From the Gospel of John
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.
The Inside of the Cup[T]
By Winston Churchill
(One of the most popular of American novelists, born 1871. This story has for its theme the failure of the Church in the face of modern social problems. In the following scene a rich man is rebuked by his pastor)
The perceptions of the banker were keen, and his sense of security was brief. Somehow, as he met the searching eye of the rector, he was unable to see the man as a visionary, but beheld and,—to do him justice—felt a twinge of respect for an adversary worthy of his steel. He, who was accustomed to prepare for clouds when they were mere specks on his horizon, paused even now to marvel why he had not dealt with this. Here was a man—a fanatic, if he liked—but still a man who positively did not fear him, to whom his wrath and power were as nothing! A new and startling and complicated sensation—but Eldon Parr was no coward. If he had, consciously or unconsciously, formerly looked upon the clergyman as a dependent, Hodder appeared to be one no more. The very ruggedness of the man had enhanced, expanded—as it were—until it filled the room. And Hodder had, with an audacity unparalleled in the banker’s experience, arraigned by implication his whole life, managed to put him on the defensive.
“But if that has become your philosophy,” the rector said—“that a man must look out for himself—what is it in you that impels you to give these large sums for the public good?”
“I should suppose that you, as a clergyman, might understand that my motive is a Christian one.”
Hodder sat very still, but a higher light came into his eyes.
“Mr. Parr,” he replied, “I have been a friend of yours, and I am a friend still. And what I am going to tell you is not only in the hope that others may benefit, but that your own soul may be saved. I mean that literally—your own soul. You are under the impression that you are a Christian, but you are not and never have been one. And you will not be one until your whole life is transformed, until you become a different man. If you do not change, it is my duty to warn you that sorrow and suffering, the uneasiness which you now know, and which drive you on, in search of distraction, to adding useless sums of money to your fortune—this suffering, I say, will become intensified. You will die in the knowledge of it, and live on after, in the knowledge of it.”