"Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye, and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
Love will waste no time trying to explain itself to the selfish. If Love does not commend itself by its own light and warmth to a man, no forms of words can make him understand it. The sensual, the greedy, the hard, and the cruel Love will treat as gently and kindly as circumstances permit; yet expect as a matter of course that they will interpret Love's justice as hardness, kindness as weakness, temperance as asceticism, forbearance as cowardice, sacrifice as stupidity. Those who love will not mind being misunderstood by those who do not; knowing that any attempted explanation would only increase their conceit and hardness of heart, and so make a bad matter worse.
"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them under their feet, and turn and rend you."
Since Love is "the greatest thing in the world," we are bound to stand ready with girt loins, and trimmed, burning lamps, to shed its light far and wide. To cover it up would be to deprive ourselves and our fellows of the one sight in all the world best worth seeing, and so to hinder its spread. False modesty that would keep Love's good works out of sight is as bad as false pride that would thrust oneself forward. Though works done merely to be seen are not good at all, yet good works genuinely done for Love's sake gain added influence and lustre when frankly and freely allowed to be seen as the beautiful things that they are. The Christian is under spiritual compulsion to be a missionary. Other systems draw their little circles of disciples about them, as Jesus drew His twelve. One cannot hold what he believes to be a true and helpful view of life without wishing to communicate it to others. Yet this tendency, which is natural to every principle, is characteristic of Christianity in a unique degree. For the Christian Spirit consists in Love, the desire to give to others the best one has. And what can be so good, so desirable to impart, as this very Spirit of Love, which is Christianity itself? That is why the Christian must, in some form or other,—by journeying to foreign lands, by contribution to missionary work at home, by gifts to Christian education, by support of settlement work, or perhaps best of all by the silent diffusion of a Christian example in the neighbourhood, or the unnoticed expression of the Christian Spirit in the home,—be a propagator of the Spirit of Love he has himself received.
"Ye are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a lamp and put it under the bushel, but on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house. Even so let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
Does virtue bring happiness? is a question every philosophy of life must meet. Yet before it can be rightly answered it must be rightly put.
For if by virtue you mean something negative, conventional,—not lying, not cheating, not swearing, not drinking; and if by happiness you mean something passive, external,—riches, offices, entertainments, and honours; then virtue and happiness do not necessarily go together in life, and no philosophy can show that they should.
If a man were to persuade himself that they do go together, and should seek this sort of happiness by cultivating this sort of virtue, he would miss true virtue and true happiness. For both virtue and happiness are positive, active; so interrelated that the happiness must be found in that furtherance of our common social interests in which the exercise of virtue consists.
Jesus bids us take an active, devoted interest in the interests of others and of society. Now whoever shares and serves a wide range of interests has an interested, and therefore an interesting, life. But the interesting life is the happy life. Love, whether it has much or little wealth and station, always has interests and aims; always finds or makes friends to share them,—in other words, is always happy.
The beatitudes are illustrations of this deep identity between interest taken and happiness found; statements of the truth that Love going out to serve and share the interests and aims of others, and blessedness flowing in to fill the heart thereby enlarged for its reception, are the outside and inside of the same spiritual experience.
To think little of self is the key to the joy that goes with much thought for others.
Love is so going out to others as to make them as real as self. But that is what no man puffed up with self-importance can do. Where self is much in the foreground others are pushed to the rear. Self-importance and Love cannot dwell together in the same house of clay. As one goes up in the scales of the balance the other goes down. To be rich in the shared lives of others one must be poor in his own self-esteem. The two are in inverse proportion. Modesty is impossible of direct cultivation. It isn't safe to talk or even think about it much. As Pascal remarks, "Few people talk of humility humbly." Like Love it is the manifestation of something deeper than itself. Unless one is in intimate personal relations with one whom he reveres as greater, stronger, better than himself, it is obviously impossible for him to be modest. If he is in such relations, it is equally impossible for him not to be modest. Hence, as Love is the inmost quality of the Christian, the inevitable manifestation to his fellow-men of what the Father is to him, so modesty is the surest outward sign of this inward grace. Conceit is a public proclamation of the poverty of one's personal relations. For if this conceited fellow, this vain woman, really had the honour of the intimate acquaintance of some one better and greater than their petty, miserable selves, they could not possibly be the vain, conceited creatures that they are. Every one who lives in the presence of the great Father, and walks in the company of His glorious Son, is sure to find modesty and humility the natural and spontaneous expression of his side of these great relationships. "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Our shortcomings frankly confessed prepare us for Love's consolation.
