The Empire of Love | Page 2

would love
Him more than father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a
love a condition of what He called discipleship. The greatest marvel of
all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly verified

in the event. He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love, unrealizable as
it is by touch, or glance, or spoken word, or momentary presence, men
and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and surrender all
things. The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his last lonely
reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing in universal
history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, I, have founded empires. They were
founded on force, and have perished. Jesus Christ has founded an
empire on love, and to this day there are millions ready to die for Him."
Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the baffling, inexplicable marvel.
Were we able to detach ourselves enough from use and custom, to
survey the movement of human thought from some lonely height above
the floods of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea-silences of St. Helena,
we also might feel the wonder of this most wonderful thing the world
has ever known.
That the majority of men, and even Christian men, do not perceive that
the whole meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a thing too obvious to
demand evidence or invite contradiction. I say men, and Christian men,
thus limiting my statement, because women and Christian women,
frequently do perceive it, being themselves the creatures of affection,
and finding in affection the one sufficing symbol of life and of the
universe. It is a St. Catherine who thinks of herself as the bride of
Christ, and dreams the lovely vision of the changed hearts--the heart of
Jesus placed by the hands that bled beneath her pure bosom, and her
heart hidden in the side of Him who died for her. It is a St. Theresa who
melts into ecstasy at the brooding presence of the heavenly Lover, and
can only think of the Evil One himself with commiseration as one who
cannot love. It is true that Francis of Assisi also thought and spoke of
Christ with a lover's ecstasy, but then Francis in his exquisite
tenderness of nature, was more woman than man. No such thought
visited the stern heart of Dominic, nor any of those makers of theology
who have built systems and disciplines upon the divine poetry of the
divine Life.
Love, as the perfect symbol of life and the universe, does not content
men, simply because for most men love is not the key to life, nor an

end worth living for in itself, nor anything but a complex and often
troublesome emotion, which must needs be subordinated to other
faculties and qualities, such as greed, or pride, or the desire of power,
or the dominant demands of intellect. Among men the poets alone have
really understood Jesus: and in the category of the poets must be
included the saints, whose religion has always been interpreted to them
through the imagination. The poets have understood; the theologians
rarely or never. Thus it happens that men, being the general and
accepted interpreters of Christ, have all but wholly misinterpreted Him.
The lyric passion of that life, and the lyric love which it excites, has
been to them a disregarded music. They have rarely achieved more than
to tell us what Christ taught; they have wholly failed to make us feel
what Christ was. But Mary Magdalene knew this, and it was what she
said and felt in the Garden that has put Christ upon the throne of the
world. Was not her vision after all the true one? Is not a Catherine a
better guide to Jesus than a Dominic? When all the strident theologies
fall silent, will not the world's whole worship still utter itself in the lyric
cry,
Jesu, Lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly.
Is it then not within the competence of man to interpret Christ aright,
simply because the masculine temperament is what it is? By no means,
for such a statement would disqualify the evangelists themselves, who
are the only biographers of Jesus. But in the degree that a temperament
is only masculine, it will fail to understand Jesus. Napoleon could not
understand; he was the child of force, the son of the sword, the very
type of that hard efficiency of will and intellect which turns the heart to
flint, and scorns the witness of the softer intuitions. Francis could
understand because he was in part feminine--not weakly so, but nobly,
as all poets and dreamers and visionaries are. Paul could understand for
the same reason, and so could John and Peter; each, in varying degrees,
belonging to the same type;