Unspoken Sermons

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Let a man once find another who has fallen among thieves; let him be a
neighbour to him, pouring oil and wine into his wounds, and binding
them up, and setting him on his own beast, and paying for him at the
inn; let him do all this merely from a sense of duty; let him even, in
the pride of his fancied, and the ignorance of his true calling, bate
no jot of his Jewish superiority; let him condescend to the very
baseness of his own lowest nature; yet such will be the virtue of
obeying an eternal truth even to his poor measure, of putting in
actuality what he has not even seen in theory, of doing the truth even
without believing it, that even if the truth does not after the deed
give the faintest glimmer as truth in the man, he will yet be ages
nearer the truth than before, for he will go on his way loving that
Samaritan neighbour a little more than his Jewish dignity will justify.
Nor will he question the reasonableness of so doing, although he may
not care to spend any logic upon its support. How much more if he be a
man who would love his neighbour if he could, will the higher condition
unsought have been found in the action! For man is a whole; and so soon
as he _unites himself_ by obedient action, the truth that is in him
makes itself known to him, shining from the new whole. For his action
is his response to his maker's design, his individual part in the
creation of himself, his yielding to the All in all, to the tides of
whose harmonious cosmoplastic life all his being thenceforward lies
open for interpenetration and assimilation. When will once begins to
aspire, it will soon find that action must precede feeling, that the
man may know the foundation itself of feeling.

With those who recognize no authority as the ground of tentative
action, a doubt, a suspicion of truth ought to be ground enough for
putting it to the test.

The whole system of divine education as regards the relation of man and
man, has for its end that a man should love his neighbour as himself.
It is not a lesson that he can learn by itself, or a duty the
obligation of which can be shown by argument, any more than the
difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms than
their own. "But that difference," it may be objected, "manifests
itself of itself to every mind: it is self-evident; whereas the loving
of one's neighbour is _not_ seen to be a primary truth; so far from it,
that far the greater number of those who hope for an eternity of
blessedness through him who taught it, do not really believe it to be a
truth; believe, on the contrary, that the paramount obligation is to
take care of one's self at much risk of forgetting one's neighbour."

But the human race generally has got as far as the recognition of right
and wrong; and therefore most men are born capable of making the
distinction. The race has not yet lived long enough for its latest
offspring to be born with the perception of the truth of love to the
neighbour. It is to be seen by the present individual only after a long
reception of and submission to the education of life. And once seen, it
is believed.

The whole constitution of human society exists for the express end, I
say, of teaching the two truths by which man lives, Love to God and
Love to Man. I will say nothing more of the mysteries of the parental
relation, because they belong to the teaching of the former truth, than
that we come into the world as we do, to look up to the love over us,
and see in it a symbol, poor and weak, yet the best we can have or
receive of the divine love. [Footnote: It might be expressed after a
deeper and truer fashion by saying that, God making human affairs after
his own thoughts, they are therefore such as to be the best teachers of
love to him and love to our neighbour. This is an immeasurably nobler
and truer manner of regarding them than as a scheme or plan invented by
the divine intellect.] And thousands more would find it easy to love
God if they had not such miserable types of him in the self-seeking,
impulse-driven, purposeless, faithless beings who are all they have for
father and mother, and to whom their children are no dearer than her
litter is to the unthinking dam. What I want to speak of now, with
regard to the second great commandment, is the relation of brotherhood
and sisterhood. Why does my brother come of the same father and mother?
Why do I behold the helplessness and confidence of his infancy? Why is
the infant laid on the knee of the child? Why do we grow up with the
same nurture? Why do we behold the wonder of the sunset and the mystery
of the growing moon together? Why do we share one bed, join in the same
games, and attempt the same exploits? Why do we quarrel, vow revenge
and silence and endless enmity, and, unable to resist the brotherhood
within us, wind arm in arm and forget all within the hour? Is it not
that Love may grow lord of all between him and me? Is it not that I may
feel towards him what there are no words or forms of words to express--
a love namely, in which the divine self rushes forth in utter
self-forgetfulness to live in the contemplation of the brother--a love
that is stronger than death,--glad and proud and satisfied? But if love
stop there, what will be the result? Ruin to itself; loss of the
brotherhood. He who loves not his brother for deeper reasons than those
of a common parentage will cease to love him at all. The love that
enlarges not its borders, that is not ever spreading and including, and
deepening, will contract, shrivel, decay, die. I have had the sons of
my mother that I may learn the universal brotherhood. For there is a
bond between me and the most wretched liar that ever died for the
murder he would not even confess, closer infinitely than that which
springs only from having one father and mother. That we are the sons
and the daughters of God born from his heart, the outcoming offspring
of his love, is a bond closer than all other bonds in one. No man ever
loved his own child aright who did not love him for his humanity, for
his divinity, to the utter forgetting of his origin from himself. The
son of my mother is indeed my brother by this greater and closer bond
as well; but if I recognize that bond between him and me at all, I
recognize it for my race. True, and thank God! the greater excludes not
the less; it makes all the weaker bonds stronger and truer, nor forbids
that where all are brothers, some should be those of our bosom. Still
my brother according to the flesh is my first neighbour, that we may be
very nigh to each other, whether we will or no, while our hearts are
tender, and so may learn _brotherhood_. For our love to each other is
but the throbbing of the heart of the great brotherhood, and could come
only from the eternal Father, not from our parents. Then my second
neighbour appears, and who is he? Whom I come in contact with soever.
He with whom I have any transactions, any human dealings whatever. Not
the man only with whom I dine; not the friend only with whom I share my
thoughts; not the man only whom my compassion would lift from some
slough; but the man who makes my clothes; the man who prints my book;
the man who drives me in his cab; the man who begs from me in the
street, to whom, it may be, for brotherhood's sake, I must not give;
yea, even the man who condescends to me. With all and each there is a
chance of doing the part of a neighbour, if in no other way yet by
speaking truly, acting justly, and thinking kindly. Even these deeds
will help to that love which is born of righteousness. All true action
clears the springs of right feeling, and lets their waters rise and
flow. A man must not choose his neighbour; he must take the neighbour
that God sends him. In him, whoever he be, lies, hidden or revealed, a
beautiful brother. The neighbour is just the man who is next to you at
the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you in contact.

Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the
whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink-debased,
vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared, they will
yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbours. Any
rough-hewn semblance of humanity will at length be enough to move the
man to reverence and affection. It is harder for some to learn thus
than for others. There are whose first impulse is ever to repel and not
to receive. But learn they may, and learn they must. Even these may
grow in this grace until a countenance unknown will awake in them a
yearning of affection rising to pain, because there is for it no
expression, and they can only give the man to God and be still.

And now will come in all the arguments out of which the man tried in
vain before to build a stair up to the sunny heights of love. "Ah
brother! thou hast a soul like mine," he will say. "Out of thine eyes
thou lookest, and sights and sounds and odours visit thy soul as mine,
with wonder and tender comforting. Thou too lovest the faces of thy
neighbours. Thou art oppressed with thy sorrows, uplifted with thy
joys. Perhaps thou knowest not so well as I, that a region of gladness
surrounds all thy grief, of light all thy darkness, of peace all thy
tumult. Oh, my brother! I will love thee. I cannot come very near thee:
I will love thee the more. It may be thou dost not love thy neighbour;
it may be thou thinkest only how to get from him, how to gain by him.
How lonely then must thou be! how shut up in thy poverty-stricken room,
with the bare walls of thy selfishness, and the hard couch of thy
unsatisfaction! I will love thee the more. Thou shalt not be alone with
thyself. Thou art not me; thou art another life--a second self;
therefore I can, may, and will love thee."

When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the
hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand
what St Paul meant when he said, "I could wish that myself were
accursed from Christ for my brethren." But he will no longer understand
those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential
of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to
come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its
expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its
battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each
other, "Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our
neighbours no more." St Paul would be wretched before the throne of
God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and
that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we
say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not,
upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off
time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the
blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with
the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself
more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who,
in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one
of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were
taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far
below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he
must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird
his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire,
travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his
brother?--who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love
of the Father?

But it is a wild question. God is, and shall be, All in all. Father of
our brothers and sisters! thou wilt not be less glorious than we,
taught of Christ, are able to think thee. When thou goest into the
wilderness to seek, thou wilt not come home until thou hast found. It
is because we hope not for them in thee, not knowing thee, not knowing
thy love, that we are so hard and so heartless to the brothers and
sisters whom thou hast given us.

One word more: This love of our neighbour is the only door out of the
dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing
phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our
own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet
winds of the universe. The man thinks his consciousness is himself;
whereas his life consisteth in the inbreathing of God, and the
consciousness of the universe of truth. To have himself, to know
himself, to enjoy himself, he calls life; whereas, if he would forget
himself, tenfold would be his life in God and his neighbours. The
region of man's life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his
neighbours, his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone his
spirit can find room. Himself is his dungeon. If he feels it not now,
he will yet feel it one day--feel it as a living soul would feel being
prisoned in a dead body, wrapped in sevenfold cerements, and buried in
a stone-ribbed vault within the last ripple of the sound of the
chanting people in the church above. His life is not in knowing that he
lives, but in loving all forms of life. He is made for the All, for
God, who is the All, is his life. And the essential joy of his life
lies abroad in the liberty of the All. His delights, like those of the
Ideal Wisdom, are with the sons of men. His health is in the body of
which the Son of Man is the head. The whole region of life is open to
him--nay, he must live in it or perish.