We all fall short of that patient consideration, that courteous kindliness, which makes the feelings and interests of others as precious as our own. Some of us fail in one way, some in another. But we all are unprofitable servants of the Love that would make our lives one with all the lives that we touch. To forget or deny that we fail is to lose sight of Love altogether. He who thinks he succeeds thereby shows that he fails; he who knows and laments that he fails comes as near as man can to the goal.
Love neither asks nor expects a clean record; else it would have no disciples. Love fully and freely forgives, at the eleventh hour welcomes the idler, and offers its fulness of joy to all who, whatever their repented past may have been, make service and kindness to others their eager present concern. For no sin frankly confessed, no wrong deed sincerely repented, no loss squarely met, no bereavement bravely endured, can shut out from Love's consolation those who serve with the best there is in them the persons who still need their aid. "Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted."
To meet criticism with kindness, crossness with geniality, insult with courtesy, and injury with charity is the way to conquer the world.
By nature we are creatures of suggestion. A hateful look, an ugly word, a spiteful sneer, a cruel blow, make us hateful and ugly and spiteful and cruel in turn. For the empty heart flashes back in resentment whatever attitude another's act suggests.
Meekness greets as a friend the just critic, and for unjust and unkind treatment makes allowance as due to the blindness or hardness or weakness of the pitiful person who has nothing better to give. Meekness makes the soft answer that turns away wrath, and treats one who wrongs us all the more gently. Thus the meekness of Love gives both power to possess our own souls in patience under all provocation, and power, not indeed to coerce the bodies of others, but to win the consent of their souls. "Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth."
Righteousness is something of which we can have no more and no less than we wish.
He who is good enough is not good at all, and never will be any better. For righteousness is right relation to others; and so long as there are things we can do to help others, its infinite task is unfinished. Yet though the goal ever advances and never comes within reach, aspiration is achievement; progress is attainment. If we could come to the end of our journey; if we could see the world's claims on us met, the deeds of which we are capable done, that moment would mark the death of our souls. Just because Love grows by loving and serving, and makes ever greater and greater demands, it prophesies there shall be forever and ever things to do that will make life worth while. "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled."
The depth of our sympathy for those below us in secular service and station measures our worth in the eyes of those spiritually higher than we.
Love is like a tree; if it is not to be scorched in the blaze of ambition and withered in the heat of competition, its roots of sympathy must go down as deep into the soil of the obscure and lowly lives on whose humble toil we depend as its branches spread into the upper air of social distinction and station.
Unless we have much sympathy for those who toil on the farm and on the sea, in the factory and the mine, behind the counter and the desk, in the kitchen and laundry, what we call courtesy in the drawing room, or charity on the platform, is hollow mockery and Pharisaic sham. "Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy."
In order for Love to shine through them there must be nothing else in our hearts.
Love demands everything or nothing. It refuses to dwell in quarters or halves of our souls. The least flaw of pride, greed, or lust is enough to make them opaque. Greed, lust, pride, hate, so blind our eyes to the real selves of others that we cannot see or treat them as they really are; that is, cannot love them. It reduces them to mere means and tools of our passions and pleasures; and one who so regards persons can never love either them or any person aright. Only the pure can see Love; for only the pure can experience that union of one's whole self with the whole self of others in which Love consists. "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God."
