The Empire of Love | Page 7

had returned in dignity and triumph. In the last
scene of all, implied rather than described, the restored prodigal sits at
the feast, leaning on his father's bosom, but the respectable son stands
without in a darkness of his own creation--the darkness which a harsh
spirit and an unlovely temper never fail to create in men of his unhappy
temperament.
It is a very strange story, if we come to think of it; almost an immoral
story, as no doubt it was considered by the Pharisees, and persons of
their cold and mechanical type of virtue. But Jesus anticipates their
criticism with one of the most startling statements that ever fell from
inspired lips, "There is more joy in heaven among the angels of God
over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous
persons who need no repentance." Heaven approves the story, if they
do not. Thus God Himself would act, for God is love. Thus love must
needs act, if it be the kind of love that "suffereth long and is kind, doth
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh
not account of evil, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all
things, endureth all things." And if we ask what becomes of justice,
Jesus assures us that love is the only real justice. For the main object of
justice is not punishment but reclamation. A truly enlightened justice is
less concerned with the punishment of wrong than its reparation.
The gravest question in the case of this unhappy boy is not what he has
made of himself by sin and folly, but what can yet be made of him by
wise and tender treatment. Had the father coldly dismissed the prodigal
with some bitter verdict on his past folly, he himself would have been
unjust to the boy's possibilities, and thus would have sinned against his
son with a sin much less capable of excuse than the son's sin against
him. The worst sinner in the story is not the son who went wrong, but
the son who had never done anything but right, yet had done it in such
a way that it had begotten in him a vile, censorious, loveless temper.

No one can be just who does not love; and so, once more removing the
story into that unseen world which Christ called in to redress the
balance of this visible world, we sinful men and women build our
hopes upon the great saying that God's forgiveness is God's justice: if
we confess our sins, He is not only faithful, but JUST in forgiving us
our sins.

LOVE IS JUSTICE

THE WAY OF WOUNDS
He touched the leper tenderly, So in His hands there came to be Wide
wounds that were not wrought with nails. Alas, my hands are smooth
and fair, No wound is on them anywhere, Nor any scarlet scar of nails.
His lips lay on the mouth of death, God's healing dwelt within their
breath, Wherefore his lips grew pale with pain, And no man shall that
pain divine; Alas, my lips are red with wine, And they have scorned His
draught of pain.
His feet were torn of stone and thorn, Full slow He moved on roads
forlorn, But joyous hearts accompanied Him; Alas, my feet are softly
shod, And on the road that leads to God, They have not sought to move
with Him.
And so all wounded by the way, He came home at the close of day, And
angels met Him at the Gate. Alas, His way I have not known-- The road
forlorn, the wounding stone-- And no one waits me at the Gate.

IV
LOVE IS JUSTICE
Love is the only real justice--never was there a more revolutionary

ethic! If Christianity is to be judged by its institutions, it must be
reluctantly confessed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have
almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind.
The elder brother still makes broad his phylacteries in the home, in the
Church, and on the seat of justice. The elder brother's sense of offended
respectability still masquerades as virtue. Who forgives as this father
forgave, with such completeness that he who has wrought the wrong is
encouraged to forget that the wrong was ever wrought? Where is the
loving and tolerant spirit of the father less visible than in the Church,
which crucifies men for a word, and makes a difference of opinion the
ground for deadly enmity? Of what administration of law can we say
that its chief object is not the punishment of the wrong-doer, but his
reclamation? No existing society is organized on these principles, and
the only defense the apologists of a bastard Christianity make is that it
is totally