These facts and principles enable us clearly to comprehend the great law of rectitude and happiness given by God through Moses, and then more clearly explained and illustrated by Jesus Christ. All men are conscious of that instinctive love which we share in common with the brutes. This consists in pleasurable emotions in view of certain persons or things which afford us pleasure, attended by a desire to please those who cause such enjoyment to ourselves, or to those we love. Thus the mother, whether human or brute, feels instinctive love to her offspring; and thus all men feel this instinctive love to those who confer pleasure on themselves.
But Jesus Christ expressly discriminates, and explains that the great law of love (which, he says, it is the chief end of “the law and the prophets” to inculcate) is the voluntary love which consists in choosing to do right—that is, to make happiness on the best and largest scale. For the law is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Now self-love consists not in pleasurable emotions in our own agreeable qualities, but in an instinctive, an all-controlling desire to make self happy.
This is the principle of mind which gives its true meaning to the great law of love, which in this aspect reads thus:
Thou shalt choose, for the chief end or controlling purpose, to make happiness on the greatest scale by obeying God’s laws, and as the way to make him and all his creatures happy in the highest degree. And for this end you are to regard and treat the happiness of all in your reach as equal in value to your own.
This exposition of the great law of love is verified repeatedly in the New Testament: “This is the love of God, that ye keep his commandments.”
“He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”
“If a man love me, he will keep my words;”—“he that loveth me not, keepeth not my sayings.”
“That the world may know that I love the Father, as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do.”
We now are prepared to appreciate the new and most wonderful revelation ever made to the human race, and one which the wisest heathen philosophers never even conjectured.
Jesus Christ first revealed to mankind that our Creator is a loving Father to the whole human race; and that such is the eternal nature of things, that our highest possible happiness and escape from endless evil can be accomplished only by self-denying sacrifice and suffering, to save ourselves and others; and that our heavenly Father himself so loves us as to encounter such suffering to save us. For whatever views men form as to the divinity of Jesus Christ, or how his sufferings avail to save from danger in the life to come, all will concede that he teaches that God is represented as having made such a painful sacrifice as a father suffers in seeing a dear and lovely and only son subjected to long years of humiliation, of painful toils, and to a disgraceful and torturing death. And whatever opinions men form as to the nature and duration of future retributions, it is clear that Jesus Christ teaches that so great are our dangers, that every consideration of earthly enjoyment should be subordinate, and that our first interest and aim should be to secure escape to ourselves and our fellow-men.