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Ce ieee eal CONTENTS PART ONE CLIMBING THE TRAIL PAGE CLIMBING THD ERA TIN er CR le ten ak os 11 PART TWO hi ON THE BROAD TABLE-LAND . LOVE’s LoNG-SUFFERING AND KINDNESS. 53 SERIO Y OMANITY INN 7s 05 yA beaten oes a a 75 OVE AND EGOTIGM . ooo ke a tiire ce bas 89 . LOVE AND EXTIQUBTTE. : 2.0.0.5 00.2.4. 121 ROVE Ay ITS KIGHTS te ier its ies 139 PS LOVH AND LL EMPDR occis os oak Aue os 161 CRU VIEAN OY CULL ft ook e's oe be ne etateer he 173 LOVE AND: THE TRUTH. oR el ly au 193 . Toe Crimaxinae Risume.............. 211 PART THREE IN THE HEIGHTS De ram igus: oh. Poa. se te 221 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library httos://archive.org/details/heightsofchristi0OOhaye 0 PART ONE CLIMBING THE TRAIL ) a Le B ‘ K ry ae at OAE ke “rT Ore r CLIMBING THE TRAIL I. Tue Hicuest HEIGHT THE Yosemite Valley in California is one of nature’s wonderiands. Take any trail you choose and it will lead you into marvelous displays of natural beauty and far-reaching vision. We stood upon Glacier Point, three thousand two hundred and fifty feet above the valley floor, and looked down upon the great hotels which seemed like doll houses and the men and women who walked about them like moving specks, and then we looked away to the Vernal and Nevada Falls and on to the crest of the Sierras through a sweep of forty miles; and we were ready to say, “Nothing could be more impressive than this.” On another day we climbed to the top of Eagle Peak on the opposite side of the valley, five hundred feet higher into the air, and we found that the view from that point was wider and grander still. On yet another day we toiled up the trail which led us past the Vernal Falls and the Nevada Falls and round il THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the Cap of Liberty through the Little Yosemite past South Dome to the towering peak they called Cloud’s Rest, six thousand feet above the valley, ten thousand feet above the sea, the highest accessible point in that region, and there we found what was possibly the finest panoramic view with the most far-reaching and varied and striking topographical out- look to be seen anywhere in the mountains of America. To the earnest student of Scripture the Epistles of Paul are a wonderland, filled with marvels of literary beauty and _ spiritual power. Anyone who follows their guidance will be led again and again into mountain heights of marvelous vision, where spir- itual horizons will be like unto that at Glacier Point or Eagle Peak or Cloud’s Rest in Yosem- ite; and again and again one will be tempted to say, “This is the highest height of exaltation to which even such a giant genius as that of Paul can lead me, for nothing can be more im- pressive and sublime than this.” The eighth chapter of Romans, the first chapter of Ephe- sians, the fifteenth chapter of First Corin- thians—these are like Glacier Point or Eagle Peak or Sentinel Dome; but almost all the authorities and lovers of the Scripture are agreed that there is one passage which towers 12 CLIMBING THE TRAIL above all the rest, the highest reach of the apostle’s genius, the highest peak in the Paul- ine Epistles. That highest height of the apostle’s inspiration is to be found in the thir- teenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Cor- inthians. Dean Alford said of this chapter that it was a pure and perfect gem, perhaps the noblest assemblage of beautiful thoughts in beautiful language extant in this our world; and a re- cent writer declares of it that it is beyond ques- tion the noblest statement of all that a Chris- tian man ought to be and do and suffer, that has ever been penned. Other passages in the Pauline Epistles may be very precious to us; but if we would enjoy the very best which Paul has to offer us, we must read and study, ap- propriate and absorb until it becomes a very part of our being, the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to Corinth. Paul never wrote anything else t to equal it. This is chapter _ is the brightest_ gem among all his | treasures, the fairest flower to be plucked in his garden, the highest mountain peak to which even his daring spirit could ascend. Shall we endeavor to climb this trail by his side? Let us first notice one curious fact concerning this chapter. It is merely an aside, a paren- thesis. 13 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE Ii. A PARENTHESIS Paul is writing to the Corinthians about the spiritual gifts which God had bestowed upon them. There were marvelous charisms in their church, gifts of healing, working of miracles, discerning of spirits, eloquence of prophecy, diversities of tongues, interpretations of tongues. In the twelfth chapter the apostle makes a general presentation of the subject, emphasizing especially the diversity and the varying value among these gifts, while he en- deavors to show that they all have one source and therefore ought to work toward one end. In the fourteenth chapter Paul proceeds to a discussion of particular gifts, and especially the gift of tongues. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth chapters he interrupts himself to say, “I will show you a more excellent way.” Then he makes of the thirteenth chapter a pean of praise to perfect love. The chapter is a parenthesis, but it is greater than other men’s volumes. The Faith Chapter of the New Testament is another parenthesis. