William Dawson - The Empire of Love стр 4.

Now the wonderful thing in Jesus is that He is always sure of Himself. Nothing takes Him by surprise, nothing produces the least hesitation in His judgment. Therefore He must have had an unfailing clue to which He trusted in the maze of life. Behind all consistency of judgment there must exist consistency of principle. The principle that governed all the thoughts of Jesus was that love was the only real justice. He came not to condemn, not to destroy men's lives, but to save them. There was no problem of human relationship that could not be solved by love; there was no other principle needed for the regulation of society; and no other could produce that general peace and good-will which He called the Kingdom of God.

Thus, on one occasion Jesus tells a story which is so lifelike in every touch that we may accept it, without doubt, as less a parable than an incident. A father has two sons, one of whom is industrious and dutiful, the other wayward and rebellious. The wayward son finally casts off all pretense of filial obedience, goes into a far country, and wastes his substance in riotous living. Here we have one of the saddest of all problems in human relationship, for presently the disgraced son comes home a beggar. The elder brother who represents the average social view, has no doubt whatever as to what should be done. He is offended that the disgraced son should come home at all; he would have thought better of him if he had hidden his shame in the country that had witnessed it. Probably his sense of pride and respectability is offended more than his love of virtue, though he characteristically gives his jealous anger the illusion of morality. This, I say, is the average social view. There are few things more cruel than affronted respectability. The elder brother is an eminently respectable person, totally unacquainted with wayward passions, and his only feeling for his brother is disdain.

Jesus tells the story, however, in such a way as to discredit the average social view. He begins by making us feel that whatever follies the prodigal had committed, he had already been punished for them in the miseries he had endured. It is not for man to punish with his whip of scorn one who has already been flaggellated with a whip of scorpions in the desert places of disgrace and shame. Jesus makes us feel also that whatever sins might be laid to the charge of the disgraced son, there is nevertheless in his heart a warmth of feeling of which the elder brother gives no sign. The boy loves his father, otherwise he would not have turned to him in his anguish of distress. The elder brother's attitude to his father is arrogant and harsh; the younger brother's is humble and tender. Lastly the father himself is revealed as the embodiment of love. He asks no questions, utters no reproaches, imposes no conditions; he simply takes his son back, in the rush of his affection cutting short the boy's pitiful confession, and calling for shoes and new robes and festal music, as though his son 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 creationthe 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

IV

Love is the only real justicenever 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 impossible to apply the principles of Jesus to the administration of society. That is, at all events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one? Was Jesus merely a romantic dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love and justice? Was He a moral anarchist, whose teachings, if interpreted in laws, would destroy the basis of society? A strange thing indeed in human history if One who has been loved as no other was ever loved by multitudes of men and women through the ages, should prove after all to be an impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist!