Sweeter than the perfume of roses is the possession of a kind, charitable, unselfish nature, a ready disposition to do for others any good turn in one's power.
A New York man who saw a little girl carrying a crippled boy across a street, offered to assist her, telling her that the boy was too heavy for her to carry. "Oh, no," said the child quickly, "he's not heavy; he's my brother."
Oh, marvelous power of love that lightens all heavy burdens and smooths all rough roads! What would become of humanity were it not for love, which sweetens the hardest labor and makes self-sacrifice a joy? It is the greatest force in the universe. Without its transforming power we should still be primitive barbarians.
In spite of the loud cries of pessimists and skeptics to the contrary, its light is still leading men upward. Although the dream of the world's peacemakers has come to naught and Europe is plunged in a merciless war, yet there are multitudes of signs of the reign of love. Its merciful healing power is at work even on the cruel battlefield. We see it animating the great army of Red Cross surgeons and nurses, who, regardless of creed or country, racial or social differences, are treating all the wounded soldiers as brothers, binding up their wounds and nursing them back to health and life. Love is healing the hurts made by hate and discord.
We see its influence in the miracle which the leaven of the Golden Rule is performing in the business world, in the passion for social service in the world at large, in the gradual obliteration of class distinctions, in the growing efforts to ameliorate the conditions of the poor, in the great wave of reform that is beating against the walls of all our institutions, our jails, our poorhouses, our reformatories, our insane asylums. The abuses with which these places were filled are gradually being cleared up by love.
In many of our prisons, the kindly, brotherhood system of treatment that has been inaugurated is really helping to reform criminals, whereas the old system of penology killed men, broke their spirit, or made them more hardened in crime. It rarely, if ever, reformed. Love's way must in time banish altogether the old cruel prison methods, and ultimately the criminal himself. When the world is run by love, by the Golden Rule plan, crime will die a natural death.
Every one who slips from the right path, no matter what he has done, should be given another chance, a fresh opportunity to make good, to rebuild his character. One who has sinned against society should not be expelled from the sympathies, the good-will and the kindliness of his fellowmen. Criminals should be treated as unfortunate brothers and sisters who have stumbled and lost their way on the life path. Love is the only medium that will help them to rise, to get back into the current that runs Godward.
People who understand them, who see a God in the ruins that evil influences have made, would make good men and women out of the great majority of our prisoners.
Many of these poor wretches never had an opportunity. They never felt the magic touch of love, never knew the influence of a good home, of honest, loving parents. Most of them did not have a right start in life. They were handicapped at birth by ignorance, by disease, by vicious parentage. They never had a fair chance. Love's way would give them one. Shutting them into cramped, miserable, sunless cells, with none of the comforts or conveniences of life, where none of the humanities reach them; meting them out treatment we would not dream of inflicting on our domestic animals, is like trying to put out fire with kerosene oil. Such treatment makes them worse, arouses their basest passions of revenge, bitterness and hatred, fills them with a determination to "get even" with society.
Society is beginning to wake up to the futility of such brutal methods. It is beginning to apply love's way to its criminal classes, to all classes.