The Empire of Love | Page 3

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 not through the eyes of another, whatever his authority.
Suppose that we should read the Gospels in this spirit, with an entirely unbiassed and receptive mind, capable of first-hand impressions, what would be the probable character of these impressions? The clearest and deepest of all, I think, would be that the Jesus therein depicted lived His life on