No record of what he said or did for fifty years after his crucifixion, and then nothing but fragmentary memories of three or four unlettered followers. Yet, by virtue of half a dozen sentences and a couple of little parables — how can one help recalling here the Prodigal Son with its message of pure affection- he has come to be a leader and teacher of hundreds of millions of the most intelligent peoples in the world-in some sort, their idol and God.
Is it not plain from this one example that the Good is imperishable and Divine and must ultimately conquer even in this world?
For two thousand years, now, Christianity has been preached to us as an ideal; even the ministers of the gospel have regarded its teaching as impracticable, and from St. Paul down, one and all have sought to mix some hard alloy of conventional morality with the golden evangel of Jesus, in order to give it currency among men.
I wish to go a step further, to push the light a space on into the all-encircling night. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stated his belief once for alclass="underline"
I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.
And this is put aside as a counsel of perfection. It seems to me the impartial statement of scientific truth.
Jesus gave no reason for his gospel; did not attempt to prove it, save to the soul by its own virtue. For many centuries the saying was a stumbling block even to the wisest, but when it came to Shakespeare, he saw its everlasting truth and found a reason for it and so added a coping stone to the divine Temple of Humanity. The passage is in Timon of Athens:
He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer The worst that man can breathe, and make his wrongs His outsides, to wear them like his raiment, carelessly, And ne'er prefer his injuries to his heart, To bring it into danger.
In other words, if we nurse hatreds we are doing ourselves harm: we must love our enemies, for if we hate them we prefer our injuries to our heart's well being and bring it into danger.
Shakespeare did not go further than this; he saw that a man should take wrongs done to him lightly and for his own sake should not cherish resentment. It was a great step forward; but there is still a truth behind, which Shakespeare, the most articulate of men, would surely have expressed, had he seen. It is by the heart we grow; hatred injures the heart; dries up the sympathies; impoverishes the blood, so to speak; stops all growth.
This further truth was revealed to me by my art. I found that till I loved a man I could not understand him, could not see him as he saw himself, and so could not depict him fairly. But as soon as I began to like him, I began to make excuses for his faults, and when I grew to care for him really, I saw that he had no need even to be excused. Hatred gives nothing but the shadows in the portrait: you can make a likeness with shadows alone; but if you want to reveal a man's soul fully, to make a work of art, you must know the best in the man and use high lights as well; and these you can only get from loving comprehension.
The road up for all of us is sympathy. How fine the Greek word "sympathy" is, and what a lesson it teaches of the divinity of pain; it means literally "to suffer with." We mortals grow near one another by "suffering with" one another, and so come by pain to love and through love to comprehension. Shelley's word is forever true:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
The French proverb, "tout comprendre est tout pardonner" (to understand all is to pardon all), does not go far enough. If we understand a man perfectly, there is no need to pardon, for we are then above forgiveness, even beyond good and evil; we see why and how he acted.
And this effort to love our enemy, and so come to see him as he sees himself, is soul-enriching in a thousand ways. First of all, the getting rid of an enemy is exhilarating and delightful. Then every new friend is an acquisition more precious by far than any great portrait to a collector in his gallery; and when we have forced ourselves to annex several of these rich prizes that we had no title to and money could not buy, we begin to see that this is no alien or difficult world, and not dangerous at all. The woods that seemed so dark and threatening to our childhood, now show us shady nooks and gay green glades and pleasant avenues sun-kissed. Love is the guide; and the good magician, Love.
A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one another.
This is the scientific law of life, the end, if not the beginning, of all human morality!
I was about forty before I came to understand its supreme significance. It influenced me in my conduct of the Saturday Review, as I have stated, in my desire to get the best men to work with me, careless of their opinions, and to set them, so far as possible, to praise and not to blame.
The message of Jesus has, I think, influenced my life more and more with every year I have lived since, but still I hardly dare call myself a Christian, because I also believe in the pagan view of life. Who can doubt that it is the first duty of man to develop all his faculties to the uttermost, and to enjoy all the beauties and pleasures of life so far as he can without injuring others? The doctrine of love for others only supplements and crowns this primary creed.
It seems plain to me that the intense spirituality of Christ's teaching has had an unexpected result in increasing sensuality and the sensuous expression of affection. Was it the love of the Magdalen-which, everyone knows, was the heart of the religious enthusiasm of the Middle Ages-which intensified and in some sense ennobled passion, or was this exaltation of the woman who had "loved much" also a result of increasing sensualism- probably at once both cause and consequence?
It cannot be denied that the growth of sensuality is the chief note of all the centuries since. It is embodied to me in the coming to honor of the kiss.
Naturally, the kiss in the beginning was a purely maternal act: it is unknown to the Yellow and Negro races, who rub noses instead; in early Sanskrit literature, too, the kiss was always maternal or filial. The kiss seems to have been unknown as a token of love even to the ancient Greeks: there is no mention of a kiss in the love scenes of Homer; and among the ancient Romans, the kiss was a mere salutation.
It is possible that the Jews were somewhat more advanced; St. Paul advises his followers to greet one another "with an holy kiss," and there seems to me to be a strange confession in that "holy."
However that may be, the kiss in our time has become even more than a token of love: I cannot but recall Shakespeare's deathless lines to his dark lady:
Of many thousand kisses, the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
Saint-Beuve, in one of his rare flashes of insight, says: "Nous sommes tons aujourd'hui fils d'une litterature sensuelle" (We are all today children of a sensual literature).
It is curious to me that even the greatest have done so little to justify the new commandment of Jesus, to love one another.
Even Cervantes is silent on the matter: his Don Quixote will fight windmills, but is not Quixotic enough to preach the doctrine of love to his neighbor; nor does Goethe; and yet what can be plainer than the fact that unless this gospel of Jesus is learned and put to practice, the generations of men will cease to exist?
A scientist in London wrote me the other day that already they had under control five or six of the original elements. "When we have control of a dozen," he added, "a man will go about with power enough in his waistcoat pocket to destroy a whole city like London or New York." It seems to me possible that men may win power before goodness, and the race may then come to an untimely end. If not, its survival will be in great part due to the divine spirit of Jesus.