_HATRED AND LOVE_
I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle: "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other
emotion can do." The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say
nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically
unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it
is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.
However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth
century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and
there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always
recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and
is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals.
"The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his
old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide
mouth and deep red gullet." Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing
a dog's savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an
exactly similar spirit may be concealed--and not always concealed--in
a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination,
still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally
are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the
poignancy of the bitter saying: "I forgive him as a Christian--which
means that I don't forgive him at all." Under a decent, though
hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one
another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial
Rome.
Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received
in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime.
"Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold"; and there are unhappy
natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a
long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which
hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because
it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently
because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. "I
have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without
longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant?
No? Well, I do." It was a woman who wrote the words.
The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where
all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but
is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this
type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international
hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action,
and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this
kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted
above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit
of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which
started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before
long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the
source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic
principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but
it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure
its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire--it makes
even light rubbish deadly."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred
"steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there,
I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen
indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and
"steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire
to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative
that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred "steels
the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do," his
psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as
powerful as hatred to "steel the mind and set the resolution"--and
the name of this other emotion is love. It required some resolution
and a "steeled" mind for Father Damien to give himself in early
manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and
dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love
that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the
hands of "savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave
up home and country and friends dearer than his life." There was
"steel" in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest
honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude
of Tokat; and "steel" in an earlier and even more memorable decision
when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit,
fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing
India.
But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form
of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on
the human will is manifested. John Howard devoted the comforts
and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle
Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord
Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political
opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing
boys and factory slaves. If ever I knew a man whose resolution
was "steeled," it was this honoured friend of my early manhood,
and the steeling power was simply love. A humbler illustration
of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom
worldly people ridiculed and who "for fifty years seized every
chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school";
and this though a boy's nature is "wax to receive, and marble to
retain." The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even
by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to
be withheld.
I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions
in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind
must be "steeled" and the resolution "set" for a solemn work of
international justice. But hatred will not help us; for hatred
is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily
and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise. Hatred is
natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its
doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples: "A
new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Twelve
men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they changed the
face of the world. Are we to abjure the doctrine which wrought
this change, and give heed to the blind guides who would lure us
straight back to barbarism?
"What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign shall ye know them,
That they ruin and make dark;
"By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;
"By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old Barbarian,
The Barbarian come again."[*]
[Footnote *: G. K. Chesterton.]