V
LOVE AND PUNISHMENT
Lord Hugh Cecil is, I think, one of the most interesting figures in the public life of the time. Ten years ago I regarded him as the future leader of the Tory party and a predestined Prime Minister. Of late years he has seemed to turn away from the strifes and intrigues of ordinary politics, and to have resigned official ambition to his elder brother; but his figure has not lost—rather has gained—in interest by the change. Almost alone among our public men, he seems to have "his eyes fixed on higher lodestars" than those which guide Parliamentary majorities. He avows his allegiance to those moral laws of political action of which John Bright so memorably said that "though they were not given amid the thunders of Sinai, they are not less the commandments of God."
Now, the fearless utterance of this ethical creed does not tend to popularity. Englishmen will bear a good deal of preaching, so long as it is delivered from the pulpit; but when it is uttered by the lips of laymen, and deals with public problems, it arouses a curious irritation. That jovial old heathen, Palmerston, once alluded to Bright as "the Honourable and Reverend Member"; Gladstone's splendid appeals to faith and conscience were pronounced "d——d copy-book-y"; and Lord Houghton, who knew the world as well as most men, said, "Does it ever strike you that nothing shocks people so much as any immediate and practical application of the character and life of Christ?"
Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous partisanship, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone. Just lately, his pronouncement that we ought to love the Germans, as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of God on earth, has provoked very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was "medieval." For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one's enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh's doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is better than a short one.
Having thus repelled what I think a ridiculous criticism, I will admit that Lord Hugh's doctrine raises some interesting, and even disputable, points. In the first place, there is the theory of the Universal Church as the Divine Kingdom on earth, and of the citizenship in which all its members are united. I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The "Enthusiasm of Humanity" is a noble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. Under the pressure of injury from without, cosmopolitanism must contract itself into patriotism. We may wish devoutly that the whole human family were one in heart and mind—that all the citizens of the kingdom of God obeyed one law of right and wrong; but when some members of the family, some citizens of the kingdom, have "given themselves over to a reprobate mind," our love must be reserved for those who still own the claim of righteousness. If our own country stood as a solitary champion of right against a world in unrighteous arms, patriotism would be a synonym for religion, and cosmopolitanism for sin.
And then again I ask myself this question: Even assuming that Lord Hugh is right, and that it is our bounden duty to love the Germans, is love inconsistent with punishment? We postulate the love of God towards mankind, and we rightly regard it as the highest manifestation of what love means; but is it inconsistent with punishment for unrighteous action? Neither Revelation, nor Nature, nor History, knows anything of the conception which has been embodied in the words, "a good-natured God." Of Revelation I will not speak at length, for this is not the place for theological discussion; I only remark in passing that the idea of punishment for wrong-doing is not, as some sciolists imagine, confined to the Old Testament, though there it is seen in its most startling form; in the New Testament it is exhibited, alike by St. Paul and by St. Paul's Master, as a manifestation of love—not vindictive, but remedial. The disciplining love of a human father is used to illustrate the Divine dealings with insubordinate mankind. About Nature we need scarcely argue. "In the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins," and rebellion against the laws of righteous living brings penal consequences which no one can mistake. And yet again, has History any more unmistakable lesson than that "for every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last"? Froude was right. "Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French Revolutions and other terrible ways."
What we believe of the Divine Love, thus dealing with human transgression, we may well believe of human love, when it is called by duty to chastise unrighteousness. I do not suppose that John Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some people so bad that they "ought to be blotted out of the catalogue of living men." It was the dispassionate judgment of philosophy on crime. When the convicted murderer exclaimed, "Don't condemn me to death; I am not fit to die!" a great Judge replied, "I know nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live"; but I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock. Even so, though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of God, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent wrong-doing.
VI
HATRED AND LOVE
I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do." The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.
However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals. "The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet." Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing a dog's savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an exactly similar spirit may be concealed—and not always concealed—in a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination, still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the poignancy of the bitter saying: "I forgive him as a Christian—which means that I don't forgive him at all." Under a decent, though hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial Rome.
Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime. "Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold"; and there are unhappy natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. "I have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant? No? Well, I do." It was a woman who wrote the words.
The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action, and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and "steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do," his psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as powerful as hatred to "steel the mind and set the resolution"—and the name of this other emotion is love. It required some resolution and a "steeled" mind for Father Damien to give himself in early manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the hands of "savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life." There was "steel" in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude of Tokat; and "steel" in an earlier and even more memorable decision when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit, fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing India.
But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on the human will is manifested. John Howard devoted the comforts and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing boys and factory slaves. If ever I knew a man whose resolution was "steeled," it was this honoured friend of my early manhood, and the steeling power was simply love. A humbler illustration of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom worldly people ridiculed and who "for fifty years seized every chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school"; and this though a boy's nature is "wax to receive, and marble to retain." The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to be withheld.
I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind must be "steeled" and the resolution "set" for a solemn work of international justice. But hatred will not help us; for hatred is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise. Hatred is natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Twelve men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they changed the face of the world. Are we to abjure the doctrine which wrought this change, and give heed to the blind guides who would lure us straight back to barbarism?
"What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign shall ye know them,
That they ruin and make dark;
"By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;
"By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old Barbarian,
The Barbarian come again."[*]
[Footnote *: G. K. Chesterton.]