When, for the last time, from His Mother's home
The Son went forth, foreseeing perfectly
What doom would happen, and what things would come,
Was there upon His lips no stifled sigh
For happy hours that should return no more,
Long days among the lilies, pure delights
Of wanderings by Galilee's fair shore,
And converse with His friends on starry nights?
Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun
With this one word, "Father, Thy will be done!"

With a low voice the stooping olive-trees
Whispered to Him of His Gethsemane;
The cruel thorn-bush, clinging to His knees,
Proclaimed, "I shall be made a crown for Thee!"
And, looking back, His eyes made dim with loss,
He saw the lintel of the cottage grow
In shape against the sunset, like a cross,
And knew He had not very far to go.
Yet brave He stepped into the setting sun,
Still saying this one word, "Thy will be done!"

So, when the last time, from His Mother's home
The Son passed out, no choir of angels came,
As long before at Bethlehem they had come,
To comfort Him upon the road of shame.
Alone He went, and stopped a little space,
As one overburdened, stopped to look again
Upon His Mother's pleading form and face,
And wept for her, that she should know this pain.
Then, silently, He faced the setting sun
And said, "Oh, Father, let Thy will be done!"

VII

LOVE AND JUDGMENT

Just as Jesus called in the vision of the unseen world to redress the balance of the visible world, when He said that there was more joy in heaven over the penitent sinner than over ninety and nine just men who needed no repentance, so in His final addresses to His followers He again discloses the unseen world. These final addresses deal with the tremendous problem of a future judgment. Over no problem does the human mind hover with such breathless interest, such unfeigned alarm. But with characteristic perversity the elements in Christ's vision of the judgment on which men have seized most tenaciously, are precisely those elements which are least intelligible, and least capable of strict definition. It is around the word "eternal" and the nature of the punishment suggested, that the theological battles of centuries have centred. Yet the really central point of both the vision and the teaching, is not here at all; and it is only man's habitual love of enigma which can explain the passion with which men have opposed one another over the interpretation of words and phrases which must always remain enigmatic.

Let us turn to Christ's vision of the Judgment, as recorded by St. Matthew, and what do we find? First that the same Son of Man, whose whole life was an exposition of the law of love, is Himself the final judge of men and nations. "The Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations, and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." No alien judge, observe, unacquainted with the nature of man, but one who knows human life so thoroughly that He is the representative man—"the Son of Man"; and although He is now the Judge, yet He still calls Himself by the tender name of the Shepherd. The tribunal is therefore the tribunal of love, and the court is the court of love. He who shall judge mankind is He who judges Peter and the woman who was a sinner, He of whose tenderness and sympathy we have assurance in a hundred acts of mercy, pity, and magnanimity. Yet for centuries the Church has sung its terrible Dies Irae, has clothed the judgment seat with thunder, has put into the hands of Jesus bolts of flame, and has applauded and enthroned in His sanctuaries such pictorial blasphemies as Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, which represents Jesus as an angry Hercules, and even gratifies the private spite of the artist by overwhelming in a sea of fire one who had offered him a personal affront.

Blasphemy indeed, and falsehood too; for the second thing we find is that the one principle which governs the entire vision of Jesus is that Love judges, and that it is by Love that men are tested. The men and women of loving disposition, who have wrought many little acts of kindness which were to them so natural and simple that they do not so much as recollect them, find themselves mysteriously selected for infinite rewards. The men and women of opposite disposition, in spite of all their outward rectitude of behaviour, find themselves numbered with the goats. A cup of cold water given to a child, a meal bestowed upon a beggar, a garment shared with the naked—these things purchase heaven. One who Himself had been thirsty, hungry, and naked, judges their worth, and He judges by His own remembered need. It is love alone that is divine, love alone that prepares the soul for divine felicity. With a beautiful unconsciousness of any merit, the people who have lived lovingly plead ignorance of their own lovely acts and tempers; but they have been witnessed by the hierarchies of heaven, the morning stars have sung of them, they have made glad the heart of God; and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having added to the joy of God, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.

Never was there vision at once so exquisite and so surprising. It is like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined, and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of a piece with all He taught; so much so indeed that without it, His teaching would be incomplete.

Truly, we may say, the Heaven of Jesus is a strangely ordered Kingdom; for in it beggars are comforted for apparently no other reason than that they need comfort; the doers of forgotten kindnesses are crowned with sudden splendours of divine approval while the lords of genius and the makers of empire are forgotten; and the very anthems of the blessed are hushed into silent wondering and joy when solitary penitents turn homewards from the roads of sin! But it is not stranger than that kingdom in which Jesus lived habitually, the kingdom He created round Him in His earthly life. In that kingdom also love was lord, and she who anointed the tired feet of the Master against His burial was promised everlasting remembrance, and she who out of her penury gave her mite to the poor was praised as having done more than all the rich, who from their abundance distributed careless and unmissed benefactions. In all that Jesus says and does the same sequence of thought runs clear, the same master principle rules the various result. Life is a unity either here or hereafter, and love is, and must evermore remain, the one temper that gives significance to life.