Those who refuse Christ have many easily understandable reasons for not accepting Him: they would need to renounce their old personalities and they cannot see that they would gain much by this renunciation; and they are afraid of losing the dusty rubbish which seems magnificence to them. People who deny Christ as an excuse for not following His teachings have justified themselves of late by another reason, a learned reason: they claim that He said nothing new. His words can be found in the Orient and in the Occident centuries earlier. Either He stole them, or plagiarized unconsciously. If He said nothing new, He is not great; if He is not great, there is no need to listen to Him. Let the ignorant admire Him, the stupid obey Him, the foolish respect Him!
However, these experts in the genealogy of ideas do not say whether the ideals of Jesus, let them be new or old, should be accepted or rejected; they do not dare to pretend that Christ did nothing of value when He consecrated by His death a great truth, a forgotten, unused truth. They do not look carefully to see whether there is a real identity of sense and of spirit between the ideas of Jesus and those other older ideas, or whether there is merely a simple assonance and a distant verbal resemblance. And in the meantime, in order to avoid being misled in that matter, they reject Christ’s law and that of the philosophers who, they pretend, were Christ’s teachers, and they continue tranquilly to lead their filthy lives as if the Gospels had not been addressed to them as to other men.
After the promulgation of the old Law there was amity between blood kin; and the citizens of the same city bore with each other and did one another no harm; but for strangers, if they were not guests, there was only hatred and extermination. Inside the family a little love; inside the city an approximate justice; outside the walls and the frontiers inextinguishable hatred. Centuries later voices were heard which asked a little love also for the neighbor, for those who were not of the same household but of the same nation, which asked for a little justice even for strangers, even for enemies. This would have been a wonderful step forward; but these voices—they were so few, so weak, so distant—were not heard, or, if heard, were not heeded.
Four centuries before Christ a wise man of China, M’-Ti, wrote a whole book, the Kie-Siang-Ngai, to say that men should love each other. He wrote, “The wise man who wants to improve the world can improve it only if he knows with certainty the origin of disorders; if he does not know that, he cannot improve it.... Whence come disorders? They spring up because men do not love each other. Workmen and children have no filial feeling for their employers and parents. Children love themselves but do not love their parents; they cheat their parents for their own purposes. Younger brothers love themselves but do not love their older brothers; subjects love themselves but do not love their princes; the father has no indulgence for the son, the older brother for the younger brother, the prince for his subjects. The father loves himself and does not love his son; he wrongs his son to his own advantage ... thus, everywhere brigands love their own homes and not their neighbors’ homes, and for this they sack other men’s houses to fill their own. Thieves love their own bodies and do not love men, wherefore they steal from men for the good of their own bodies. If thieves considered the bodies of other men as they do their own, who would rob? The thieves would stay their hands.... If universal mutual love should come, countries would not resort to blows, families would not be troubled, thieves would hold their hands, princes, subjects, fathers and sons would be respectful and indulgent and the world would be better.”
For M’-Ti, love, or, to translate it more exactly, benevolence composed of respect and indulgence, is the mortar to hold citizens and the state more closely united. It is a remedy against the evils of life-in-common, a social panacea.
“Answer insults with courtesy,” suggests timidly the mysterious Lao-Tse; but courtesy is prudence or mildness, not love. His contemporary, old Confucius, according to his disciple Thseng-Tse, taught a doctrine which consisted in uprightness of heart, and in loving one’s neighbor as oneself (neighbor and not the distant one, the stranger, the enemy) as much as ourselves and not more than ourselves! Confucius preached filial love and general benevolence, necessary to the good ordering of kingdoms, but he did not dream of condemning hate. In the same Lun-Yu, where the words of Thseng-Tse are read, we find these other words, taken from the oldest Confucian text, the Ta-Hio: “Only the just and human man is capable of justly loving and hating men.”
His contemporary Gautama recommends love for men, for all men, even the most wretched and despised. And the same love is to be felt for animals, for the smallest among animals, for all living beings. In Buddhism love of man for man is only a salutary exercise for the total eradication of self-love, first and strongest prop of life. Buddha wishes to suppress suffering; and to suppress suffering he sees no other way than to drown personal souls and universal souls in Nirvana,—in nothingness. The Buddhist does not love his brother out of love for his brother, but out of self-love,—that is, to avoid suffering, to overcome egotism, to approach absorption in the stream of life. His universal love is cold and self-seeking, egotistical, a form of indifference, stoical in grief as in joy.
In Egypt every dead body took with it into the tomb a copy of the book of the dead, an anticipatory apology of the soul before the tribunal of Osiris. The dead praises himself: he has been righteous and has given to the needy, “I have starved no one! I have made no one weep! I have not killed! I have not commanded treacherous murder! I have defrauded no one! I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, a boat to the traveler halted on his journey, sacrifices to the gods, funeral banquets to the dead.” This is righteousness and these are works of mercy (had they really as a matter of fact done all that they claimed?) but we find no love here, much less love for enemies. If we wish to know how the Egyptians treated their enemies let us read an inscription of the great king, Phiops I Miriri: “This army went in peace; it entered as it pleased into the country of the Hirushaitu. This army went in peace; it laid waste the country of the Hirushaitu. This army went in peace; they cut down all their fig trees and their grape vines. This army went in peace; they set on fire all their houses. This army went in peace; it massacred their soldiers by myriads. This army went in peace; it carried away their men, women and children in great numbers, and for this, more than for any other thing, did his Holiness rejoice.”
Zarathushtra also leaves a law for the Iranians. This law commands the faithful of Ahura Mazdâ to be kind to their companions in the faith. They are to give clothes to the naked and they are not to refuse bread to the hungry working man. We are still concerned with material charity towards those who belong to us, who serve us, who are our neighbors. There is no talk of love.
It has been said that Jesus added nothing to the Mosaic law, and only repeated the old Commandments. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Thus speaks Moses in Deuteronomy, “And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shalt have no pity upon them.” Thus it is written in Deuteronomy: a step further and we have reached Love, “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This is a beginning: do no wrong to strangers in memory of the time when you also were a stranger; but the stranger who lives with us is not an enemy, and to refrain from wronging him, does not mean to do good to him. Exodus commands not to wrong him. Leviticus is more generous, “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land ye shalt not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself....” Always the foreigner who lives with you and has become your fellow-citizen, hence like one of your friends. In the same book we read, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.” This is another step forward. Do no harm to him who offends you, provided that he is of your own nation. We have come, if not to pardon, to generous forgetfulness, although only for neighbors.