Just so sure as we love two or more persons we shall do all in our power to keep them from hating each other.
We wish everyone to love those whom we love. If anybody hates one we love, it hurts us as much as it does the one hated, even more than it would to be hated ourselves. And if anyone whom we love is hating another, we are even more sorry for him than we are for the person he hates, and make all haste to deliver him from this most dreadful condition. The more we love our fellows, the more we hate to see misunderstanding, ill-will, strife, between them.
Not that the Christian is unwilling or afraid to fight. Where deliberate wrong is arrayed against the rights of men, where fraud is practised on the unprotected, where hypocrisy imposes on the credulous, where vice betrays the innocent, where inefficiency sacrifices precious human interests, where avarice oppresses the poor, where tyranny tramples on the weak, there the man who shares the Father's Love for His maltreated children, the man who walks daily in the companionship of the Christ who owns all the downtrodden as His brothers, will be the most fearless and uncompromising foe of every form of injustice and oppression. Property, reputation, position, time, strength, influence, health, life itself if need be, will be thrown unreservedly into the fight against vice and sin. He cannot keep in with the Father and with Christ and not come out in opposition to everything that wrongs and injures the humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child.
Fighting, however, is not altogether uncongenial to the descendants of our brute progenitors. To fight our own battles, and occasionally a few for our neighbours, comes all too naturally to most of us. Fighting God's battles on principle is a very different thing. To feel entirely tranquil in the midst of the combat; to know that we are not alone on the side of the right; to have the real interests of our opponents at heart all the time; to be ever ready to forgive them, and to ask their forgiveness for any excess of zeal we may have shown; to have the peace of God in our hearts, and no trace of malice, in deed, or word, or thought, or feeling,—this is not altogether natural, and the man who does his fighting on that basis gives pretty good assurance of dwelling in the Christian Spirit. No other adequate provision for maintaining peace in the midst of effective warfare, and making peace for others as well as for ourselves the instant the need for war is over, has ever been devised. The peacemakers of this fearless, earnest, strenuous type have the unmistakable right to be called the children of God. "Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God."
All who love must expect to be hated by the foes of those whom they love.
Because Jesus loved the common people and sought to deliver them from their fears and errors, the men who traded on those fears and errors put Him to an ignominious death. If we love and serve the despised, the abused, the plundered, those who despise and abuse and plunder them will do to us the worst they dare. The road of Love is marked at every turn by a cross. Whoever in business, society, or politics makes as real as his own the interests and the wrongs of all whom he can reach and touch, will be disliked, criticised, misrepresented, vilified, condemned. He will pay Love's price of persecution.
Christian sacrifice closely resembles Greek temperance and courage. There is, however, this essential distinction. The Christian takes on not merely the pains and privations which are essential to his personal welfare, or the welfare of his community or state; he takes on whatever suffering the Father's Love for all His children calls him to undergo; gives up whatever indulgences the service of Christ requires him to dispense with; adopts whatever mingling of hardship and self-denial will keep him in most effective and sympathetic fellowship with those who have discovered the same great spiritual secret as himself. Thus, though to the uninitiated outsider much of his life looks hard and severe, on the inside it is easy and light; for the companionship with the Father, with Christ, and with Christian people is so much greater and dearer than the material and sensuous delights it may incidentally take away, that on the inside it does not wear the aspect of loss and sacrifice at all, but rather that of a glory and a gain. Still, since this element of pleasant things foregone, and hard things endured, is ever present, and since it has to be judged by people on the outside as well as by those on the inside of the experience, in recognition of this truth Christianity has made its symbol before the uninitiated world the cross. As in the life of the Master, so in the life of every faithful disciple, the cross must be borne, the perpetual sacrifice must be made, as the price of Love's presence in a world of selfishness and hate; but the cross is transfigured into a crown of rejoicing, the sacrifice is transformed into privilege and pleasure by those precious personal relationships which are the supreme glory and gladness of the soul, and which could be maintained on no cheaper terms. The sacrifice that the Christian makes to get his Father's will, his Master's mission, accomplished in the world which so sorely needs it, is like the sacrifice a mother makes for her sick and suffering child,—the dearest and sweetest experience of life. The cross thus gladly borne, the yoke of sacrifice thus unostentatiously assumed, is the supreme expression of the Christian Spirit.
