"Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well."—St. James ii. 8.

VII

THE ROYAL LAW

What St. James calls the Royal Law, is mentioned as far back as the time of Moses. It is one of the two commands to which our Lord gave new incidence, into which He put fresh meaning.

There has been, I hardly need remind you, endless debate about the source of some of Christ's most characteristic sayings. Was He original in His teaching, as we use the word, or was He eclectic, gathering together the most luminous things that had been said? Jewish scholars, as we might expect, have not been slow to point out that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and certainly many of His ideas, are to be found in the old Rabbinical writings; that many of His highest truths had been announced by saints and seers of His race long before He came.

We need not question that there is truth in this representation. But we must question the inference from these words, "long before He came." For time has known no such solitude. He, which is, and was, and is to come, has ever been in the world teaching men how to pray, inspiring them what to say. He had taught "them of old time." "Before Abraham was," He says, "I am." And St. John tells us that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not." Originality is no mere traffic with words however skilfully manipulated. There is a language of God transcending all words, and intelligible only when we meet Him spirit to spirit in the secret places of His eternity.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Observe the setting of this admonition when first given: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This word "neighbour" connoted something that was a distinct advance in the upward trend of the race. It did, at any rate, a little to lift the Israelite out of himself into the lives of others. But it meant to him, at the most, only those who were of the same tribe or nation. In the fulness of time—when the world was ready—Jesus took up His own word spoken through Moses, and limited in its interpretation by the moral intelligence of that day; took up His own word, and made it co-extensive with humanity.

This is what I mean by a language of God transcending all speech. "You have been told," says Jesus, "to love your neighbour"; and to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" He makes the answer reach out to its full circumference—"Thy neighbour is he or she who bears thy nature." By the law which declares that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, the physical unity of the race is implied; so by the operation of the law of love the moral unity, or, what we now call the "solidarity of humanity," is intended.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And I hardly need point out, that it is this little word as in the text which gives us pause. Is it possible, then, to bring down this command and incarnate it in our daily life? It does not say, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour with certain arbitrary qualifications of thy own." It evidently means what it says: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Is it possible to do it? And many of us are ready to answer, It is not. Either there has been some mistake in the way it is reported, we tell ourselves, or it is useless to try to fulfil it with such natures as ours in such a world as this.

Put it in this way: granted we loved others as we love ourselves—this should be good and pleasant for those who possessed our love, if it had genuine strength in it. Granted, again, we had the fulness of the strong love of others, that should be helpful to us. If we may condition the Royal Law in some such manner as this, "Love them who love us;" or, "love them who are worthy of our love," the difficulty is obviously lessened, if not in fact removed. But such a limit, while it might amount to prudence, would not reach up to beatitude. "If ye love them who love you, what do ye more than others?" "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." But who is thy neighbour? And Jesus answers, "thy neighbour is he who bears thy nature." This is iteration, but I venture it because I want us to confront the real insistence of this text. They who share our nature may be, and often are, those who hate us with or without a cause. There are people who perpetuate an existence on others which is little better than a moral and physical calamity. To tell us to tolerate them, not to speak about loving them, is like telling us to attempt the impossible. And yet Jesus did not forget these people when He said: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you."

We, then, who say we accept Christ's teaching must accept it. This is one of the places where we cannot escape behind some ingenuity of exegesis or manipulation of text. The command is plain. We can take it or leave it. One thing we cannot do, we cannot re-write it. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." As thyself. If this but fixes a hard standard; or simply indicates the measurement of neighbourly love, then we may almost as well close the discussion—its practical attainment is out of our reach.

But, as some one has very wisely said: "Love of self must become a medium before it becomes a measure." [1] In other words, we cannot love our neighbour as we ought until we love ourselves as we should. Out of love of self "flow the ingredients which must enter into neighbour love."

The text, then, lays down a twofold obligation: to cultivate a right love of self, and to translate this love of self into love for others.

As touching the first part of this obligation, it is useless to ask what it is in our neighbour we are to love as ourselves, until we know what it is in ourselves we are to love. In what sense is a man to love himself? Because there is a radical difference between self-love as taught and practised in the world, and the love of self sanctioned and regulated by the Royal Law. Love of self is a right anxiety to secure the things we need in this world. It is based upon the principle that life is not to be unclothed but clothed upon. The fact that we are in the world and have to fulfil its desired ends should carry with it reverence for our manhood, and the demand for space to work out its full equation. While the Apostle Paul was always ready to subject his rights to the law of love, he was equally careful to assert that they were his rights before he yielded them. In his care for the weak brethren, he did not become a weak brother. One of the first things we have to learn, is how to take wise care of ourselves; and then, step by step, a true life is a growth in the knowledge of how so to take care of ourselves as to promote the best interests of others. In this matter of a right love of self, the point of transition at which it passes into beneficence is the victory over a self-love which is selfishness. It is really the basal principle of moral government in the world.

