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.]