If these things be true, if the whole tradition of Jesus is an
exposition of love as the law of life, the deduction is entirely
simple, and as logical as it is simple. That deduction has been
already stated. It is that Christianity is a method of life by which
men and women are taught and inspired to love as Jesus loved, and to
live loving and lovable lives. It has little to do with creeds, and
still less with formal codes of conduct. For this reason such a
definition of Christianity will satisfy neither the theologian nor the
philosopher. Jesus never expected that it would. He knew that the one
would regard it as heretical, and the other as so deficient in subtlety
as to seem foolish. Therefore He made His appeal to simple and natural
people, saying that what was hidden from the wise and prudent, was
revealed to babes.
The simple and natural people understood Jesus; they always do. The
sophisticated and artificial people did not understand Him; they never
will. With scarcely an exception the people of intelligence and
culture regarded Him with disdain, withdrew from Him, or violently
opposed Him. The reason for their conduct lay not so much in either
their culture or their intelligence, as in the kind of life that seemed
to be necessary to them as the expression of their culture.
Thus, they were full of prejudices, prepossessions, and foregone
conclusions, all of which had the sanction of their culture. It was
enough for them to know that Jesus came from Nazareth and was
unlettered; this produced in them violent scorn and antipathy. They
were still further offended because He used none of the shibboleths
with which they were familiar. Nor could they conceive of any life as
satisfactory but the kind of life they lived, and that was a life of
social complexity, ruled by conventional usages and maxims, and
essentially artificial in ideal and practice. Jesus, therefore, turned
from them to the simple and natural people, fishermen, artisans, and
humble women, in whom the natural instincts had fuller play. His
reward was immediate; then, and ever since, the Common People heard Him
gladly.
The reason why simple and natural people readily understand Jesus is
that in the kind of life they live the primal emotions are supreme.
The very narrowness of their social outlook intensifies those emotions.
They have little to distract them; they are not bewildered by endless
disquisitions on conduct, and religion itself is for them an emotion
rather than a systematized creed. For the poor man home, children,
fireside affection, mean more than for the rich man, because they are
his only wealth. This is the lesson which Wordsworth has so nobly
taught in his "_Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_,"--
How, by heaven's grace this Clifford's heart was framed,
How he, long forced in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed.
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
People who live thus, in wise simplicity, undistracted by the numerous
illusions of an artificial life, have no difficulty in accepting
Christ's teaching that love is the supreme law of life, because love
means everything to them in the kind of life they lead. In the wisdom
of the heart they are more learned than the wisest Pharisee, who is
rarely "softened into feeling," whose whole social life indeed imposes
a restraint on feeling. What peasant father would not welcome a
returning prodigal, what peasant mother would not open her arms wide to
gather to her bosom a penitent daughter, recovered from the cruel snare
of cities? Certainly one is much more likely to find such acts of pure
feeling among peasant folk than among the rich and cultured, for the
peasant cares less for opinion, is less respectful of social etiquette,
and follows more closely in his actions the instincts of primal
affection. Who has not discovered among poor and humble folk a strange
and beautiful lenience, the lenience of a great compassion, towards
those sins which in more artificial conditions of society are held to
justify the most violent condemnation, and do indeed close the heart to
pity? In poor men's huts beside the Sea of Galilee Jesus Himself had
found love, love in all its divine daring, lenience, and magnanimity,
and He knew that among people like these He would be understood. He
also knew that the only people fitted to interpret His doctrine of
sovereign love to the world were these simple folk of the lake and
field, and therefore to them He committed His Gospel, and from them He
chose His disciples.
It needed a peasant Christ to teach these things, for no other could
have imagined them, no other could have had the daring and simplicity
to utter them. A peasant Christ He was, living, thinking, and acting
as a peasant even in His highest moments of inspiration. It was
because He always remained a peasant that He was able to see so clearly
the defects of that more intricate social system to which His ministry
introduced Him. He brought with Him a new scale of values, which He
had learned in the school of a more primal life than could be found in
cities. Nature always spoke in Him, convention never. In His
treatment of sin it is always the voice of Nature that we hear
triumphing over the verdicts of convention. The sins which convention
regards as inexpiable are sins of passion; the sins which it excuses
are sins of temper, such as greed, malice, craft, unkindness, cruelty.
