The Empire of Love | Page 3

but Pilate could not understand, because he
had been trained in the hard efficiency of Rome; nor Judas, because the
masculine vice of ambition had overgrown his affections, and
deflowered his heart. What is it then in Paul and John and Peter, what
element or quality, which we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or Napoleon?

Clearly there is no lack of force, for the personality of these three first
apostles lifted a world out of its groove and changed the course of
history. Was it not just this, that each had beneath his masculine
strength a feminine tenderness, a power of loving and of begetting love
in others? John lying on the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of
love and sorrow at the last Supper; Peter, plunging naked into the
Galilean sea, and struggling to the shore at the mere suspicion that the
strange figure outlined there upon the morning mist is the Lord; Paul
praying not only to share the wounds of Jesus, but if there be any pang
left over, any anguish unfulfilled, that this anguish may be his--these
are not alone immortal pictures, but they are revelations of a
temperament, the temperament that understands Jesus. He who could
not melt into an abandonment of grief and love over one on whom the
shadow of the last hour rested; he who would spring headlong into no
estranging sea to reach one loved and lost and marvellously brought
near again; he who can share the festal wine of life, but has no appetite
for agony, no thirsting of the soul to bear another's pain--these can
never understand Jesus. They cannot understand Him, simply because
they cannot understand love.

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?

TOWARDS GALILEE
The great obdurate world I know no more, The clanging of the brazen
wheels of greed, The taloned hands that build the miser's store, The
stony streets where feeble feet must bleed. No more I walk beneath thy
ashen skies, With pallid martyrs cruelly crucified Upon thy
predetermined Calvaries: I, too, have suffered, yea, and I have died!
Now, at the last, another road I take Thro' peaceful gardens, by a lilted
way, To those low eaves beside the silver lake, Where Christ waits for
me at the close of day. Farewell, proud world! In vain thou callest me.
I go to meet my Lord in Galilee.

II
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
Christianity, as it exists to-day, is in the main a misrepresentation and a
misinterpretation of Christ; not consciously indeed--if it were so the
remedy would be easy; but unconsciously, which makes the remedy
difficult. One need not stop to define Christianity, for there is only one
sincere meaning to the word; it implies a kind of life whose spirit and
method reproduce as accurately as possible the spirit and the method
of the life of Jesus. It would seem that if this interpretation of the term
be correct there could be no difficulty in adjusting even unconscious
misinterpretation of Christ to the true facts of the case: but here we are
met by that perversity of vision which springs not from ignorance, but
from thoughtlessness, and is in its nature much more obdurate than the
worst perversity of ignorance. Ignorance can be enlightened;
thoughtlessness, being usually associated with vanity, recognizes no
need of enlightenment.
The life of Jesus, freshly introduced to a mind wholly ignorant of its
existence may be trusted to convey its own impression; but the
thoughtless mind will be either too proud, or too shallow, or too
confident, to be sensitive to right impressions. Thus the trouble with
most people who call themselves Christians is not to educate them into
right conceptions of the life of Christ, but to destroy the growth of
wrong impressions. "Surely," they will say, "we know all about the life
of Christ. We have read the biographies of Jesus ever since the days of
infancy. We have heard the life of Jesus expounded through long years
by multitudes of teachers. We have a church which claims to have
extracted from the life of Jesus a whole code of laws for life and
conduct; is not this enough?" But what if the teachers themselves have
never found the true secret of Jesus? What if they have but repeated the
error of the Pharisees in elaborating a code of laws in which the vital
spirit of the truth they would impart is lost? And does not the whole
history of man's mind teach us that one simple truth known at first-hand
is worth more to us, and is of greater influence on our conduct, than all
the second-hand instruction we may receive from the most competent

of teachers? It is just this first-hand thought which we most need. We
need to see for ourselves what Jesus was, and