"Treat both others and yourself as their place and yours in God's coming Kingdom require;" that is the Golden Rule in its complete form. "All things, therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you" (remembering that both you and they have places and functions in the Father's Kingdom of Love); "even so do ye also unto them: for this is the law and the prophets."
This fulfilment of law is a very different thing from selfishly breaking the law. That such a reformer as Jesus ever took the conservative side of any question seems at first sight so preposterous that most candid critics believe that He never said the words attributed to Him about breaking one of the least of these commandments, or else that He said them in a lost context which would greatly alter their meaning. That, however, is not quite sure. For Love at its best is never rudely iconoclastic. Every good law in its original intent is aimed to lift men out of their sensuality and selfishness into at least an outward conformity to the requirements of social well-being. And however grotesque, fantastic, and superfluous such a law under changed conditions may become, its original intent will always keep it sacred and precious, even after its purpose can be accomplished better without it. To fulfil is not to destroy, or to take delight in destruction. "Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished."
At the same time Love is always changing and superseding laws and institutions by pressure of adjustment to the changing demands of individual and social well-being. Laws and institutions are made for men, rather than men for institutions and laws; and the instant an old law ceases to serve a new need in the best possible way, Love erects the better service into a new law or institution, superseding the old. Any law that fails to promote the physical, mental, social, and spiritual good of the persons and the community concerned, thereby loses Love's sanction and becomes obsolete. Law for law's sake, rather than for the sake of man and society, is the flat denial of Love. To exalt any tradition, institution, custom, or prohibition above the human and social good it has ceased to serve, is to sink to the level of the scribe and Pharisee—the deadliest enemies of Jesus, and all for which He stood. "For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."
In Love's eyes all anger, contempt, and quarrelsomeness are as bad as murder—indeed are incipient murder, stopped short of overt crime through fear. The look, or word, or deed of unkindness, the thought, or wish, or hope that evil may befall another, even the attitude of cold indifference, is murder in the heart. And it is only because we lack the courage to translate wish into will that in such cases we do not do the thing which, if done without our responsibility, by accident or nature, we should rejoice to see accomplished.
From a strange and unexpected source there has come the confirmation of this New Testament conception of the prevalence, not to say the universality, of murder. A brilliant but grossly perverse English man of letters was sentenced to imprisonment a few years ago for the foulest crime. From the gaol in which he was confined there came a most realistic description of the last days and final execution within its walls of a lieutenant in the British army, who was condemned for killing a woman whom he loved.
The poem has the exaggeration of a perverted and embittered nature; but beneath the exaggeration there is the original truth, which underlies Jesus' identification of murder and hate. After describing the last days of the condemned man, his execution and his burial, the poem concludes as follows:—
"In Reading Gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding sheet he lies
And his grave has got no name.
"And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
"And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word:
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword."
Charge up against ourselves as murder the bitter looks, the hateful words, the unkind thoughts, the selfish actions, which have lessened the vitality, diminished the joy, wounded the heart, and murdered the happiness of those whom we ought to love, whom perhaps at times we think we do love, and who can profess to be guiltless?