Chapter 13: The Empire of Love

THE WOMAN WHO WAITED

She wrought warm garments for the poor,
From morn to eve unwearied she
Went with her gifts from door to door;
And when the night drew silently
Along the streets, and she came home,
She prayed, “O Lord, when wilt Thou come?”
She was but loving, she could please
With no rare art of speech or song.
The art she knew was how to ease
The sick man’s pain, the weak man’s wrong;
And every night as she came home
She said, “O Lord, when wilt Thou come?”
The truths men praised she deemed untrue,
The light they hailed to her was dim,
But that the Christ was kind she knew,
She knew that she must be like Him.
Like Mary, in her darkened home,
She sighed, “O Christ, that thou would’st come!”
Her hair grew white, her house was bare,
Yet still her step was firm and glad,
The feet of Hunger climbed the stair,
For she had given all she had.
She died within her empty home
Still seeking One who did not come.
She rose from out the wave of death,
A Stranger stood beside the shore;
The robe she wrought with failing breath,
And staining tears, the Stranger wore.
He drew her tired heart with His smile,
“Lo, I was with thee all the while.”

But if this spirit of compassion were general, would virtue itself be secure? Would not a fatal lenience towards vice become the temper of society? Would not the immediate effect be the declaration of a general amnesty towards every kind of wrong-doer, and from such an act what could be expected but a rapid dissolution of the laws and conventions that maintain the structure of society?

These are natural fears, and they are not altogether the fears of weak and timid men. They will certainly be shared by all tyrants, all persons whose tempers incline to absolutism, all believers in force as the true dynamic of stable social government. To reason with such persons is impossible, because their opinions are the fruit of temper, and are therefore irrational. But even such persons are not destitute of powers of observation, and in the long history of the world there is a field of observation which no person of intelligence can neglect.

Do we find, as we survey this field, that force has ever proved the true dynamic of stable social government? We find the exact contrary to be true. The great empires of the past were founded on force and perished, even as Napoleon discovered in his final reveries on human history. Whenever force has been applied to maintain what seemed a right social system it has uniformly failed. The Church of Rome applied force to produce a world consonant with her ideas of truth; she was all but destroyed by the recoil of her prolonged persecutions. The Puritans were persecuted in the name of truth and virtue; they triumphed. The Puritans in turn persecuted, under the impulse of ideals that an impartial judgment must pronounce among the loftiest and noblest that ever animated human hearts, and in turn they were overthrown. Again and again, when crime has attained monstrous and threatening proportions, laws of barbarous severity have been applied for its repression; in not one solitary instance have they been successful. The more barbarous and severe the law against crime, the more has crime flourished. When men were hanged for petty theft, when they were whipped at the cart’s tail for seditious language, when they were disembowelled for treasonable practices; theft, sedition, and treason flourished as they have never flourished since. The very disproportion and hideousness of the penalty inflamed men’s minds to the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate the death penalty for the anarchist, irrespective of his exact crime; when city councils propose the same penalty for those guilty of outrages on women; when indignant mobs, in spite of law, and without trial, burn at the stake offending negroes. If history teaches anything with an emphasis at once clear and unmistakable, it is that crime has never yet been abridged by brutal harshness, but has thriven on it. History also teaches with an emphasis equally clear and positive, that the spirit of love, manifesting itself in lenience, compassion, and magnanimity, has constantly justified itself by the reduction of crime, and the taming of the worst kind of criminal.