Like all high-cost things, sacrifice for Love's sake carries a high premium. It admits, as nothing else does, to the inner circle of the immortal lovers of their fellows, to the intimate fellowship of the Lord of Love, Jesus Christ.
Joy follows incidentally and inevitably from the maintenance of these great Christian relationships. A gloomy, depressed, despondent tone and temper, unless it be demonstrably pathological, is public proclamation that the deep mines of these Christian relationships, with their inexhaustible resources, are either undeveloped or unworked. For no man who looks through sunshine and shower, through food and raiment, through family and friendship, through society and the moral order of the world, up into the face of the Giver of them all as his Father; who knows how to summon to his side the gentle and gracious companionship of Christ, alike in the pressure of perplexity and in the quiet of solitude; who knows how to unlock the treasures of Christian literature, to appropriate the meaning of Christian worship, and to avail himself of the comfort and support that is always latent in the hearts of his Christian friends,—no man in whom these vast personal resources are developed and employed can ever long remain disconsolate.
Even in prosperity, popularity, and outward success it takes considerable mixture of these deeper elements to keep the tone of life constantly on the high level of joy. But adversity is the real test. Then the man without these interior resources gives way, breaks down, becomes querulous, fretful, irritable, sour. On the other hand, the man who can make mistakes, and take the criticism they bring, and go on as cheerfully as if no blunder had been made and no vote of censure had been passed; the man who can be hated for the good things he tries to do, and condemned for bad things he never did and never meant to do; the man who can work hard, and contentedly take poverty for pay; the man who can serve devotedly people who revile and betray him in return; the man who can discount in advance the unpopularity, misrepresentation, and defeat a right course will cost, and then resolutely set about it; the man who takes persecution and treachery as serenely as other men take honours and emoluments,—this man, we may be sure, has dug deep an invested heavily in the field where the priceless Christian treasure lies concealed.
"Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."
Jesus' Spirit of Love is capable of absorbing into itself whatever we have found valuable in the four previous systems.
The Epicurean's varied and spontaneous joy in life is not diminished, but enhanced, by the Christian Spirit, which multiplies this joy as many times as there are persons whom one knows and loves. The Epicurean lives in the little world of himself, and a few equally self-centred companions. The Christian lives in the great world of God, and shares its joys with all God's human children. It is the absence of this larger world, the exclusive concern for his own narrow pleasures, that makes the consistent Epicurean, with all his polish and charm, the essentially mean and despicable creature we found him to be.
To be sure, Mill, Spencer, and others have endeavoured to graft the altruistic fruits of Christianity on to the old Epicurean stock. There is this great difference, however, between such Christianised Epicureanism as that of Mill and Spencer, and Christianity itself. These systems have no logical bridge, no emotional bond by which to pass from the pleasures of self to the pleasures of others. They can and do point out the incompleteness of merely egoistic Epicureanism; they exhort us to care for the pleasures of others as we do for our own. But the logical nexus, the moral dynamic, the spiritual motive, is lacking in these systems; and consequently these systems fail to work, except with the few highly altruistic souls who need no spiritual physician.
This logical bond, this moral dynamic, this spiritual motive which impels toward altruistic conduct, the Christian finds in Christ. He certainly did love all men, and care for their happiness as dearly as He cared for His own. But this same Christ is the Christian's Lord and Master and Friend. Yet friendship for Him, the acceptance of Him as Lord and Master, is a contradiction in terms, unless one is at the same time willing to cultivate His Spirit, which is the Spirit of service, the Spirit which holds the happiness and welfare of others just as sacred and precious as one's own. He that hath not this Spirit of Christ is none of His. Hence what men like Mill and Spencer preach as a duty, and support by what their critics have found to be very inadequate and fallacious logical processes, Christianity proclaims as a fact in the nature of God, as embodied in Christ, and a condition of the divine life for everyone who desires to be a child of God, a follower and friend of Jesus Christ. Christianity, therefore, includes everything of value in Epicureanism, and infinitely more. It has the Epicurean gladness without its exclusiveness, its joy without its selfishness, its naturalness without its baseness, its geniality without its heartlessness.
