Note 223.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

Let us now cast a glance on that most characteristic and most widely bruited of all the Christian virtues, viz., Love; which under the name of Charity (not Ἔρως, the old satellite of Venus, but ἀγάπη), St. Paul in a famous chapter eulogizes as at once the crown and the epitome of all virtues most peculiarly Christian. We read also that “Love is the fulfilling of the law;” and a watchword so deliberately chosen and so emphatically sounded must always be pregnant with significance as to the moral character and efficiency of the religion to which it belongs. Now the plain significance which this blazon bears on the face of it is this, that if Love be the blossom of all virtue, the root of all vice is the opposite of Love, viz., Selfishness. And whosoever has looked into the moral world with any faculty of generalizing, will not fail to have observed that every form of vice is only a diverse manifestation of that untempered, voracious, and altogether monstrous egotism, which, in order to purchase for itself a slight advantage or a momentary titillation, would not scruple to plunge a whole universe into disorder and ruin; while, on the other hand, the virtuous man lives as much by sympathy with the desires of others as by the gratification of his own, and is ready at any moment to dash the bowl of blessedness from his lips, if he must purchase it by the consignment to misery of a singly human soul. And if we look at the lower organism of society, we shall find, that as in the republic of science knowledge prospers exactly in proportion as the pure love of truth prevails, so in communities of human beings, the measure of the amount of that brotherly love which man feels to man, taken in its intensity and in its diffusion, furnishes an exact test of the amount of moral excellence and consequent happiness—as distinguished from mere material prosperity—which is found in any place. The greatest difficulties, indeed, which society has to encounter, spring fundamentally from a deficiency of brotherly love,—from every grade of carelessness, indifference, and coldness, down to niggardliness, shabbiness, and the wretched mania of hoarding jealously what he who hoards is afraid to use. Poor-laws, for instance, which are generally looked upon as a necessary evil, exist only because those social associations to which the administration of charity naturally belongs, viz., in a Christian country the Christian churches, are not powerful or zealous enough adequately to do their duty in relieving human misery; that is to say, because Love, which is professedly the soul of those associations, is either not intense enough where it exists, or not sufficiently diffused, to provide the necessary aid; and thus people are driven to supply the want of voluntary love in the community by the exaction of compulsory rates, which may, indeed, save a few individuals from starvation, but which certainly produce the double evil of weakening the healthy habit of self-support through all classes of the community, and of stopping the fountain-heads of that natural flow of brotherly aid, which is a virtue only so long as it is voluntary. Now to this selfishness, which may without exaggeration be termed the endemic taint of all human associations, Christianity has applied the antidote of Love, in the triple form of love to Christ, love to the brethren, and love to the human race;—love to Christ as the incarnate type of unselfish benevolence and noble self-sacrifice; love to the brethren as fellow-soldiers in the same glorious human campaign; love to all men, as sheep of one common fold, which the further they have strayed the more diligently they are to be sought for. How much more intensely and extensively than in any other association this Love has operated in the Christian churches, from the days of Dorcas and her weeping widows down to Florence Nightingale and her Crimean campaign, need not be told; nine-tenths of the most active benevolence of the day in this country are Christian in their origin and in their character; and even those persons the favourite watchwords of whose social ethics are borrowed not from Christ but from Epicurus, will be found to have added a strange grace to the philosophy which they profess by a light borrowed from the religion which they disown. And if we inquire what are the causes of this superior prominence given to active benevolence in the Christian scheme of ethics, we shall find, as in other instances, that the peculiar character of the ethical fruit depends on the root of religion by which the plant is nourished, and the theological soil in which it was planted. For surely it requires very little thought to perceive that the root of all that surpassing love of the human brotherhood lies in the well-known opening words of the most catholic of prayers—“Our Father which art in Heaven;” the aspect also of sin as a contumacy and a rebellion, and a guilt drawing down a curse, necessarily led to a more aggressive philanthropy, with the view of achieving deliverance from that curse; but, above all, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the terrible consequences necessarily involved in the idea of an eternal banishment from the sunshine of the Divine presence, has created an amount of social benevolence and missionary zeal which under any less potent stimulus would have been impossible. The miseries of the more neglected and outcast part of humanity present an entirely different aspect to the calm Epicurean and to the zealous Christian. To the Christian the soul of the meanest savage and of the most degraded criminal is still an immortal soul. As when a conflagration bursts out in a high turret, where a little child is sleeping within the near enswathment of the flames, some adventurous fireman boldly climbs the ladder, and rushing through the suffocating smoke, snatches the little innocent from the embrace of destruction; so the Christian apostle flings himself into the eager host of idolatrous worshippers, and rejoices with exceeding joy when he saves if it were but one poor soul from the jaws of the destroying Siva to whom he was sold. But, as men’s actions are the offspring of their convictions, the Epicurean will find no spur strong enough to shake him out of his easy-chair at such a spectacle of human degradation. Let the poor sinner be worshipping Siva on the banks of the Ganges, or committing slow suicide by what, in the language of the Celtic islands, is strangely called the water of life,[223.1] your easy sensuous philosopher needs not vex himself about the matter. Poor idiot! poor sot! poor devil! with his little feeble flame of smoky light which he calls life, let him flicker on another moment, or let him be snuffed out, it matters not; another bubble has burst on the surface of the waters, and the mighty ocean of cosmic vitality flows on as full and as free and as fathomless as before!