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews, which sings the triumphs of faith, is an interruption of the author’s argument, an insertion by the way, and yet the most precious chapter of the entire Epistle to us. It is just so with the thirteenth 14 CLIMBING THE TRAIL chapter of First Corinthians. It is an aside, an insertion, a parenthesis, but we would not exchange it for any. other chapter written by Paul. Iif. THe Sussect, Love The chapter is a poem in praise of Chris- tian love. We would have expected it to be written by the apostle John. John is the Apostle of Love in the New Testament. He was the beloved disciple among the twelve. The Epistles of John are love letters, filled with exhortations to and protestations of love. We would have expected John to com- pose a poem to Christian love; but it is one of the paradoxes of church history that it was not John but Paul to whom the privilege was granted of writing the most glorious presenta- tion of love to be found in the Bible or in the ' world’s literature. Paul is called the Apostle of Faith, but it is he who writes, “The greatest of these is love.”* John is called the Apostle of Love, but he wrote the fourth Gospel and said at the end of it, “These things are written that ye may believe’’*—not that ye may love but “that ye may believe.” The Apostle of Love writes +1 Cor. 13, 13: 2 John 20. 31. 15 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the gospel for Faith. The Apostle of Faith writes the incomparable Eulogy of Love. Paul was not much given to poetry. He was a lawyer by instinct, a logician in practice, a prince among executives, a man of action, no dreamer or rhapsodist. Yet here for a mo- ment his pen is poetically inspired and he rises into the transcendent heights, and with illimitable spiritual vision he describes the queen of Christian graces, and on the most sublime summit of Christian attainment on earth and in heaven he plants the religious ideal of the New ‘Testament revelation, charity or Christian love. He shows that the love involved alone can give any value to all the spiritual gifts in their personal posses- Sion or their public manifestation, and that love has eternal worth, while all these things will pass away. He shows that love is the primal necessity and the eternal necessity as well in the Christian life. It is the incompar- able gift, the most excellent way. Paul puts into his description of it all gra- cious attributes, all lovable traits, and yet seems scarcely satisfied. Many writers have made the same attempt worthily to describe this chief of all the graces, and have felt their own inadequacy. Let us look at a few of these, before we continue our study. 16 CLIMBING THE TRAIL TV. OvTuHeEr DESCRIPTIONS OF LOVE 1. Five hundred years before Paul’s day Plato had essayed to sing the praises of love. It may be that Paul had read his words and thought that he could improve upon them. “From the love of the beautiful,” Plato said, “has sprung every good in heaven and earth. Therefore I say of Love, that he is the cause of what is fairest and best in all things. Love is our lord, supplying kindness and ban- ishing unkindness, giving friendship and for- giving enmity, the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods; de- sired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him; parent of delicacy, luxury, desire, fond- ness, softness, grace; regardful of the good, re- gardless of the evil; in every word, work, wish, fear—pilot, helper, defender, saviour; glory of gods and men, leader best and brightest; in whose footsteps let every man follow, chant- ing a hymn of praise and joining in that fair strain with which Love charms the souls of gods and men.” 2. Chrysostom, the most eloquent of the church Fathers, discourses upon Love in the following fashion: “Consider how great a blessing it is of itself to exercise love; what 17 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE cheerfulness it produces, in how great grace it establishes the soul !—a thing which above all is a choice quality of it. For the other parts of virtue have each their trouble yoked with them. But love, along with the gain, hath great pleasure too, and no trouble—and, like an industrious bee gathering the sweets from every flower, deposits them in the soul of him who loveth. Though anyone be a slave, it renders slavery sweeter than liberty—for he who loveth rejoiceth not so much in command- ing as in being commanded—although to com- mand is sweet: but Love changes the nature of things, and presents herself with all blessings in her hands, gentler than any mother, wealthier than any queen, and makes difficul- ties light and easy, making out virtue to be facile, but vice very bitter to us. As thus: to expend seems grievous, yet Love makes it pleasant; to receive other men’s goods, pleas- ant, yet Love suffers it not to appear pleasant, but frames our minds to avoid it as evil. Again, to speak evil seems to be pleasant to all; but Love, while making this out to be bitter, causeth speaking well to be pleasant; for nothing is so sweet to us as to be praising one whom we love. Again, anger hath a kind of pleasure: but in this case no longer; rather all its sinews are taken away; . . . so faris 18 CLIMBING THE TRAIL Love from being exasperated. And should Love behold one in error, Love mourns and is in pain; yet even this pain itself brings