But when this is said, the surest and simplest answer to the question, What is it in ourselves we are to love? is to say—We are to love that which God loves in us. And what does God love in us? From all we know of the divine nature as revealed in Jesus Christ, we are surely right in thinking that God loves in us what is most like Himself. No man can stand at Calvary reverently and thoughtfully for five minutes without being impressed with the truth of a wondrous self-sacrifice. I met with a remark lately in a story I was reading which fastened itself on my mind. It was made by a poor, toiling woman who had scarcely sufficient means to keep body and soul together: "I never, somehow," she said, "seem to think a thing is mine until I have given it away."

This is the spirit that God loves, a spirit ever getting further away from "miserable aims that end with self." God loves in us the self-mastery that scorns to compromise with self-indulgence. God loves in us that which cannot find its true home in the things seen and temporal, but must ever soar out to the things unseen and eternal; the things that live in and wait upon the earnest man and after which he must ceaselessly aspire. God loves in us the strenuous effort which proceeds from the conviction that there is sacred power in every life which must not be wasted in "egotistical pride, or in a narrowing self-love." From instinct, from the moral consciousness, from the Scriptures—these we know to be representative of the things that God loves. And we know we are right in loving in ourselves what God loves in us. We also know that no man can wisely love himself until he knows the purifying power of a love that is divine.

If now I may assume that this exposition of the text shows the ground, and defines the sphere of a right love of self, I may further say that the Royal Law does not require us to love in others what it does not permit us to love in ourselves. And we do well to be clear about this. Many of us stumble over this text because, not getting at its true inwardness, we have an uneasy feeling that it carries us too far. Others try to work up an artificial sentiment, and profess to exercise a charity which is not theirs to extend.

Here is a man, let us say, who calls himself a religious man, who yet notoriously is a mean and shabby creature. I once heard this man, well placed and prosperous, boast of having that day become richer by some twelve hundred pounds through an oversight of a solicitor in winding up the affairs of a late client. I afterwards learned that the mistake was at the expense of a widow and her young children, who, because of it, were brought within very measurable distance of want. Must my love for my neighbour include one callous enough, not only to do a thing like that, but to boast about it? Must it annex the whole low plane of such a squalid disposition? God forbid. What I hope I should hate in myself I am not asked to love in another. If a man is base and unworthy we are to recognize the fact, however ugly; we are to look the devil in him in the face, and say it is the devil.

But, on the other side, Christianity admonishes us that our judgments of our neighbours are neither infallible nor final. It has been well pointed out, that if we "have found any part of the secret of God's mercy shown to us, we shall not find it hard to believe in God's mercy for our neighbours." To realize that the essential thing the Redeemer saw in us and deemed it worth dying for, He sees in them, will help us, however weary at times in their service, not to weary of it.

In this command, then, we have the ground and motive for the sacrifice of each for the good of all. We see that it is possible to love our neighbour in the sense we are to love ourselves. We see that the command which, on the surface of it, seems to urge an unattainable experience, is, in truth, what St. James calls it, the Royal Law that binds us together not only as neighbours, but as children of the same All-Father.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Should any one ask, "Who does it?" I answer, That is not the question. To deny that we can love our neighbour in this sense is to deny that we can love ourselves. Yet I know what fate, especially for young men, may lurk in this cold, faithless question. And I want it to be understood, that my single aim in this address—the reason why I have wrestled at this length for the meaning of the passage before us—is to show, that whether we choose to do it or not, it can be done. I affirm that this text is a simple statement of the principle of the only rational, helpful life man can live. And to prevail upon you to admit this, would be to accomplish much. To accept it as the truth, that you can love your neighbour as yourself, is to win intellectual confidence in the service which your day demands of you. It is to take the sting of death out of the old evil question: "Who does it?" Once recognize that Christ asks for nothing impossible, when He gave a new and ever-abiding authority to this ancient precept, and the question will not be, Who does it? Rather will it be, Who can afford not to do it? For not to do it is selfishness, and selfishness is self-defeat. He who exists only for himself, exists only to injure himself. It is the fashion now to get rid of a judgment to come by telling us that we are our own judgment here. The latter part of the statement is not the whole truth, but there is truth in it. The strain brings out the strength there is, but shirk it and we have weakness. Do as we like rather than do as we ought, and the price must be paid in loss of manhood. Everything we gain for selfishness we must steal from ourselves.

