We wish everyone to love those whom we love. If anybody hates one we love, it hurts us as much as it does the one hated, even more than it would to be hated ourselves. And if anyone whom we love is hating another, we are even more sorry for him than we are for the person he hates, and make all haste to deliver him from this most dreadful condition. The more we love our fellows, the more we hate to see misunderstanding, ill-will, strife, between them.
Not that the Christian is unwilling or afraid to fight. Where deliberate wrong is arrayed against the rights of men, where fraud is practised on the unprotected, where hypocrisy imposes on the credulous, where vice betrays the innocent, where inefficiency sacrifices precious human interests, where avarice oppresses the poor, where tyranny tramples on the weak, there the man who shares the Father's Love for His maltreated children, the man who walks daily in the companionship of the Christ who owns all the downtrodden as His brothers, will be the most fearless and uncompromising foe of every form of injustice and oppression. Property, reputation, position, time, strength, influence, health, life itself if need be, will be thrown unreservedly into the fight against vice and sin. He cannot keep in with the Father and with Christ and not come out in opposition to everything that wrongs and injures the humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child.
Fighting, however, is not altogether uncongenial to the descendants of our brute progenitors. To fight our own battles, and occasionally a few for our neighbours, comes all too naturally to most of us. Fighting God's battles on principle is a very different thing. To feel entirely tranquil in the midst of the combat; to know that we are not alone on the side of the right; to have the real interests of our opponents at heart all the time; to be ever ready to forgive them, and to ask their forgiveness for any excess of zeal we may have shown; to have the peace of God in our hearts, and no trace of malice, in deed, or word, or thought, or feeling,—this is not altogether natural, and the man who does his fighting on that basis gives pretty good assurance of dwelling in the Christian Spirit. No other adequate provision for maintaining peace in the midst of effective warfare, and making peace for others as well as for ourselves the instant the need for war is over, has ever been devised. The peacemakers of this fearless, earnest, strenuous type have the unmistakable right to be called the children of God. "Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God."
All who love must expect to be hated by the foes of those whom they love.
Because Jesus loved the common people and sought to deliver them from their fears and errors, the men who traded on those fears and errors put Him to an ignominious death. If we love and serve the despised, the abused, the plundered, those who despise and abuse and plunder them will do to us the worst they dare. The road of Love is marked at every turn by a cross. Whoever in business, society, or politics makes as real as his own the interests and the wrongs of all whom he can reach and touch, will be disliked, criticised, misrepresented, vilified, condemned. He will pay Love's price of persecution.
Christian sacrifice closely resembles Greek temperance and courage. There is, however, this essential distinction. The Christian takes on not merely the pains and privations which are essential to his personal welfare, or the welfare of his community or state; he takes on whatever suffering the Father's Love for all His children calls him to undergo; gives up whatever indulgences the service of Christ requires him to dispense with; adopts whatever mingling of hardship and self-denial will keep him in most effective and sympathetic fellowship with those who have discovered the same great spiritual secret as himself. Thus, though to the uninitiated outsider much of his life looks hard and severe, on the inside it is easy and light; for the companionship with the Father, with Christ, and with Christian people is so much greater and dearer than the material and sensuous delights it may incidentally take away, that on the inside it does not wear the aspect of loss and sacrifice at all, but rather that of a glory and a gain. Still, since this element of pleasant things foregone, and hard things endured, is ever present, and since it has to be judged by people on the outside as well as by those on the inside of the experience, in recognition of this truth Christianity has made its symbol before the uninitiated world the cross. As in the life of the Master, so in the life of every faithful disciple, the cross must be borne, the perpetual sacrifice must be made, as the price of Love's presence in a world of selfishness and hate; but the cross is transfigured into a crown of rejoicing, the sacrifice is transformed into privilege and pleasure by those precious personal relationships which are the supreme glory and gladness of the soul, and which could be maintained on no cheaper terms. The sacrifice that the Christian makes to get his Father's will, his Master's mission, accomplished in the world which so sorely needs it, is like the sacrifice a mother makes for her sick and suffering child,—the dearest and sweetest experience of life. The cross thus gladly borne, the yoke of sacrifice thus unostentatiously assumed, is the supreme expression of the Christian Spirit.
Like all high-cost things, sacrifice for Love's sake carries a high premium. It admits, as nothing else does, to the inner circle of the immortal lovers of their fellows, to the intimate fellowship of the Lord of Love, Jesus Christ.
Joy follows incidentally and inevitably from the maintenance of these great Christian relationships. A gloomy, depressed, despondent tone and temper, unless it be demonstrably pathological, is public proclamation that the deep mines of these Christian relationships, with their inexhaustible resources, are either undeveloped or unworked. For no man who looks through sunshine and shower, through food and raiment, through family and friendship, through society and the moral order of the world, up into the face of the Giver of them all as his Father; who knows how to summon to his side the gentle and gracious companionship of Christ, alike in the pressure of perplexity and in the quiet of solitude; who knows how to unlock the treasures of Christian literature, to appropriate the meaning of Christian worship, and to avail himself of the comfort and support that is always latent in the hearts of his Christian friends,—no man in whom these vast personal resources are developed and employed can ever long remain disconsolate.
Even in prosperity, popularity, and outward success it takes considerable mixture of these deeper elements to keep the tone of life constantly on the high level of joy. But adversity is the real test. Then the man without these interior resources gives way, breaks down, becomes querulous, fretful, irritable, sour. On the other hand, the man who can make mistakes, and take the criticism they bring, and go on as cheerfully as if no blunder had been made and no vote of censure had been passed; the man who can be hated for the good things he tries to do, and condemned for bad things he never did and never meant to do; the man who can work hard, and contentedly take poverty for pay; the man who can serve devotedly people who revile and betray him in return; the man who can discount in advance the unpopularity, misrepresentation, and defeat a right course will cost, and then resolutely set about it; the man who takes persecution and treachery as serenely as other men take honours and emoluments,—this man, we may be sure, has dug deep an invested heavily in the field where the priceless Christian treasure lies concealed.
"Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."