Nevertheless there are occasions in life when these things become
evident to even the least observant of us. When we stand beside the
newly dead the most intolerable reflection of countless mourners is
that their tears fall on quiet lips to which they gave scant caresses,
in the days of health: their passionate words of love are uttered to
unhearing ears, which in life waited eagerly for such assurances as
these, and waited vainly. All the purity and beauty of the vanished
human soul is revealed to us now, when it is no longer in our power to
gladden or delight it with our kindness or our praise. All the willing
service rendered to us by those folded hands and resting feet, which we
so thanklessly accepted, is seen as a thing dear and precious to us
now, when the opportunity of thanks is past forever. What would we
give now if but for one brief hour we might recall our dead just to say
the tender things we might have said and did not say, through all those
days and years when they were with us,--presences familiar and
accustomed, moving round us with so soft a tread that we scarce
regarded them, nor laid on them detaining hands, nor lifted our
preoccupied and careless eyes to theirs!
For most of us, alas, it is not Grief and Love alone who conduct us to
the chambers of the dead; the sad and silent Angel of Reproach also
stands beside the bed, and the shadow of his wings falls upon the
features fixed in their immutable appeal, their pathetic and unwilling
accusation. Then it is that veil after veil is lifted from the past,
till in the pitiless light we read ourselves with a new understanding
of our faults. We see that through some element of hardness in
ourselves which we allowed to grow unchecked; through vain pride, or
obstinate perversity, or mere thoughtless disregard, we repulsed love
from the dominion of our hearts, and made him the servitor of our
desires, but no longer the lord of our behaviour and the spirit of our
lives. And now as we gaze on these things across the gulf of the
irreparable, we see our sin and how it came to pass; how we were unkind
not in the things we did but in those we failed to do; how, without
being cruel, our denied response to hearts that craved our tenderness
became a more subtle cruelty than angry word or hasty blow; how with
every duty accurately measured and fulfilled, yet love evaporated in
the cold and cheerless atmosphere of repression and aloofness with
which we clothed ourselves; and then the significance of Christ's
teaching comes home to us, for we know too late, that kindness is more
than righteousness, and tenderness more than duty, and that to have
loved with all our hearts is the only fulfilling of the law which
heaven approves. None, bowed beside the newly dead, ever regretted
that they had loved too well; millions have wept the bitterest tears
known to mortals because they loved too little, and wronged by their
poverty of love the sacred human presences now withdrawn forever from
their vision.
But there are other and more joyous ways of learning the truth of
Christ's teaching, ways that are accessible to all of us. The best and
most joyous way of all is to make experiment of it. Here is a law of
life which to the sophisticated mind seems impossible, impracticable,
and even absurd. No amount of argument will convince us that we can
find in love a sufficient rule of life, or that "to renounce joy for
our fellow's sake is joy beyond joy." How are we to be convinced?
Only by making the experiment, for we really believe only that which we
practice. "I wish I had your creed, then I would live your life," said
a seeker after truth to Pascal, the great French thinker. "Live my
life, and you will soon have my creed," was the swift reply. The
solution of all difficulties of faith lies in Pascal's answer, which is
after all but a variant of Christ's greater saying, "He that willeth to
do the will of God, shall know the doctrine." Is not the whole reason
why, for so many of us, the religion of Christ which we profess has so
little in it to content us, simply this, that we have never heartily
and honestly tried to practice it? We have accepted Christ's religion
indeed, as one which upon the whole should be accepted by virtuous men,
or as one which has sufficient superiorities to certain other forms of
religion to turn the scale of our intellectual hesitation, and win from
us reluctant acquiescence. But have we accepted it as the only
authoritative rule of practice? Have we ever tried to live one day of
our life so that it should resemble one of the days of the Son of Man?
Knowing what He thought and did, and how He felt, have we ever tried to
think and act and feel as He did--and if we have not, what wonder that
our religion, being wholly theoretical, appears to us tainted with
unreality, a thin-spun web of barren, fragile idealism which leaves us
querulous and discontented?
Such a sense of discontent should be for us, as it really is, the
signal of some deep mistake in our conception of religion. It should
at least cause us alarm, for what can be more alarming than that we
should be haunted with a sense of unreality in religion, yet still
profess religion for reasons which leave the heart indifferent and
barely serve to satisfy the intellect? And what can produce a keener
torture in a sincere mind than this eternal suspicion of unreality in a
religion whose conventional authority is acknowledged and accepted?
I am convinced that these feelings are general among great multitudes
of the more thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Christianity.
Religion rests with them upon a certain intellectual acquiescence, or
upon the equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the compromise of
intellectual hesitations. Their tastes are gratified by the normal
forms of worship, and their sentiments are softly stirred and
stimulated. But when the voice of the orator dies upon the porches of
the ear, and the music of the Church is silent, and the seduction of
splendid ceremonial is forgotten, there remains the uneasy sense that
between all this and the actual Carpenter-Redeemer there is a wide gulf
fixed; that Jesus scarcely lived and died to produce only such results
as these; that there must be some other method of interpreting His
life, much simpler, much truer, and much more satisfying. Is it
wonderful that among such men the current forms of Christianity excite
no enthusiasm, and that the bonds of their attachment to it are lax and
easily dissolved? And what is felt by these men within the Church is
felt with much greater strength by multitudes of sincere men outside
the Church, who do not hesitate to express their feeling and to
pronounce current Christianity a burlesque and tragic travesty upon the
real religion of the Nazarene.
But the moment we do begin to live, however inefficiently, as Jesus
lived, the sublime reality of His religion is revealed to us. We do
actually find that in the postponement of our own desires for the sake
of others; in the abandonment of our own apparently legitimate
ambitions for the service of the poor; in the patient endurance of
affront and injury; in the forgiveness of those whose wrong seems
inexpiable; in the daily exercise of love that "seeketh not itself to
please," but hopeth all things, and believeth all things,--there is a
joy beyond joy, and an exceeding great reward. We do actually find
that to forgive our brother freely is better both for him and us than
to judge him harshly, and the wisdom of Jesus is thus justified in its
moral and social efficacy. We do actually find that in ceasing to live
by worldly maxims and by living instead according to the maxims of
Jesus, we have attained a form of happiness so incredibly sweet and
pure that the world holds nothing that resembles it, and nothing that
we would exchange for it. For this is now our great reward, that peace
attends our footsteps, and that our hearts are no longer vexed with the
perturbations of vanity and self-love, of envy and revenge. We find
human nature answering to our touch even as it answered to the touch of
Jesus, and revealing to us all its best and purest treasure. We find
the very natures we thought intractable and destitute of all affinity
with ours, brought near our own; the very men and women we thought
wholly alien to us suddenly made lovable, and full of qualities that
claim our love. And as we thus humbly follow in the steps of Jesus,
trying to live each day as He lived, we know that sublimest joy of
all--we feel Jesus acting once more through our actions, and we see in
the eyes that meet our own the same look that Jesus saw in the eyes of
those whom He had cured of misery and redeemed from sin.