When I recollect these experiences, and the almost breathless sense of
joy which accompanied them, I can only marvel that I lived so many
years without discovering the path that led to them. The path was
quite plain, and nothing concealed it from me but my own pride. I
could even see with distinctness those who trod it, not only the saints
of far-off days, but men like Father Dolling, and women whose pale
intense faces met mine from beneath the quaint ugliness of Salvation
Army bonnets. These soldiers of the League of Service moved everywhere
around me in the incessant processions of a tireless love. I knew
their works, and there was no hour when my heart did not go out to them
in sympathy. Why was it that I was only sympathizer and spectator,
never comrade?
Partly through a kind of mischievous humility which was really pride.
They could do these things; I could not, nor were they required of me.
It needed special gifts for such a work, and I had not these gifts.
Besides, had I not my own work? Was it not as important to educate
persons of some culture and social position in a knowledge of Christian
truth as to redeem lost people from the hell of their misdoing?
Certainly it was easier and pleasanter. I found in it that most subtle
of all gratifications, the sense of ability efficiently applied, and
winning praise by its exertion. There was no one who wished me to live
in any other way than that in which I lived. Those to whom I
ministered were satisfied with me, and had I told them that I wished to
do the sort of things that Salvation Army people did among the slums,
they would have been shocked, and would certainly have dissuaded me.
And so to this mischievous humility which assured me that I had no
fitness for the kind of life which I knew was the life of the saints in
every age, there was added the dull pressure of convention. Why should
I do what no one expected me to do? Why could I not be content to
fulfill the common standard approved by the average conception of
Christianity?
I can see now how foolish and how wrong these thoughts were. I saw it
even then at intervals. Again and again, like a torturing flash of
fire, there ran through me illumining agonized dissatisfactions with
myself, my work, my whole position. And again and again I let the
flame die down, knowing not that the Son of Man had walked amid the
fire. Nay more, I deliberately smothered the holy fire, being in part
fearful of it, and of what its consequence might be, if once it were
allowed to triumph. For I knew that if I followed these strange
impulses my whole life must be changed, and I did not want it changed.
I did not want to give up the ease of an assured position, the calm of
studious hours, the tasks which flattered my ability. I did not want
to face what I knew must happen, the estrangement of old friendships,
the rupture of accustomed forms of life. Besides, I might be wholly
wrong. I might have no real fitness for the tasks I contemplated;
saints, like poets, were born, not made. No one who knew me would have
believed me better fitted for any kind of life than that I lived. I
had no friend who did not think my present life adequate and
satisfactory, and many envied me for the good fortune that had given me
just the kind of sphere which seemed best suited to me.
But now I see, as I look back, that at the root of all my inconsistency
there lay this one thing, I was not a lover of my kind. I did not love
men as men, humanity as humanity, as Jesus did. Of course I loved
individuals, and even groups of men and classes of men, who could
understand my thoughts, recognize my qualities, and repay my affection
with affection. But to feel love for men as men; for those whose
vulgarity distressed me, whose ignorance offended me, whose method of
life repelled me; love for the drudge, the helot, the social pariah;
love for people who had no beauty that men should desire them, nor any
grace of mind or person, nor any quality that kindled interest; love
for the dull average, with their painful limitations of mind and ideal,
the gray armies of featureless grief, whose very sorrows had nothing
picturesque in them and no tragic fascination--no, for these I had no
real love. I had a deep commiseration, but it was that kind of
romantic or aesthetic pity which begins and ends in its own expression.
I did not know them by actual contact; I could not honestly say that I
wished to know them. And then the thought came to me, and grew in me,
that Jesus did love these people with an unconquerable passion. The
multitudes to whom He preached were composed, as all multitudes are, of
quite ordinary immemorable people. He also, to the eyes of those who
saw Him in the peasant garb of Galilee, and judged only by outward
appearance, was a common man. And so it would appear that if I did not
love men after the fashion in which Jesus loved them, it was very
unlikely that I should love Jesus Christ Himself if He once more
appeared in the habit in which men saw Him long ago in Galilee. A
Jesus, footsore, weary, travel-stained, wearing the raiment of a
village carpenter, speaking with the accent of an unconsidered
province, surrounded by a rabble of rude fishermen, among whom mingled
many persons of doubtful character--how should I regard Him? Should I
discern the Light and Life of men beneath His gray disguise of
circumstance? Should I have left my books, my studious calm, my
pleasant and sufficing tasks, to listen to One who seemed so little
likely to instruct me? Would not the same spirit of disdain which made
me think lightly and even scornfully of persons whose lives had no
resemblance to my own, have made me disdainful of the Man of Nazareth?
I knew the answer and I quailed before it. I saw that the temper of my
mind was the temper of the Pharisee, and had I lived two thousand years
ago in Jerusalem or Galilee, I should have rejected Jesus even as the
scribes and Pharisees rejected Him.
And I should have rejected Him for the same reason, because I had no
truly generous love of man as man. I should have been no better able
to perceive than they that it had pleased God to clothe Himself in the
flesh of one who united in His own person all those disabilities which
incur the scorn of those who account themselves superior and
cultivated, such as lowly and doubtful origin, poverty and the lack of
liberal education, and methods of life which outraged social use and
custom. Did not Jesus demand for the understanding of Himself
precisely that temper which enabled Him to understand others, the
temper which discerns the soul beneath all disguise of circumstance?
He discerned the splendid and divine beneath the sordid. He saw
beneath the drift of sin the buried magnificence of human nature as men
discover the hidden temple beneath the sand-drift of the desert. He
was able to love all men because all men were to Him living souls. And
His own manifestation to the world was such that only those who had
this temper could at all perceive His divine significance. The
Pharisee could not see that significance simply because he was not
accustomed to see men as men. He had no real interest in man as man.
He was not a lover of his kind. Hence, when the Son of Man came out of
Nazareth, the Pharisee was too careless or too supercilious to regard
Him with interest. The divine wonder passed him by; all he saw was a
wandering fanatic with no place to lay His head. He could not pierce
the disguise of circumstance, and bow in love and awe before the soul
of Jesus because he was not accustomed to discern the soul in common
people. And so there came home to me the awful truth that I was not a
lover of my kind. I was even as the Pharisees, and in denying my
regard and love to the lowliest of men and women I was rejecting Jesus
Christ. That which had seemed to me a strange exaggeration or an
enigmatic sentence, now became a rational principle, a saying that had
its root in the deep truth and reality of things; inasmuch as I showed
not love to the least of these, my fellows, I denied my love to Jesus
Christ Himself.