Thus to love our fellow men is a difficult business,--there is none
harder. It is so difficult that only a few in any age succeed on so
conspicuous a scale as to attract prolonged attention. Yet the secret
of success is not obscure; it lies in that temper of compassion which
is the most beautiful of all features in the character of Jesus. When
He looked upon the multitude He was "moved with compassion"--never was
there more illuminative sentence. It reveals an attitude of mind
absolutely original. For the general attitude towards the multitude in
Christ's day was harsh and scornful. All the splendid intellectualism
of Greece existed for the favoured few; beneath that glittering edifice
of art and letters lay the dungeons of the slave. It was the same with
Rome; it was an empire of privilege, in which the multitude had no
part. Jewish society was built after the same pattern, except that
with the Pharisee the sense of religious superiority bred a kind of
arrogance much more bitter than that which is the fruit of intellectual
or social exclusiveness. With men of this temper the call to love all
men as fellows could only provoke anger and derision. What possible
relation could exist between an Athenian philosopher and a helot, a
Roman noble and a slave, a Pharisee proud of his meticulous knowledge
of the law, and the common people who were unlettered? The gulf that
yawned between such lives was as wide as that which separates the
scholar, the artist, or the aristocrat of modern Europe from the pale
toiler of a New York sweating-room, or the coal carriers of Zanzibar or
Aden. When Jesus bade the young ruler sell all that he had and give it
to the poor, He proposed an entirely unthinkable condition of
discipleship. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He
proposed instead real comradeship with the poor, He Himself being poor.
For two thousand years the pulpit has denounced the young ruler for not
doing what no one even now would think of doing--not even those who are
most eloquent in denunciation.
We may waive the question of whether the advice of Jesus to the young
ruler was meant to be of particular or universal application, but we
cannot ignore the new law of life which Jesus formulated when He made
compassion the supreme social virtue. For it is only through
compassion that we learn to understand those who differ from us in
social station or temperament, and can at all come to love them. Let
me examine my own natural tendencies, and I am soon made aware of how
impossible it is to love _all_ my fellow men. I commence my life, for
instance, under conditions which permit me to see only a small section
of society, which I imagine to be the world itself. I know nothing,
and am told nothing, of those whose lives do not lie in the direct line
of my limited vision. The process of education removes me at each
stage further from the likelihood of knowing them. I acquire ideals,
habits, and manners of which they are destitute. I come to regard an
acquaintance with various forms of knowledge as essential to life, and
I am naturally disdainful of those who do not possess this knowledge.
In the same way I regard a certain code of manners as binding, and the
lack of this code of manners in others as an outrage. My very thoughts
have their own dialect, and I am totally unacquainted with the dialect
of those whose thoughts differ from my own. Thus with the growth of my
culture there is the equal growth of prejudice; with the enjoyment of
my privilege, a tacit rejection and repudiation of the unprivileged.
How then am I ever to find myself in any relation of affection towards
these human creatures from whom I am alienated by the nature of my
education? If, by any chance, I come in contact with them, it is
certain that they will arouse in me repugnance and perhaps disgust. I
shall find them coarse, crude, and ignorant; their methods of speech
will grate upon me, their manners will repel me; they will be as truly
foreign to me as the natives of New Guinea, and their total incapacity
to share the thoughts which compose my own inner life will be scarcely
less complete. It is a truly humiliating thing to admit that
differences of nationality separate men less effectually than disparity
of manners. If I am at all fastidious I am more likely to be repelled
by coarse language, gross habits, or vulgar behaviour in my fellow
mortal than by all his errors in creed or morals. So little parts men,
and is permitted to part them, that it is very likely that some mere
awkwardness of behaviour in my fellow man may extirpate effectually the
regard I might have had for him. How little indeed is permitted to
part friends--often nothing more than a tone of voice, a word
misinterpreted, or something equally slight, the product very possibly
of shyness, or inability for right expression on a sudden call. And
there is all that goes by the name of antipathy, the nameless and quite
irrational repulsions which we permit ourselves to cherish, for which
we have no better excuse than that they are instinctive. With all
these forces against us how can we love our neighbour as ourselves? It
is something if we do not detest him; if we tolerate him it should be
counted to us for a virtue.