pleasure. . . . But there is, saith one, a profane pleasure in love. Avaunt! and hold thy peace, whoever thou art! For nothing is so pure from such pleasure as genuine love. Love considers the profit of them that are loved.” , 3. Thomas a Kempis, the greatest of the medieval mystics, in his Imitation of Christ has a chapter on “The Wonderful Effect of Divine Love,” in which are these paragraphs descriptive of the graces of Love. “Love is a great thing, A blessing very good, The only thing that makes all burdens light, Bearing evenly what is uneven, Carrying a weight, not feeling it, Turning all bitterness to a sweet savor. The noble love of Jesus drives men on to do great deeds, And always rouses, them to long for what is better. “Nothing is sweeter, stronger, broader, higher, Fuller, better, or more pleasant in heaven or earth; It is the child of God, Nor can it rest except in him, Above the world created. “Tt feels no weight, Makes light of toil, Would do more than it can, 19 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE Pleads no impossibility, Because it thinks it can and may do all. “Love is swift, sincere, Pious, pleasant, and delightsome, Brave, patient, faithful, Careful, longsuffering, manly, Never seeking its own good; For where a man looks for himself He falls away from love.” Of course these descriptions by Thomas a Kempis and Chrysostom are modeled more or less upon the one by Paul. The same thing is true of the one which comes nearest to Paul in time in Christian literature. 4. One of Paul’s fellow laborers at Philippi was a man called Clement, whose name the apostle says was written in the book of life.’ After Paul’s martyrdom and while the apostle John was still living in his old age at Ephesus, church tradition says that this Clement, as the friend and companion of both Peter and Paul, was chosen to stand at the head of the Christian church at Rome. Whether Clement of Rome was the Clement of the Philippian epistle or not, we know that in his capacity of presbyter or bishop of the Roman church he wrote an epistle to the Corinthians, probably about the year 95 of our era. For some cen- | turies this epistle was read in many of the 1 Phil. 4. 3. 20 CLIMBING THE TRAIL churches as almost if not quite on a level with the apostolical and canonical writings them- selves. The forty-ninth chapter of that epistle is a chapter in praise of Christian love, and it has many points of resemblance to the chapter written by Paul. Clement, even more than Paul, seems to be overcome by his sense of the impossibility of doing anything like adequate justice to his theme. He says: “Who can describe the blessed bond of the love of God? What man is able to tell the excellence of its beauty, as it ought to be told? The height to which love exalts is unspeakable. Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love beareth all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no seditions: love does all things in harmony. By love have all the elect of God been made perfect ; without love nothing is well pleasing to God. In love has the Lord taken us to him- self. On account of the love he bore us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave his blood for us by the will of God; his flesh for our flesh, and his soul for our souls. Ye see, beloved, how great and wonderful a thing is love, and that there is no declaring its perfections.” Clement was right. The half never yet has 21 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE been told of love’s sublimity. Irenzus, one of the church Fathers, declared of love that “it is a most excellent present from heaven, the top and zenith of all virtues, gifts, and powers of God.” It is all that, and more. The love of God is indescribable, inexhaustible, infinite. The love of Christ was greater love than this world ever had known or than men ever will realize. This love of God and love of Christ as cherished in’'a human heart and incarnated in a human life has beauties and nobilities in it which no human pen adequately can de- scribe. Yet Paul has essayed to hint at cer- tain unfailing characteristics which love has. We turn next to an analysis of his descrip- tion. V. ANALYSIS OF PAUL’S DESCRIPTION The description proper is found in verses four to seven inclusive. Findlay tells us that these verses run in seven couplets, arranged as one affirmative, four negative, and then two more affirmative verse lines, with the subject repeated at the head of the second line. The verse which closes the middle longer move- ment becomes a triplet, making a pause in the chant by the antithetical repetition of the second clause. The paragraph then reads as follows: 22 CLIMBING THE TRAIL Love suffers long, shows kindness. Love envies not, makes no self-display ; Is not puffed up, behaves not unseemly; Seeks not her own advantage, is not em- bittered ; Imputes not evil, rejoices not at wrong, but shares in the joy of the truth. All things she tolerates, all things she be- lieves ; _ All things she hopes for, all things she en- dures. _ Findlay says further that the first line sup- plies the general theme, defining the two fundamental excellencies of Love—her pa- tience toward evil and kindly activity in good. In the negative movement, the first half-lines set forth Love’s attitude—free from jealousy, arrogance, avarice, grudge-bearing; while the second member in each case sets forth her temper—modest, refined