The Empire of Love | Page 9

two thousand years we still
stand astonished at it, more than half doubtful of its validity, and, if
truth be told, secretly dismayed at its boldness. It is romantic justice,
we say, but is it practicable justice? We might at least remember that
what we call practicable justice has never yet attained the gracious
results of Christ's romantic justice. Simon the Pharisee knows no more
how to deal with "this woman" than the elder brother knew how to deal
with the prodigal. Such sense of justice as they possessed would have
infallibly driven the penitent boy back to the comradeship of harlots,
and have refused the penitent harlot the barest chance of reformation. Is
not this enough to make the least discerning of us all suspect that
Pharisees and elder brothers, for all their immaculate respectability of
life, are by no means qualified to pass judgment on these tragedies of
life with which they have no acquaintance, and cannot have an
understanding sympathy? Does not the entire failure of legal justice
with all its apparatus of punishment and repression, to give the sinner a
vital impulse to withdraw from his sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at
least to the hope, that there must be some better method of dealing with
sinners than is sanctioned by conventional justice? There is another
method--it is Christ's method. And the thing to be observed is that
whereas conventional justice must certainly have failed in either of
these crucial instances, the romantic justice of Jesus--if we must so call
it--completely succeeded. The woman who was a sinner sinned no
more, and the penitent son henceforth lived a new life of purity and

obedience. In each case love is justified, and proves itself the highest
justice.

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

LOVE'S PROFIT
What profits all the hate that we have known The bitter words, not all
unmerited? Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown? Have
roses grown from thistles we have sown? Or lucid dawns flowered out
of sunsets red? Lo, all in vain The violence that added pain to pain,
And drove the sinner back to sin again.
We had been wiser had we walked Love's way We had been happier
had we tenderer been, We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day Had
we but loved the souls that went astray, And sought from shame their
many faults to screen Lo, they and we Had thus escaped Life's worst
Gethsemane, And found the Garden where the angels be.
For One there was who, angry, drew no sword, Derided, wept for those
who wrought Him wrong, And at the last attained this great reward,
That those who injured Him acclaimed Him Lord, And wove His story
into holiest song. So sinners wrought For Him the Kingdom He had
vainly sought, And to His feet the world's frankincense brought.

V
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
In these instances it is the singular completeness of Christ's forgiveness
which is the most startling feature. It would be a libel on human nature
to say that men do not forgive each other, but human forgiveness
usually has reservations, reticences, conditions. Jesus taught unlimited
forgiveness, and what He taught He practiced.

"Then came Peter, and said to Him, 'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin
against me and I forgive him? Until seven times?' Jesus said unto him,
'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.'"
It is a vehement reply, in which a quiet note of scorn vibrates; not scorn
of Peter, but scorn of any kind of love that is less than limitless. But
whose love is limitless? Do we not commonly speak of love as being
outworn by offense or neglect? In the compacts which we make with
one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name certain
offenses as unpardonable? Thus one man will say, "I can forgive
anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive
perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is
held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now
and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different
music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and
sixteenth sonnet, boldly states that
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with
the remover to remove.
But who listens, who believes? Yet, if it should happen to us to be
placed in the position of the offender, we need no one to convince us
that a true love should be, in its very nature, unalterable. How
astonished and dismayed are we, when eyes that have so many times
met ours in tenderness harden at our presence, and lips which have
uttered so many pledges of affection, speak