In like manner Christianity takes up all that is true in the Stoic teaching, without falling into its hardness and narrowness. The truth of the Stoic teaching consisted in its power to transform into an expression of the man himself, and of the beneficent laws of Nature, whatever outward circumstance might befall him, Now put in place of the abstract self the love of the perfect Christ, and instead of universal law the loving will of the Father for all His children, and you have a deepened, sweetened, softened Stoicism which is identical with a sturdy, strenuous, and virile Christianity.
If a man has in his heart the earnest desire to be like Christ, and to do the things that help to carry out Christ's Spirit in the world, it is absolutely impossible that he should ever find himself in a situation where what he most desires to do cannot be done. Now a man who in every conceivable situation can do what he most desires to do is as completely "master of his fate" and "captain of his soul" as the most strenuous Stoic ever prayed to be. And yet he is saved from the coldness and hardness and repulsiveness of the mere Stoic, because the object of his devotion, the aim of his assertion, is not his own barren, frigid, formal self, but the kindly, sympathetic, loving Christ, whom he has chosen to be his better self. Like the Stoic, he brings every thought into captivity; but it is not the captivity of a prison, the empty chamber of his individual soul, swept and garnished; it is captivity to the most gracious and gentle and generous person the world has ever known,—it is captivity to Christ.
When misfortune and calamity overtakes him, he transforms it into a blessing and a discipline, not like the mere Stoic through passive resignation to an impersonal law, as of gravitation, or electricity, or bacteriology, but through active devotion to that glory of God which is to be furthered mainly by kindness and sympathy and service to our fellow-men. The man who has this love of Christ in his heart, and who is devoted to the doing of the Father's loving will, can exclaim in every untoward circumstance, "I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me." He can shout with more than Stoic defiance: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" In all the literature of Stoic exultation in the face of frowning danger and impending doom, there is nothing that can match the splendid outburst of the great Apostle: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Everything that we found noble, and strong, and brave in Stoicism we find also here; the power to transform external evil into internal good, and to hold so tightly to our self-chosen good that no power in earth or heaven can ever wrest it from us,—a good so universal that the circumstance is inconceivable in which it would fail to work. Yet with all this tenacious, world-conquering strength, there is, drawn from the divine Source of this affection a gentleness, and sympathy, and tenderness, and humble human helpfulness, which the Stoic in his boastfulness, and hardness, and self-sufficiency could never know.
The Christian abhors lying and stealing, scolding and slandering, slavery and prostitution, meanness and murder, not less but far more than the Stoic. But he refrains from these things, not under constraint of abstract law, but because he cares so deeply and sensitively for the people whom these things affect that he cannot endure the thought that any word or deed of his should bring them pain or loss or shame or degradation. Thus he gets the Stoic strength without its hardness, the Stoic universality without its barrenness, the Stoic exaltation without its pride, the Stoic integrity without its formalism, the Stoic calm without its impassiveness.
Christianity is as lofty as Platonism; but it gets its elevation by a different process. Instead of rising above drudgery and details, it lifts them up into a clearer atmosphere, where nothing is servile or menial which can glorify God or serve a fellow-man.
