Chapter 12: The Law of Compassion

THE TRUE MUSIC

Not for the things we sing or say
He listens, who beside us stoops;
Too worn the feet, too hard the way,
Too sore the Cross wherewith He droops,
And much too great the need that cries
From these bruised eyelids and dim eyes.
He waits the water from the spring
Of kindness in the human heart,
The touch of hands, whose touches bring
A coolness to the wounds that smart,
The warm tears falling on His feet
Than precious ointment much more sweet.
O Lord, the way is hard and steep,
Help me to walk that way with Thee,
To watch with Thee, and not to sleep
Heedless of Thy Gethsemane,
Till love becomes my worshipping,
Who have no other gift to bring.
It is no hour for angel-harp,
The sky is dark, the Cross is near,
The agony of Death is sharp,
The scorn of men upbraids Thine ear.
Fain would I leave all empty creeds,
And make a music of my deeds.

Thus to love our fellow men is a difficult business, —there is none harder. It is so difficult that only a few in any age succeed on so conspicuous a scale as to attract prolonged attention. Yet the secret of success is not obscure; it lies in that temper of compassion which is the most beautiful of all features in the character of Jesus. When He looked upon the multitude He was “moved with compassion”—never was there more illuminative sentence. It reveals an attitude of mind absolutely original. For the general attitude towards the multitude in Christ’s day was harsh and scornful. All the splendid intellectualism of Greece existed for the favoured few; beneath that glittering edifice of art and letters lay the dungeons of the slave. It was the same with Rome; it was an empire of privilege, in which the multitude had no part. Jewish society was built after the same pattern, except that with the Pharisee the sense of religious superiority bred a kind of arrogance much more bitter than that which is the fruit of intellectual or social exclusiveness. With men of this temper the call to love all men as fellows could only provoke anger and derision. What possible relation could exist between an Athenian philosopher and a helot, a Roman noble and a slave, a Pharisee proud of his meticulous knowledge of the law, and the common people who were unlettered? The gulf that yawned between such lives was as wide as that which separates the scholar, the artist, or the aristocrat of modern Europe from the pale toiler of a New York sweating-room, or the coal carriers of Zanzibar or Aden. When Jesus bade the young ruler sell all that he had and give it to the poor, He proposed an entirely unthinkable condition of discipleship. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He proposed instead real comradeship with the poor, He Himself being poor. For two thousand years the pulpit has denounced the young ruler for not doing what no one even now would think of doing—not even those who are most eloquent in denunciation.

We may waive the question of whether the advice of Jesus to the young ruler was meant to be of particular or universal application, but we cannot ignore the new law of life which Jesus formulated when He made compassion the supreme social virtue. For it is only through compassion that we learn to understand those who differ from us in social station or temperament, and can at all come to love them. Let me examine my own natural tendencies, and I am soon made aware of how impossible it is to love all my fellow men. I commence my life, for instance, under conditions which permit me to see only a small section of society, which I imagine to be the world itself. I know nothing, and am told nothing, of those whose lives do not lie in the direct line of my limited vision. The process of education removes me at each stage further from the likelihood of knowing them. I acquire ideals, habits, and manners of which they are destitute. I come to regard an acquaintance with various forms of knowledge as essential to life, and I am naturally disdainful of those who do not possess this knowledge. In the same way I regard a certain code of manners as binding, and the lack of this code of manners in others as an outrage. My very thoughts have their own dialect, and I am totally unacquainted with the dialect of those whose thoughts differ from my own. Thus with the growth of my culture there is the equal growth of prejudice; with the enjoyment of my privilege, a tacit rejection and repudiation of the unprivileged.