When Galilee took morning's flame
Thro' fields of flowers the Master came.
He stopped before a cottage door,
And took from humble hands the store
Of crumbs that from the table fell,
And water from the living well.
He smiled, and with a great content
Upon the road of flowers went.

Foredoomed upon the road of shame
With bleeding feet the Master came,
And found the cottage door again.
"No wine have we to ease Thy pain,
But only water in a cup."
The Master slowly drank it up.
"Thy kindness turns it into wine,"
He said, "and makes the gift divine."

Upon a day the Master trod
The road of stars that leads to God,
All tasks for men accomplished.
"They gave Me hate," He softly said,
"But Love in larger measure gave,
And therefore was I strong to save.
I had not reached the Cross that day
But for the Well beside the way."

VIII

THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE

If these things be true, if the whole tradition of Jesus is an exposition of love as the law of life, the deduction is entirely simple, and as logical as it is simple. That deduction has been already stated. It is that Christianity is a method of life by which men and women are taught and inspired to love as Jesus loved, and to live loving and lovable lives. It has little to do with creeds, and still less with formal codes of conduct. For this reason such a definition of Christianity will satisfy neither the theologian nor the philosopher. Jesus never expected that it would. He knew that the one would regard it as heretical, and the other as so deficient in subtlety as to seem foolish. Therefore He made His appeal to simple and natural people, saying that what was hidden from the wise and prudent, was revealed to babes.

The simple and natural people understood Jesus; they always do. The sophisticated and artificial people did not understand Him; they never will. With scarcely an exception the people of intelligence and culture regarded Him with disdain, withdrew from Him, or violently opposed Him. The reason for their conduct lay not so much in either their culture or their intelligence, as in the kind of life that seemed to be necessary to them as the expression of their culture.

Thus, they were full of prejudices, prepossessions, and foregone conclusions, all of which had the sanction of their culture. It was enough for them to know that Jesus came from Nazareth and was unlettered; this produced in them violent scorn and antipathy. They were still further offended because He used none of the shibboleths with which they were familiar. Nor could they conceive of any life as satisfactory but the kind of life they lived, and that was a life of social complexity, ruled by conventional usages and maxims, and essentially artificial in ideal and practice. Jesus, therefore, turned from them to the simple and natural people, fishermen, artisans, and humble women, in whom the natural instincts had fuller play. His reward was immediate; then, and ever since, the Common People heard Him gladly.

The reason why simple and natural people readily understand Jesus is that in the kind of life they live the primal emotions are supreme. The very narrowness of their social outlook intensifies those emotions. They have little to distract them; they are not bewildered by endless disquisitions on conduct, and religion itself is for them an emotion rather than a systematized creed. For the poor man home, children, fireside affection, mean more than for the rich man, because they are his only wealth. This is the lesson which Wordsworth has so nobly taught in his "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,"—

How, by heaven's grace this Clifford's heart was framed,
How he, long forced in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

People who live thus, in wise simplicity, undistracted by the numerous illusions of an artificial life, have no difficulty in accepting Christ's teaching that love is the supreme law of life, because love means everything to them in the kind of life they lead. In the wisdom of the heart they are more learned than the wisest Pharisee, who is rarely "softened into feeling," whose whole social life indeed imposes a restraint on feeling. What peasant father would not welcome a returning prodigal, what peasant mother would not open her arms wide to gather to her bosom a penitent daughter, recovered from the cruel snare of cities? Certainly one is much more likely to find such acts of pure feeling among peasant folk than among the rich and cultured, for the peasant cares less for opinion, is less respectful of social etiquette, and follows more closely in his actions the instincts of primal affection. Who has not discovered among poor and humble folk a strange and beautiful lenience, the lenience of a great compassion, towards those sins which in more artificial conditions of society are held to justify the most violent condemnation, and do indeed close the heart to pity? In poor men's huts beside the Sea of Galilee Jesus Himself had found love, love in all its divine daring, lenience, and magnanimity, and He knew that among people like these He would be understood. He also knew that the only people fitted to interpret His doctrine of sovereign love to the world were these simple folk of the lake and field, and therefore to them He committed His Gospel, and from them He chose His disciples.