The great truth which Plato taught was the subordination of the lower elements in human nature to the higher. In the application of this truth, as we saw, Plato went far astray. His highest was not attainable by every man; and he proposed to enforce the dictates of reason by fraud and intimidation on those incapable of comprehending their reasonableness. Thus he was led into that fallacy of the abstract universal which is common to all socialistic schemes. Christianity takes the Platonic principle of subordination of lower to higher; but it adds a new definition to what the higher or rather the highest is; and it introduces a new appeal for the lowliest to become willing servants and friends of the highest, instead of mere constrained serfs and slaves. This highest principle is, of course, Love of the God who loves all His human children, friendship to the Christ who is the friend of every man. Consequently there are no humble working-men to be coerced and no unfortunate women to be maltreated; no deformed and ill-begotten children to be exposed to early death, as in Plato's exclusive scheme. To the Christian every child is a child of God, every woman a sister of Christ, every man a son of the Father, and consequently no one of them can be disregarded in our plans of fellowship and sympathy and service; for whoever should dare to leave them out of his own sympathy and love would thereby exclude himself from the Love of God, likeness to Christ, and participation in the Christian Spirit.
Thus Christianity gives us all that was wise and just in the Platonic principle of the subordination of the lower elements in our nature to the higher; but its higher is so much above the highest dream of Plato that it guards certain forms of social good at points where, even in Plato's ideal Republic, they were ruthlessly betrayed.
Christianity finally gathers up into itself whatever is good in the principle of Aristotle. The Aristotelian principle was the devotion of life to a worthy end and the selection of efficient means for its accomplishment. On that general formula it is impossible to improve. "To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world," is Jesus' justification of His mission, when questioned by Pontius Pilate. "One thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus," is Paul's magnificent apology for his way of life. The concentration of one's whole energy upon a worthy end, and the willing acceptance of pains, privations, and penalties which may be incidental to the effective prosecution of that end, is the comprehensive formula of every brave and heroic life, whether it be the life of Jew or Gentile, Greek or Christian. It is not because it sets forth something different from this wise and brave prosecution of a noble end that Christianity is an improvement on the teaching of Aristotle; it is because the end at which the Christian aims is so much higher, and the fortitude demanded by it is so much deeper, that Christianity has superseded and deserves to supersede the noblest teaching of the greatest Greeks. What was the end which Aristotle set before himself and his disciples? Citizenship in a city state half free and half enslaved, with leisure for the philosophic contemplation of the learned few, bought by the constrained toil of the ignorant, degraded many; the refined companionship of choice congenial spirits for which it was expected that the multitude would be forever incapacitated and from which they would be forcibly excluded. Over against this aristocracy of birth, opportunity, leisure, training, and intelligence Jesus sets the wide democracy of virtue, service, Love. Whoever is capable of doing the humblest deed in Love to God and service to man becomes thereby a member of the kingdom of the choicest spirits to be found in earth or heaven, and entitled to the same courteous and delicate consideration which the disciple would show to his Master. The building up of such a kingdom and the extension of its membership to include all the nations of the earth and all classes and conditions of men within its happy fellowship, and in its noble service, is the great end which Jesus set before himself and which He invites each disciple to share.
Whatever hardship and toil, whatever pain and persecution, whatever reviling and contumely, whatever privation and poverty may be necessary to the accomplishment of this great end the Master himself gladly bore, and He asks His followers to do the same. In a world full of hypocrisy and corruption, pride and pretence, avarice and greed, cruelty and lust, malice and hate, selfishness and sin, there are bound to be many trials to be borne, much hard work to be done, many blows to be received, much suffering to be endured. All that is inevitable, whatever view one takes of life. Christ, however, shows us the way to do and bear these things cheerfully and bravely as part of His great work of redeeming the world from the bondage and misery of these powers of evil, and establishing His kingdom of Love. To keep the clear vision of that great end before our eyes, to keep the sense of His companionship warm and glowing within our hearty never to lose the sense of the great liberation and blessing this kingdom will bring to our downtrodden, maltreated brothers and sisters in the humbler walks of life, Jesus tells us is the secret of that sanity and sacrifice which is able to make the yoke of useful toil easy, and the burden of social service light; and to transform the cross of suffering into a crown of joy.
