"Well, if you are going to get even," concluded the uncle, "you'll either have to go down into the mire with him or get him up on to the clean, hard ground with you. Think it over."
The next day, when his uncle asked him how he had made out, the boy replied: "You know I thought about what you said, about getting even, so I told him we wanted him to pitch for us; and he not only played a dandy game, but he said he would get me a new ball." The boy had found the divine way of getting even.
I am not concerned to apply this principle to the many corporate and social evils of our time; for if only I can succeed in making clear how true and how vital it is as a key to human relationships, and how central it was in Jesus' teaching, its wider application can safely be left to you. Creative love is the healing spirit most needed in the world today.
If, in presenting those aspects of Jesus' message which reached the hearts of the simple with a vitalizing power, giving them a new grip on life and a sense of at-homeness in God's world, I have conveyed the impression that here is a safe and easy way out of life's difficulties, I have failed in my task. Because a view of the world is true and because a method of approach is the only ultimately successful one, it by no means follows that it is always a safe method for the individual. Indeed Jesus abundantly reminded His followers that they need not expect less of opposition, antagonism and persecution than He Himself had received. The following of the way of love would make for division and strife even in that place where it would be hardest to see it arise—in one's own home. It could not be expected that evil corporately and socially entrenched would always give way before the power of redemptive love glowing in the life of one individual. It might mean that the lives and labors of many would have to be spent to the utmost before love would achieve its victory.
It is indeed in the light of such a possibility that the social character of the gospel is doubly emphasized. The kingdom has a meaning only when we realize that far beyond the individual triumphs for love that may be achieved, there is a field that can be won only by the corporate faithfulness to the ideal of the group. The individual may lose by all the worldly standards, and his life may seem an ineffectual protest or gesture, but it is the type of losing in which the soul is found and which sooner or later wins out for the group over the entrenched evil of ages.
In a decade in which, following a more imperfect, yes, even a sadly futile ideal, millions of men have been content to give their lives, we have no cause to feel that men will not be ready to pay the price. They are even too ready to sell themselves for that which is worthless. If they but knew, to adapt our Lord's words, if they but knew the things that belong unto their peace, but now they are hid from their eyes!
But why is it, we are sometimes tempted to ask, that the way of love stirs up strife and bitterness? Does not that outcome of some of our endeavors argue a failure on our part to express the healing spirit? It may be that, of course; but is it not generally because that method is essentially an appeal to conscience, and a conscience stirred, but not completely won, drives its possessor to an extreme of reaction? It was no accident that some of our leading Christian ministers were the most bitter detractors of conscientious objectors during the war. The very existence of the latter was a continual challenge to the consciences of those ministers. They had to maintain their different attitude the more vehemently. As some of our friends remind us, love is not a mushy thing, and it sometimes has to inflict pain.
The world is growing old in its sophistication. The developments in scientific research, during the last century especially, have led many to feel that in the ever-growing complexity of the life of the universe and in the ever-widening reaches of our knowledge there is, each decade, less and less place for God in the world and less and less occasion to pay attention to the words of a half-mythical Syrian teacher. But out of that very sophistication has come the reaction that is leading many to question the whole interlocking system of philosophy, science, industry and politics that sums up the universe in terms of material things. It is time, they say, that we began to cut loose from the machine and get down to the human heart that is the one vital thing in the world:
"Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not crowns and thrones, but men!"
To such comes with new and convincing power that which has been hidden from the wise and prudent, the vision that this is still God's world, in which, for all the learned data we have collected, there are still the almost untapped reservoirs of human possibilities awaiting not the test tubes of the scientist or formulas of the mathematician to bring them out, but merely the spirit of redemptive love as we have learned it in Jesus.