Nor thus shall a man lose the consciousness of well-being. Far deeper
and more complete, God and his neighbour will flash it back upon him--
pure as life. No more will he agonize "with sick assay" to generate it
in the light of his own decadence. For he shall know the glory of his
own being in the light of God and of his brother.

But he may have begun to love his neighbour, with the hope of ere long
loving him as himself, and notwithstanding start back affrighted at yet
another word of our Lord, seeming to be another law yet harder than the
first, although in truth it is not another, for without obedience to it
the former cannot be attained unto. He has not yet learned to love his
neighbour as himself whose heart sinks within him at the word, _I say
unto you, Love your enemies_.

LOVE THINE ENEMY.

_Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour,
and hate thine enemy; but 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; that ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even
the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore
perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect._--St
Matthew v. 43-48.

Is not this at length _too_ much to expect? Will a man ever love his
enemies? He may come to do good to them that hate him; but when will he
pray for them that despitefully use him and persecute him? When? When
he is the child of his Father in heaven. Then shall he love his
neighbour as himself, even if that neighbour be his enemy. In the
passage in Leviticus (xix. 18,) already referred to as quoted by our
Lord and his apostles, we find the neighbour and the enemy are one.
"Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy
people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord."

Look at the glorious way in which Jesus interprets the scripture that
went before him. "_I am the Lord_,"--"That ye may be perfect, as your
Father in heaven is perfect."

Is it then reasonable to love our enemies? God does; therefore it must
be the highest reason. But is it reasonable to expect that man should
become capable of doing so? Yes; on one ground: that the divine energy
is at work in man, to render at length man's doing divine as his nature
is. For this our Lord prayed when he said: "That they all may be one,
as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in
us." Nothing could be less likely to human judgment: our Lord knows
that one day it will come.

Why should we love our enemies? The deepest reason for this we cannot
put in words, for it lies in the absolute reality of their being, where
our enemies are of one nature with us, even of the divine nature. Into
this we cannot see, save as into a dark abyss. But we can adumbrate
something of the form of this deepest reason, if we let the thoughts of
our heart move upon the face of the dim profound.

"Are our enemies men like ourselves?" let me begin by asking. "Yes."
"Upon what ground? The ground of their enmity? The ground of the wrong
they do us?" "No." "In virtue of cruelty, heartlessness, injustice,
disrespect, misrepresentation?" "Certainly not. _Humanum est errare_ is
a truism; but it possesses, like most truisms, a latent germ of worthy
truth. The very word _errare_ is a sign that there is a way so truly
the human that, for a man to leave it, is to _wander_. If it be human
to wander, yet the wandering is not humanity. The very words _humane_
and _humanity_ denote some shadow of that loving-kindness which, when
perfected after the divine fashion, shall include even our enemies. We
do not call the offering of human sacrifices, the torturing of
captives, cannibalism--humanity. Not because they do such deeds are
they men. Their humanity must be deeper than those. It is in virtue of
the divine essence which is in them, that pure essential humanity, that
we call our enemies men and women. It is this humanity that we are to
love--a something, I say, deeper altogether than and independent of the
region of hate. It is the humanity that originates the claim of
neighbourhead; the neighbourhood only determines the occasion of its
exercise." "Is this humanity in every one of our enemies?" "Else there
were nothing to love." "Is it there in very deed?--Then we _must_ love
it, come between us and it what may."

But how can we love a man or a woman who is cruel and unjust to us?--
who sears with contempt, or cuts off with wrong every tendril we would
put forth to embrace?--who is mean, unlovely, carping, uncertain,
self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?--who can even sneer,
the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than mere
murder?

