VII
THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE
Jesus' Spirit of Love is capable of absorbing into itself whatever we have found valuable in the four previous systems.
The Epicurean's varied and spontaneous joy in life is not diminished, but enhanced, by the Christian Spirit, which multiplies this joy as many times as there are persons whom one knows and loves. The Epicurean lives in the little world of himself, and a few equally self-centred companions. The Christian lives in the great world of God, and shares its joys with all God's human children. It is the absence of this larger world, the exclusive concern for his own narrow pleasures, that makes the consistent Epicurean, with all his polish and charm, the essentially mean and despicable creature we found him to be.
To be sure, Mill, Spencer, and others have endeavoured to graft the altruistic fruits of Christianity on to the old Epicurean stock. There is this great difference, however, between such Christianised Epicureanism as that of Mill and Spencer, and Christianity itself. These systems have no logical bridge, no emotional bond by which to pass from the pleasures of self to the pleasures of others. They can and do point out the incompleteness of merely egoistic Epicureanism; they exhort us to care for the pleasures of others as we do for our own. But the logical nexus, the moral dynamic, the spiritual motive, is lacking in these systems; and consequently these systems fail to work, except with the few highly altruistic souls who need no spiritual physician.
This logical bond, this moral dynamic, this spiritual motive which impels toward altruistic conduct, the Christian finds in Christ. He certainly did love all men, and care for their happiness as dearly as He cared for His own. But this same Christ is the Christian's Lord and Master and Friend. Yet friendship for Him, the acceptance of Him as Lord and Master, is a contradiction in terms, unless one is at the same time willing to cultivate His Spirit, which is the Spirit of service, the Spirit which holds the happiness and welfare of others just as sacred and precious as one's own. He that hath not this Spirit of Christ is none of His. Hence what men like Mill and Spencer preach as a duty, and support by what their critics have found to be very inadequate and fallacious logical processes, Christianity proclaims as a fact in the nature of God, as embodied in Christ, and a condition of the divine life for everyone who desires to be a child of God, a follower and friend of Jesus Christ. Christianity, therefore, includes everything of value in Epicureanism, and infinitely more. It has the Epicurean gladness without its exclusiveness, its joy without its selfishness, its naturalness without its baseness, its geniality without its heartlessness.
In like manner Christianity takes up all that is true in the Stoic teaching, without falling into its hardness and narrowness. The truth of the Stoic teaching consisted in its power to transform into an expression of the man himself, and of the beneficent laws of Nature, whatever outward circumstance might befall him, Now put in place of the abstract self the love of the perfect Christ, and instead of universal law the loving will of the Father for all His children, and you have a deepened, sweetened, softened Stoicism which is identical with a sturdy, strenuous, and virile Christianity.
If a man has in his heart the earnest desire to be like Christ, and to do the things that help to carry out Christ's Spirit in the world, it is absolutely impossible that he should ever find himself in a situation where what he most desires to do cannot be done. Now a man who in every conceivable situation can do what he most desires to do is as completely "master of his fate" and "captain of his soul" as the most strenuous Stoic ever prayed to be. And yet he is saved from the coldness and hardness and repulsiveness of the mere Stoic, because the object of his devotion, the aim of his assertion, is not his own barren, frigid, formal self, but the kindly, sympathetic, loving Christ, whom he has chosen to be his better self. Like the Stoic, he brings every thought into captivity; but it is not the captivity of a prison, the empty chamber of his individual soul, swept and garnished; it is captivity to the most gracious and gentle and generous person the world has ever known,—it is captivity to Christ.
When misfortune and calamity overtakes him, he transforms it into a blessing and a discipline, not like the mere Stoic through passive resignation to an impersonal law, as of gravitation, or electricity, or bacteriology, but through active devotion to that glory of God which is to be furthered mainly by kindness and sympathy and service to our fellow-men. The man who has this love of Christ in his heart, and who is devoted to the doing of the Father's loving will, can exclaim in every untoward circumstance, "I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me." He can shout with more than Stoic defiance: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" In all the literature of Stoic exultation in the face of frowning danger and impending doom, there is nothing that can match the splendid outburst of the great Apostle: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Everything that we found noble, and strong, and brave in Stoicism we find also here; the power to transform external evil into internal good, and to hold so tightly to our self-chosen good that no power in earth or heaven can ever wrest it from us,—a good so universal that the circumstance is inconceivable in which it would fail to work. Yet with all this tenacious, world-conquering strength, there is, drawn from the divine Source of this affection a gentleness, and sympathy, and tenderness, and humble human helpfulness, which the Stoic in his boastfulness, and hardness, and self-sufficiency could never know.
The Christian abhors lying and stealing, scolding and slandering, slavery and prostitution, meanness and murder, not less but far more than the Stoic. But he refrains from these things, not under constraint of abstract law, but because he cares so deeply and sensitively for the people whom these things affect that he cannot endure the thought that any word or deed of his should bring them pain or loss or shame or degradation. Thus he gets the Stoic strength without its hardness, the Stoic universality without its barrenness, the Stoic exaltation without its pride, the Stoic integrity without its formalism, the Stoic calm without its impassiveness.