Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught that God is Love. Thus understood it is not any specific sort of emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that everyone that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal affection, something that knows as well as feels, that takes account of all special aspects of life and is just to all.
Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice, but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion, but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points of view. So far as love approaches this comprehensiveness it tends toward justice, because the claims of all live and are adjusted in the mind of him who has it.
“Love’s hearts are faithful but not fond,
Bound for the just but not beyond.”
Thus love of a large and symmetrical sort, not merely a narrow tenderness, implies justice and right, since a mind that has the breadth and insight to feel this will be sure to work out magnanimous principles of conduct.
It is in some such sense as this, as an expansion of human nature into a wider life, that I can best understand the use of the word love in the writings of certain great teachers, for instance in such passages as the following:
“What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an overpowering enthusiasm.... He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”[[35]]
“A great thing is love, ever a great good; which alone makes light all the heavy and bears equally every inequality. For its burden is not a burden, and it makes every bitter sweet and savory.... Love would be arisen, not held down by anything base. Love would be free, and alienated from every worldly affection, that its intimate desire may not be hindered, that it may not become entangled through any temporal good fortune, nor fall through any ill. There is nothing sweeter than love, nothing braver, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing joyfuller, nothing fuller or better in heaven or on earth, since love is born of God, nor can rest save in God above all created things.
“He that loves, flies, runs, and is joyful; is free and not restrained. He gives all for all and has all in all, since he is at rest above all in the one highest good from which every good flows and proceeds. He regards not gifts, but beyond all good things turns to the giver. Love oft knows not the manner, but its heat is more than every manner. Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can all things. Therefore it avails for all things, and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.”[[36]]
The sense of joy, of freshness, of youth, and of the indifference of circumstances, that comes with love, seems to be connected with its receptive, outgoing nature. It is the fullest life, and when we have it we feel happy because our faculties are richly employed; young because reception is the essence of youth, and indifferent to conditions because we feel by our present experience that welfare is independent of them. It is when we have lost our hold upon this sort of happiness that we begin to be anxious about security and comfort, and to take a distrustful and pessimistic attitude toward the world in general.