These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the worst
man cannot love them. But are these the man? Does a woman bear that
form in virtue of these? Lies there not within the man and the woman a
divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood, a something lovely and
lovable,--slowly fading, it may be,--dying away under the fierce heat
of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral
selfishness--but there? Shall that divine something, which, once
awakened to be its own holy self in the man, will loathe these unlovely
things tenfold more than we loathe them now--shall this divine thing
have no recognition from us? It is the very presence of this fading
humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal
only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we
should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from
loving him. We push over the verge of the creation--_we damn_--just
because we cannot embrace. For to embrace is the necessity of our
deepest being. That foiled, we hate. Instead of admonishing ourselves
that there is our enchained brother, that there lies our enchanted,
disfigured, scarce recognizable sister, captive of the devil, to break,
how much sooner, from their bonds, that we love them!--we recoil into
the hate which would fix them there; and the dearly lovable reality of
them we sacrifice to the outer falsehood of Satan's incantations, thus
leaving them to perish. Nay, we murder them to get rid of them, we
_hate_ them. Yet within the most obnoxious to our hate, lies that
which, could it but show itself as it is, and as it will show itself
one day, would compel from our hearts a devotion of love. It is not the
unfriendly, the unlovely, that we are told to love, but the brother,
the sister, who is unkind, who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother
to his desolate fate? Shall we not rather say, "With my love at least
shalt thou be compassed about, for thou hast not thy own lovingness to
infold thee; love shall come as near thee as it may; and when thine
comes forth to meet mine, we shall be one in the indwelling God"?

Let no one say I have been speaking in a figure merely. That I have
been so speaking I know. But many things which we see most vividly and
certainly are more truly expressed by using a right figure, than by
attempting to give them a clear outline of logical expression. My
figure means a truth.

If any one say, "Do not make such vague distinctions. There is the
person. Can you deny that that person is unlovely? How then can you
love him?" I answer, "That person, with the evil thing cast out of him,
will be yet more the _person_, for he will be his real self. The thing
that now makes you dislike him is separable from him, is therefore not
he, makes himself so much less himself, for it is working death in him.
Now he is in danger of ceasing to be a person at all. When he is
clothed and in his right mind, he will be a person indeed. You _could_
not then go on hating him. Begin to love him now, and help him into the
loveliness which is his. Do not hate him although you can. The
personalty, I say, though clouded, besmeared, defiled with the wrong,
lies deeper than the wrong, and indeed, so far as the wrong has reached
it, is by the wrong injured, yea, so far, it may be, destroyed."

But those who will not acknowledge the claim of love, may yet
acknowledge the claim of justice. There are who would shrink with
horror from the idea of doing injustice to those, from the idea of
loving whom they would shrink with equal horror. But if it is
impossible, as I believe, without love to be just, much more cannot
justice co-exist with hate. The pure eye for the true vision of
another's claims can only go with the loving heart. The man who hates
can hardly be delicate in doing justice, say to his neighbour's love,
to his neighbour's predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough
to be just to our friends; and how shall our enemies fare with us? For
justice demands that we shall think rightly of our neighbour as
certainly as that we shall neither steal his goods nor bear false
witness against him. Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but
for love, which is greater than justice, and by including supersedes
justice. _Mere_ justice is an impossibility, a fiction of analysis. It
does not exist between man and man, save relatively to human _law_.
Justice to be justice must be much more than justice. Love is the law
of our condition, without which we can no more render justice than a
man can keep a straight line walking in the dark. The eye is not
single, and the body is not full of light. No man who is even
indifferent to his brother can recognize the claims which his humanity
has upon him. Nay, the very indifference itself is an injustice.

I have taken for granted that the fault lies with the enemy so
considered, for upon the primary rocks would I build my foundation. But
the question must be put to each man by himself, "Is my neighbour
indeed my enemy, or am I my neighbour's enemy, and so take him to be
mine?--awful thought! Or, if he be mine, am not I his? Am I not
refusing to acknowledge the child of the kingdom within his bosom, so
killing the child of the kingdom within my own?" Let us claim for
ourselves no more indulgence than we give to him. Such honesty will end
in severity at home and clemency abroad. For we are accountable for the
ill in ourselves, and have to kill it; for the good in our neighbour,
and have to cherish it. He only, in the name and power of God, can kill
the bad in him; we can cherish the good in him by being good to it
across all the evil fog that comes between our love and his good.

Nor ought it to be forgotten that this fog is often the result of
misapprehension and mistake, giving rise to all kinds of indignations,
resentments, and regrets. Scarce anything about us is just as it seems,
but at the core there is truth enough to dispel all falsehood and
reveal life as unspeakably divine. O brother, sister, across this weary
fog, dim-lighted by the faint torches of our truth-seeking, I call to
the divine in thee, which is mine, not to rebuke thee, not to rouse
thee, not to say "Why hatest thou me?" but to say "I love thee; in
God's name I love thee." And I will wait until the true self looks out
of thine eyes, and knows the true self in me.

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