Jesus entirely reverses the scale. His pity is reserved for outcasts,
His harshest words are addressed to those whom the world calls good.
Folly He views with infinite compassion--the foolish man is as a lost
sheep whose very helplessness invokes our pity. But for the man of
hard and self-sufficient nature, whose very righteousness is a mixture
of prudence and egoism, He has only words of flame. An offense against
virtue counts for less with Him than an offense against love. No
wonder the Pharisees called Him a blasphemer! Were the true nature of
Christ's teaching understood to-day many who profess to revere Him
would join in the same accusation. What more offensive and unpalatable
truth could be presented to mankind than this on which Jesus constantly
insists, that sins of temper are much more harmful than sins of
passion, that they spring from a more incurable malignancy of nature,
that they produce far wider and more disastrous suffering?
Yet the truth is clear enough to all broadly truthful and simple
natures, which are not bewildered by conventional views of right and
wrong. Who has occasioned more suffering, the youth who has sinned
against himself in wild folly and repented, or the man who has planned
his life with that cold craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices
everything to self-advantage? Can any human mind measure the various
and almost infinite wrongs committed by the man who piles up through
years of sordid avarice an unjust fortune? Who can count the broken
hearts in the pathway of that implacable ambition which "wades through
slaughter to a throne"? These things may not be apparent to the man
whose nature is subdued to the hue of that artificial society in which
he lives, a society which permits such crimes to pass unquestioned.
They are certainly not perceived by the criminals themselves. To-day,
as in the day of Christ, they "devour widows' houses, and for a
pretense make long prayers," save, perhaps, that more blind than the
ancient Pharisees, their prayers seem real, and they themselves are
unconscious of pretense. Now also, as then, they give their tithes in
conventional benevolence, forgetting, and hoping to make others forget,
the sources of their wealth in their use of it. How is it that such
men are so unconscious of offense? Simply because they have never
grasped Christ's deliberate statement that sins of temper are much
worse than sins of passion; that cruelty is a worse thing than folly;
that the wrong wrought by squandering the substance in a far country is
more quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, than the wrong of
hoarding one's substance in the avarice which neglects the poor, or
adding to it by methods which trample the weak and humble in the dust,
as deserving neither pity nor attention.
Yet it needs but a very brief examination of society to prove the truth
of Christ's contention; very little experience of life to discover that
the utmost corruption of the human heart lies in lovelessness. The
spiteful and rancorous temper, always seeking occasions of offense; the
jealous spirit which cannot bear the spectacle of another's joy; the
bitter nagging tongue, darting hither and thither like a serpent's fang
full of poison, and diabolically skilled in wounding; the sour and
grudging disposition, which seems most contented with itself when it
has produced the utmost misery in others; the narrow mind and heart
destitute of magnanimity; the cold and egoistic temperament, which
demands subservience of others and receives their service without
thanks, as though the acknowledgment of gratitude were weakness--these
are common and typical forms of lovelessness, and who can estimate the
sum of suffering they inflict? Their fruit is everywhere the same;
love repressed, children estranged, the home made intolerable. It does
but add to the offense of these unlovely people that in what the world
calls morality they are above reproach, for they instill a hatred of
morality itself by their appropriation of it. Before them love flies
aghast, and the tenderest emotions of the heart fall withered. Could
the annals of human misery be fairly written, it might appear that not
all the lusts and crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye have
wrought such wide-spread misery, have inflicted such general
unhappiness, as these sins of temper, so common in their operation that
they pass almost unrebuked, but so wide-spread in their effects that
their havoc is discovered in every feature of our social life.