Yet the method by which we may love him is quite simple; it is to
approach him not with judgment but compassion, to put ourselves in his
place, to see his life from his point of view instead of our own. What
is his ignorance after all but lack of opportunity? What are his bad
manners but the penalty of a narrow life? What are these habits of his
which so offend me but things inevitable in that condition of servitude
which he occupies--a servitude, let me recollect, which ministers to my
ease and comfort? To-day, not less than in earlier generations,
society resembles the palaces of the Italian Renaissance,--the feast of
life in the painted hall, and the groaning of the prisoner in the
depths below. For every comfort that I have, some one has sweated. My
fire is lit not only with coal from the mine, but with the miner's
flesh and blood; my food has come through roaring seas in which men
perished by hurricane and shipwreck; the very books from which I draw
my culture are the product not alone of the scholar and the thinker,
but of rude unlettered men in forest and at forge who helped to make
them by their toil. If I were as educated as I claim to be I should
know myself debtor to the barbarian as truly as to the Greek, and as I
read my book I should see the forest falling that it might be woven
into paper, and men labouring in the heat of factories that the moulded
metal might become the organ of intelligence. Nay, I should see yet
more; for would it not appear that these nameless toilers are richer in
essential life, and in the deep knowledge of what man's existence is,
than even the scholar and the writer, whose main acquaintance with life
is with words rather than acts? They toil with tense muscles through
the summer heat and winter cold; they endure hardship and danger; and
week by week their scanty wage is shared by wives and children, who
excite in them tenderness and self-sacrifice, and repay them with
affection and devotion. For it is so decreed that the sacred
magnanimities of the human heart come to flower as fully in lives of
crude labour as in lives of ease; these roughened hands grow gentle
when they touch the heads of little children, on these strong breasts
the wife rests her weariness, and these lips that speak a language so
different from mine have nevertheless known the sacramental wine of
love. Were my life weighed with theirs might it not appear that theirs
was the richer in essential fortitude, in patience and endurance, in
all the final qualities that compose the finest manhood?
The spirit of compassion interprets these lives to me; it lends me
vision. It enables me to see them not in their artificial disparities,
but in their deep-lying kinship with mine and all other lives. And the
same thing happens when I survey lives stained with folly, wrecked by
weakness, or made detestable by sin and crime. I also have known
folly, weakness, sin; but for me there were compulsions to a virtuous
life which these never knew. Why am I not as these? Perhaps because
my nature rests on a securer equipoise, or because there is in it a
certain power of moral recuperation which these have lacked, or because
I have the prudence that stops short of consummated folly, or because
my environment imposes and creates restraint, or because I have never
known the peculiar violence of temptation before which they succumbed.
There may be a hundred reasons, but scarce one which gives me cause for
boasting. With their life to live, had I done better? Exposed to
their temptations, deprived of all the helpful friendships that have
interposed between my life and ruin, should I have done as well? In
those wakeful hours of night when all my past life runs before me like
a frieze of flame, how clearly do I see how frequently I grazed the
snare, hung over gulfs of wild disaster, courted ruin, and escaped I
know not how? Remembering this, can I be hard towards those who fell?
Can I pride myself on an escape in which my will had little part, a
deliverance which was a kind of miracle, wrought not by virtue or
discretion, but by some outside force which thrust out a strong and
willing hand to save me? And, as these thoughts pursue me, I find
myself all at once regarding these wrecked and miserable lives not from
the outside but the inside. I penetrate their inmost coil of being,
and see with horror the crumbling of the house of life--with horror,
but also with a torturing pity. And then because compassion lives in
me, I can at last separate between the sinner and his sin. The sin
remains abhorrent, but I cannot hate the sinner. I see him as one who
has fallen in a bad cause, but his wounds cry so loud for pity that I
forget the moral treason that has brought him to a battle-field so
ignominious and so disastrous. And out of the pity grows love, for
love is the natural end of pity; and the magnanimity of love,
overleaping moral values, fixes only on the fact of suffering that
appeals for succour, misery that cries for help. This was the vital
fact that Jesus saw when He had compassion on the multitude.
Jesus had compassion on the multitude, and He gives the reason; He saw
them as sheep having no shepherd. It was the element of misdirection
in their lives on which Jesus fixed His glance--it was for lack of
guidance and a shepherd they had gone astray. May not the same be said
of all the lives that fail, whether through ignorance or want, folly or
crime? Rightly guided they might have attained knowledge and esteem,
wisdom and virtue; and if that be so, no man of right spirit can refuse
to feel the pathos of their situation. It is to this point that Jesus
leads us. He makes us conscious of "the still sad music of humanity."
No further incentive is needed to make us love humanity than the pathos
of the human lot. A man may be a knave, a fool, a rogue; yet could we
unravel all the secrecies of his disaster we should find so much to
move our pity, so much in his life which resembles crises in our own,
that in the end the one vision that remains with us is of a wounded
brother man. When once we see that vision all our pride of virtue dies
in us, and quicker yet to die is the temper of contempt which we have
nurtured towards those whose faults offend us. A yet greater offense
is ours if we can behold suffering, however caused, without pity.
Worse than the worst crime which man can commit against society, or the
worst personal wrong he can inflict on us, is the temper in ourselves
which judges him without mercy, and refuses him the one medicine that
may reinvigorate him--the balm of pity and forgiveness. And, after
all, of what wrong is it not true that the bitterest suffering it
creates falls not upon the wronged but the wronger, so that in the end
the sinner is the real victim, and like all victims should be the
object of compassion rather than of vengeance?