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 the
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,