The Greatest Thing In the World | Page 5

love can justify the waste.
It is more difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all than, having
sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only true of a partly
selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to Love, and nothing is hard. I
believe that Christ's "yoke" is easy. Christ's yoke is just His way of
taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any other. I believe it
is a happier way than any other. The most obvious lesson in Christ's
teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything,
but only in giving. I repeat, _there is no happiness in having or in
getting, but only in giving_. Half the world is on the wrong scent in
pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and
in being served by others. It consists in giving, and in serving others.
"He that would be great among you," said Christ, "let him serve." He
that would be happy, let him remember that there is but one way--"it is
more blessed, it is more happy, to give than to receive."
The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: _Good temper._ "Love is
not provoked."
Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined
to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it
as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament,
not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's
character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it
finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as
one of the most destructive elements in human nature.
The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is

often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who
are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an
easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This
compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the
strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is, there are two
great classes of sins--sins of the Body and sins of the Disposition. The
Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of
the second. Now, society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is
the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But
are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and
coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature
may be less venal than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is
Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No
form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself,
does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering
life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred
relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women,
for taking the bloom of childhood, in short,
FOR SHEER GRATUITOUS MISERY-PRODUCING POWER
this influence stands alone.
Look at the Elder Brother--moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful--let
him get all credit for his virtues--look at this man, this baby, sulking
outside his own father's door. "He was angry," we read, "and would not
go in." Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the
happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal--and how
many prodigals are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the unlovely
character of those who profess to be inside. Analyze, as a study in
Temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the Elder Brother's
brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty,
self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness--these are the
ingredients of this dark and loveless soul. In varying proportions, also,
these are the ingredients of all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the
disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than the
sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question Himself

when He said, "I say unto you that the publicans and the harlots go into
the Kingdom of Heaven before you"? There is really no place in heaven
for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make
heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man
be
BORN AGAIN,
he cannot, simply cannot, enter the kingdom of heaven.
You will see then why Temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone,
but in what it reveals. This is why I