Each of these four previous principles is valuable and essential; and the fact that Christianity is higher than them all, no more warrants the Christian in dispensing with the lower elements, than the supremacy of the roof enables it to dispense with the foundation and the intervening stories. Both for ourselves, and for the world in which we live, we need to make our ideal of personality broad and comprehensive. We need to combine in harmonious and graceful unity the happy Epicurean disposition to take fresh from the hand of nature all the pleasures she innocently offers; the strong Stoic temper that takes complacently whatever incidental pains and ills the path of duty may have in store for us; the occasional Platonic mood which from time to time shall lift us out of the details of drudgery when they threaten to obscure the larger outlook of the soul; the shrewd Aristotelian insight which weighs the worth of transient impulses and passing pleasures in the impartial scales of intellectual and social ends; and then, not as a thing apart, but rather as the crown and consummation of all these other elements, the generous Christian Spirit, which makes the joys and sorrows, the aims and interests, of others as precious as one's own, and sets the Will of God which includes the good of all His creatures high above all lesser aims, as the bond that binds them all together in the unity of a personal life which is in principle perfect with some faint approximation to the divine perfection.
The omission of any truth for which the other ancient systems stood mutilates and impoverishes the Christian view of life. Ascetic Puritanism, for instance, is Christianity minus the truth taught by Epicurus. Sentimental liberalism is Christianity without the Stoic note. Dogmatic orthodoxy is Christianity sadly in need of Plato's search-light of sincerity. Sacerdotal ecclesiasticism is Christianity that has lost the Aristotelian disinterestedness of devotion to intellectual and social ends higher and wider than its own institutional aggrandisement.
The time is ripe for a Christianity which shall have room for all the innocent joys of sense and flesh, of mind and heart, which Epicurus taught us to prize aright, yet shall have the Stoic strength to make whatever sacrifice of them the universal good requires; which shall purge the heart of pride and pretence by questionings of motive as searching as those of Plato, and at the same time shall hold life to as strict accountability for practical usefulness and social progress as Aristotle's doctrines of the end and the mean require. It is by some such world-wide, historical approach, and the inclusion of whatever elements of truth and worth other systems have separately emphasised, that we shall reach a Christianity that is really catholic.
To take the duties and trials, the practical problems and personal relationships of life up into the atmosphere of Love, so that what we do and how we treat people becomes the resultant, not of the outward situation and our natural appetites and passions, but of the outward situation and Love within our hearts,—this is what it means to live in the Christian Spirit; this is the essence of Christianity. Strengthened character and straightened conduct are sure to follow the maintenance of this spiritual relationship. Not that it will transform one's hereditary traits and acquired habits all at once, or save one from many a slip and flaw. Even the Christian Spirit of Love takes time to work its moral transformation. The tendency of it, however, is steady and strong in the right direction; and in due time it will conquer the heart and control the action of any man who, whether verbally or silently, whether formally or informally, maintains this conscious relationship to that Love at the heart of things which most of us call God. Jesus and all who have shared His spiritual insight tell us that the maintenance of this relationship, close, warm, and quick, is the pearl of great price, the one thing needful, the potency of righteousness, the secret of blessedness; and that there is more hope of a man with a bad record and many besetting sins who honestly tries to keep this relationship alive within his breast, than there is of the self-righteous man who boasts that he can keep himself outwardly immaculate without these inward aids.
Christianity of this simple, vital sort is the world's salvation. Criticised by enemies and caricatured by friends; fossilised in the minds of the aged, and forced on the tongues of the immature; mingled with all manner of exploded superstition, false philosophy, science that is not so, and history that never happened; obscured under absurd rites; buried in incredible creeds; professed by hypocrites; discredited by sentimentalists; evaporated by mystics; stereotyped by literalists; monopolised by sacerdotalists; it has lived in spite of all the grave-clothes its unbelieving disciples have tried to wrap around it, and holds the keys of eternal life.