"Ah me," said Goethe once, "that the yonder is never here." Go deep enough into every wrong and sin and you find at its root this selfishness. So many of us degrade life into a heartless scramble. We fight each other because each man, dissatisfied himself, is convinced that his neighbour is getting more than his share. It may be doubted whether there has ever been a day in the Western world when more people were dominated by the conviction that gain is godliness. So many about us have virtually ceased to put their trust in anything about which they cannot lace their fingers. With them, dreamers about anything else are cranks, and martyrs for anything else are nuisances. And this reacts upon such apology as they have for more serious thinking. We seem in many ways to be returning to the pagan condition when judgment was not feared and spiritual influences were unfelt. In novel, drama, and much that passes for science, we have the monotonous iteration that man is the creature of blind chance under an indifferent sky.

But this, thank God, is not the whole story. There is another and brighter side. If we take a very subdued estimate of our modern day and world, I am yet persuaded that never were the saving ideas of the Saviour more potent, never have His high aspirations been more ardently welcomed or more strenuously followed than they are now.

Past all human speculations about Christ, men hopelessly divided in creed are yet getting nearer to what He lived believing and died believing. In the weariness of so much of the modern world, and in the hopelessness of its outlook, I see an age ready to receive anew the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I see a temper ready to grasp with fresh earnestness the thoughts of the "Living Lord and Supreme Teacher of our race." Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness, peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man, knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his neighbour as in himself.

And Christianity, which came into the world to fulfil these heaven-born dreams, is being openly challenged as never before to substantiate them.

In the larger aims of our spiritual ideals the "yonder is never here," nor, indeed, can it be. There must always be above us something better than our best. When we cease to make progress we die, and that, in the language of Scripture, is the second death.

If, therefore, the searching demand of the text confronts us with the weakness of our nature, we need not wonder and we need not be discouraged. It is the purpose it has in view. "It discloses an ideal, and it reveals an end." If in seeking to realize the ideal and gain the end we are forced to know how insufficient we are in our own strength—this, I repeat, is the end it seeks to accomplish in us and for us. Until our life is in Christ linked on to God, we cannot love our neighbour as we ought, because we have not the higher power to love ourselves as we should.

But the power is offered us. And it is for you young men to lay fast hold of it, and accept the world's challenge in a way it has never been handled and faced before. "Do not talk about the things you believe," says the world to us who name the name of Christ; "convince me that you believe by what you do." And this is said, not from an indifference to dogma, as some would have us think. It means that a man's beliefs are between himself and God. It is what comes out of his belief, that can be reckoned with amid the forces of our everyday life.

You place in cold sheet one of the loftiest passages of a great composer before a man sensitive to music, but who does not know one note from the other, and he looks at it with indifference. You put the sheet before a gifted organist seated at his instrument; and as the melody rolls forth in swells of power, then in cadences of persuasive pathos, the indifference of the man vanishes as he catches his breath like a sob, and feels a prayer he cannot speak. We say we believe in Christ, and men turn aside with indifference. We live Christ, and men love Him. It is common enough to find this indifference about religion, and a marked want of what I have called intellectual confidence in Christianity as we preach it from the pulpit. But I have never yet found a man infidel to the fruits of its spirit, which are, love, peace, goodness, a living faith, and a genuine self-sacrifice. Before men can be expected to become Christ-like, they must know what Christ is like, and how far are we prepared to put our lives before men as an answer to the question: "What think ye of Christ?"

Preach Christ by living Christ. "All men," says the Koran, "are commanded by the Saint." And no man ever casts the wealth of his life and the crown of his devotion at the feet of Jesus without "quickening the earth with a diviner life, and uplifting it with a new courage." One of the most brilliant of the eighteenth-century poets said: "The lapse of time changes all but man, who ever has been, and ever will be, just what he is." Which means that man is by make incurably selfish. This is a lie. And it is the worst kind of lying, for it represents not only the inability to find good in man, but the inability to believe that there is good to be found. My own stand is where thought and experience have forced me. From human nature left to itself I hope for nothing; with that nature remade in Christ I despair of nothing. It all turns on the remake. And it can be remade: "As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God: who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."

Let us, therefore, by divine grace, refashion our lives on the mighty principle of divine love. And let us settle it as one of the truths never to be questioned, that nothing is worthy to be called love that cannot be affirmed of God. We know what God loves; or we know enough for the practical ordering of our daily life. Let us love in ourselves what God loves in us. This will include for ourselves and others all things which are good for us to have and enjoy; and because it will exclude all things that are narrow, mean, and selfish, it will go far to raise the world to a power of a new day. Then, through hearts and homes, through Churches and societies, the Royal Law, made royal life, will solve the problem of the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. It will become the touch of omnipotence that casts out of our life the unworthy, by bringing in the opposite virtues, resolving all into character which shall transform mankind into one realm over which the right and the might of Christ shall at last prevail—

"From creed and scheme the light goes out,
The saintly fact survives,
The Blessed Master who can doubt,
Revealed in human lives?"

[1] Two or three sentences in this chapter are memorized from a sermon I heard years ago, preached by Rev. H. E. Michie, M.A., of Stonehaven.