. Nay, we murder them to get rid of them, we
_hate_ them. Yet within the most obnoxious to our hate, lies that
which, could it but show itself as it is, and as it will show itself
one day, would compel from our hearts a devotion of love. It is not the
unfriendly, the unlovely, that we are told to love, but the brother,
the sister, who is unkind, who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother
to his desolate fate? Shall we not rather say, "With my love at least
shalt thou be compassed about, for thou hast not thy own lovingness to
infold thee; love shall come as near thee as it may; and when thine
comes forth to meet mine, we shall be one in the indwelling God"?
Let no one say I have been speaking in a figure merely. That I have
been so speaking I know. But many things which we see most vividly and
certainly are more truly expressed by using a right figure, than by
attempting to give them a clear outline of logical expression. My
figure means a truth.
If any one say, "Do not make such vague distinctions. There is the
person. Can you deny that that person is unlovely? How then can you
love him?" I answer, "That person, with the evil thing cast out of him,
will be yet more the _person_, for he will be his real self. The thing
that now makes you dislike him is separable from him, is therefore not
he, makes himself so much less himself, for it is working death in him.
Now he is in danger of ceasing to be a person at all. When he is
clothed and in his right mind, he will be a person indeed. You _could_
not then go on hating him. Begin to love him now, and help him into the
loveliness which is his. Do not hate him although you can. The
personalty, I say, though clouded, besmeared, defiled with the wrong,
lies deeper than the wrong, and indeed, so far as the wrong has reached
it, is by the wrong injured, yea, so far, it may be, destroyed."
But those who will not acknowledge the claim of love, may yet
acknowledge the claim of justice. There are who would shrink with
horror from the idea of doing injustice to those, from the idea of
loving whom they would shrink with equal horror. But if it is
impossible, as I believe, without love to be just, much more cannot
justice co-exist with hate. The pure eye for the true vision of
another's claims can only go with the loving heart. The man who hates
can hardly be delicate in doing justice, say to his neighbour's love,
to his neighbour's predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough
to be just to our friends; and how shall our enemies fare with us? For
justice demands that we shall think rightly of our neighbour as
certainly as that we shall neither steal his goods nor bear false
witness against him. Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but
for love, which is greater than justice, and by including supersedes
justice. _Mere_ justice is an impossibility, a fiction of analysis. It
does not exist between man and man, save relatively to human _law_.
Justice to be justice must be much more than justice. Love is the law
of our condition, without which we can no more render justice than a
man can keep a straight line walking in the dark. The eye is not
single, and the body is not full of light. No man who is even
indifferent to his brother can recognize the claims which his humanity
has upon him. Nay, the very indifference itself is an injustice.
I have taken for granted that the fault lies with the enemy so
considered, for upon the primary rocks would I build my foundation. But
the question must be put to each man by himself, "Is my neighbour
indeed my enemy, or am I my neighbour's enemy, and so take him to be
mine?--awful thought! Or, if he be mine, am not I his? Am I not
refusing to acknowledge the child of the kingdom within his bosom, so
killing the child of the kingdom within my own?" Let us claim for
ourselves no more indulgence than we give to him. Such honesty will end
in severity at home and clemency abroad. For we are accountable for the
ill in ourselves, and have to kill it; for the good in our neighbour,
and have to cherish it. He only, in the name and power of God, can kill
the bad in him; we can cherish the good in him by being good to it
across all the evil fog that comes between our love and his good.
Nor ought it to be forgotten that this fog is often the result of
misapprehension and mistake, giving rise to all kinds of indignations,
resentments, and regrets. Scarce anything about us is just as it seems,
but at the core there is truth enough to dispel all falsehood and
reveal life as unspeakably divine. O brother, sister, across this weary
fog, dim-lighted by the faint torches of our truth-seeking, I call to
the divine in thee, which is mine, not to rebuke thee, not to rouse
thee, not to say "Why hatest thou me?" but to say "I love thee; in
God's name I love thee." And I will wait until the true self looks out
of thine eyes, and knows the true self in me.
But in the working of the Divine Love upon the race, my enemy is doomed
to cease to be my enemy, and to become my friend. One flash of truth
towards me would destroy my enmity at once; one hearty confession of
wrong, and our enmity passes away; from each comes forth the brother
who was inside the enemy all the time. For this The Truth is at work.
In the faith of this, let us love the enemy now, accepting God's work
in reversion, as it were; let us believe as seeing his yet invisible
triumph, clasping and holding fast our brother, in defiance of the
changeful wiles of the wicked enchantment which would persuade our eyes
and hearts that he is not our brother, but some horrible thing, hateful
and hating.
But again I must ask, What if _we_ are in the wrong and do the wrong,
and hate because we have injured? What then? Why, then, let us cry to
God as from the throat of hell; struggle, as under the weight of a
spiritual incubus; cry, as knowing the vile disease that cleaveth fast
unto us; cry, as possessed of an evil spirit; cry, as one buried alive,
from the sepulchre of our evil consciousness, that He would take pity
upon us the chief of sinners, the most wretched and vile of men, and
send some help to lift us from the fearful pit and the miry clay.
Nothing will help but the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the
Son, the spirit of the Father and the Brother casting out and
revealing. It will be with tearing and foaming, with a terrible cry and
a lying as one dead, that such a demon will go out. But what a vision
will then arise in the depths of the purified soul!
"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is
perfect." "Love your enemies, and ye shall be the children of the
highest." It is the divine glory to forgive.
Yet a time will come when the Unchangeable will cease to forgive; when
it will no more belong to his perfection to love his enemies; when he
will look calmly, and have his children look calmly too, upon the
ascending smoke of the everlasting torments of our strong brothers, our
beautiful sisters! Nay, alas! the brothers are weak now; the sisters
are ugly now!
O brother, believe it not. "O Christ!" the redeemed would cry, "where
art thou, our strong Jesus? Come, our grand brother. See the suffering
brothers down below! See the tormented sisters! Come, Lord of Life!
Monarch of Suffering! Redeem them. For us, we will go down into the
burning, and see whether we cannot at least carry through the howling
flames a drop of water to cool their tongues."
Believe it not, my brother, lest it quench forgiveness in thee, and
thou be not forgiven, but go down with those thy brothers to the
torment; whence, if God were not better than that phantom _thou_
callest God, thou shouldst _never_ come out; but whence assuredly thou
shalt come out when thou hast paid the uttermost farthing; when thou
hast learned of God in hell what thou didst refuse to learn of him upon
the gentle-toned earth; what the sunshine and the rain could not teach
thee, nor the sweet compunctions of the seasons, nor the stately
visitings of the morn and the eventide, nor the human face divine, nor
the word that was nigh thee in thy heart and in thy mouth--the story of
Him who was mighty to save, because he was perfect in love.
O Father, thou art All-in-all, perfect beyond the longing of thy
children, and we are all and altogether thine. Thou wilt make us pure
and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in thy presence, because
perfect in thy love. Then shall thy children be of good cheer, infinite
in the love of each other, and eternal in thy love. Lord Jesus, let the
heart of a child be given to us, that so we may arise from the grave of
our dead selves and die no more, but see face to face _the God of the
Living_.