It needed a peasant Christ to teach these things, for no other could have imagined them, no other could have had the daring and simplicity to utter them. A peasant Christ He was, living, thinking, and acting as a peasant even in His highest moments of inspiration. It was because He always remained a peasant that He was able to see so clearly the defects of that more intricate social system to which His ministry introduced Him. He brought with Him a new scale of values, which He had learned in the school of a more primal life than could be found in cities. Nature always spoke in Him, convention never. In His treatment of sin it is always the voice of Nature that we hear triumphing over the verdicts of convention. The sins which convention regards as inexpiable are sins of passion; the sins which it excuses are sins of temper, such as greed, malice, craft, unkindness, cruelty. Jesus entirely reverses the scale. His pity is reserved for outcasts, His harshest words are addressed to those whom the world calls good. Folly He views with infinite compassion—the foolish man is as a lost sheep whose very helplessness invokes our pity. But for the man of hard and self-sufficient nature, whose very righteousness is a mixture of prudence and egoism, He has only words of flame. An offense against virtue counts for less with Him than an offense against love. No wonder the Pharisees called Him a blasphemer! Were the true nature of Christ's teaching understood to-day many who profess to revere Him would join in the same accusation. What more offensive and unpalatable truth could be presented to mankind than this on which Jesus constantly insists, that sins of temper are much more harmful than sins of passion, that they spring from a more incurable malignancy of nature, that they produce far wider and more disastrous suffering?

Yet the truth is clear enough to all broadly truthful and simple natures, which are not bewildered by conventional views of right and wrong. Who has occasioned more suffering, the youth who has sinned against himself in wild folly and repented, or the man who has planned his life with that cold craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices everything to self-advantage? Can any human mind measure the various and almost infinite wrongs committed by the man who piles up through years of sordid avarice an unjust fortune? Who can count the broken hearts in the pathway of that implacable ambition which "wades through slaughter to a throne"? These things may not be apparent to the man whose nature is subdued to the hue of that artificial society in which he lives, a society which permits such crimes to pass unquestioned. They are certainly not perceived by the criminals themselves. To-day, as in the day of Christ, they "devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers," save, perhaps, that more blind than the ancient Pharisees, their prayers seem real, and they themselves are unconscious of pretense. Now also, as then, they give their tithes in conventional benevolence, forgetting, and hoping to make others forget, the sources of their wealth in their use of it. How is it that such men are so unconscious of offense? Simply because they have never grasped Christ's deliberate statement that sins of temper are much worse than sins of passion; that cruelty is a worse thing than folly; that the wrong wrought by squandering the substance in a far country is more quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, than the wrong of hoarding one's substance in the avarice which neglects the poor, or adding to it by methods which trample the weak and humble in the dust, as deserving neither pity nor attention.

Yet it needs but a very brief examination of society to prove the truth of Christ's contention; very little experience of life to discover that the utmost corruption of the human heart lies in lovelessness. The spiteful and rancorous temper, always seeking occasions of offense; the jealous spirit which cannot bear the spectacle of another's joy; the bitter nagging tongue, darting hither and thither like a serpent's fang full of poison, and diabolically skilled in wounding; the sour and grudging disposition, which seems most contented with itself when it has produced the utmost misery in others; the narrow mind and heart destitute of magnanimity; the cold and egoistic temperament, which demands subservience of others and receives their service without thanks, as though the acknowledgment of gratitude were weakness—these are common and typical forms of lovelessness, and who can estimate the sum of suffering they inflict? Their fruit is everywhere the same; love repressed, children estranged, the home made intolerable. It does but add to the offense of these unlovely people that in what the world calls morality they are above reproach, for they instill a hatred of morality itself by their appropriation of it. Before them love flies aghast, and the tenderest emotions of the heart fall withered. Could the annals of human misery be fairly written, it might appear that not all the lusts and crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye have wrought such wide-spread misery, have inflicted such general unhappiness, as these sins of temper, so common in their operation that they pass almost unrebuked, but so wide-spread in their effects that their havoc is discovered in every feature of our social life.