Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As, according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood for its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music-halls and its night clubs, its Piccadillys and its politics, its restaurants and its salons; but of the bad—or good?—heart of it all they know nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner; and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.
But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its conditions than
His commandment that we should love our enemies. He realised—can we doubt?—that, without enemies, the Church He bade His followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but little, unless the four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.
Indeed, for a man, or a cause, that wants to get on, there is nothing like a few hearty, zealous enemies. Most of us would never be heard of if it were not for our enemies. The unsuccessful man counts up his friends, but the successful man numbers his enemies. A friend of mine was lamenting, the other day, that he could not find twelve people to disbelieve in him. He had been seeking them for years, he sighed, and could not get beyond eleven. But, even so, with only eleven he was a very successful man. In these kind-hearted days enemies are becoming so rare that one has to go out of one's way to make them. The true interpretation, therefore, of the easiest of the commandments is
—make your enemies, and your enemies will make you.
So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be sure that we have not sown in vain.
Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our personalities or ideas. He is an involuntary witness to our vitality. Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we made him—to 'make an enemy,' is not that the phrase?
Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one raison d'être. That alone should make us charitable to him. Live and let live. Without us our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession. Think of his wives and families!
The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established profession; there is but
one older—namely, the hatred of the little for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it is without doubt the more lucrative. It is one of the shortest roads to fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history? Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or Shakespeare! Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review only survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is denied them in the present.