in feeling, placable, having her joy in goodness. The third move- ment reverts to the opening note, on which it descants. We are not sure that Paul con- sciously adopted any metrical movements at this point, but all impassioned prose writing tends to adopt. poetical forms, and we already have called this chapter Paul’s sublime poem in praise of Christian love. 23 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE VI. THE SIMPLICITY OF THE CHAPTER The sublimity of the chapter is most ap- parent in its simplicity. Anyone can under- stand it, and anyone can appreciate it to the full. It is a fact, as John Wesley suggests, that it immediately commends itself to every man’s conscience, and nothing is more com- mon than to find even those who deny the au- thority of the Holy Scriptures, yet affirming, “This is my religion; that which is described in the thirteenth chapter of the Corinthians.” He tells us of a Jew, a physician living in Georgia, who used to say with great earnest- ness: “Paul of Tarsus is one of the finest writers I have ever read. I wish the thir- teenth chapter of his first letter to the Cor- inthians were written in letters of gold. And I wish every Jew were to carry it with him wherever he went.” And then John Wesley adds, “He judged (and herein he judged rightly), that this single chapter contained the whole of true religion. It contains what- soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely: if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, it is all contained in this.” 24 CLIMBING THE TRAIL VII. THE GREATNESS OF THE THEME It is a beautiful chapter and a wonderful chapter, one of the most precious to be found in the Book. We ought to study it carefully, prayerfully, until we have mastered its mean- ing and are prepared to realize its possibili- ties. It may take time and toil. It may be like climbing a mountain trail to Cloud’s Rest; but Paul will lead us at last to a height of spiritual attainment and exaltation in which we may be made perfect in love. Lesser attainments are necessary, other things are desirable, we may stand on other mountain peaks and have our souls filled with wonder and silent admiration, but Paul takes us by the hand and says, “Covet earnestly the best gifts; come, I will show you a more excel- lent way.” Then he leads us into the heights of this thirteenth chapter. From peak to peak we ascend, past the heights of eloquence, prophecy, faith, world-wide benevolence; and then as the winding path leads us up and up the central crest and we pass from one point of view to another we see Love’s patience, kindness, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, divinity and eternity; and when at last we stand on the broad tableland of the summit we see above us the cloudless heaven, around us 25 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the limitless horizon, beneath us all the lower heights through which we climbed, and, look- ing down on all that lies below, we see and know that Paul speaks the truth when he says, “The greatest of these is love.” Rowland Hill once said, “Cultivate a spirit of love. Love is the diamond amongst the jewels of the believer’s breastplate. The other graces shine like the precious stones of nature, with their own peculiar luster and various hues, but the diamond is white. Now, in white all the colors are united; so in love is centered every other grace and virtue. Love is the ful- filling of the law.” Jeremy Taylor held an equally high estimate of love’s value. He said: “Love is the greatest thing that God can give us, for himself is love. And it is the greatest thing we can give to God, for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours.” Faith is a mighty force; “hope springs eternal in the human breast,” but love is the greatest of these graces of the soul. VIIT. Love Greater THAN OTHER GRACES Paul begins this wonderful chapter by show- ing that this is true, first of all, in a com- parison of love with other splendid gifts and in their contrast proving love more excellent than they. 26 CLIMBING THE TRAIL 1. Eloquence. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, though I have ail the gifts of eloquence which ever graced the tribune or made the prophet a power, though I could preach till people cried and groaned and laughed and shouted and forgot them- selves under the spell of my oratory, though I had all the genius of the old poets and philos- ophers and masters of style, of Isocrates, Eschines, Demosthenes, of Amos or Isaiah, though hearts were moved and lives were bettered and souls were saved under every ser- mon, and yet I had not love, I would be but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. I would rather be a stammerer and a stutterer, I would rather be dumb all my days, and have my soul filled to overflowing with Christian love, than to be the most eloquent preacher of the new faith, preaching for fame or for a salary and without any personal experience of Christ’s love in my heart. Eloquence is de- sirable, but empty eloquence is no better than a tinkling cymbal or a tin pan which, hollow and dead, knows nothing of the sound it may give out; while Christ’s love shed abroad in the heart, the personal knowledge of salvation, wings the preacher’s words with fire, puts behind the sound a soul. Love is greater than eloquence.” 27 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE In all probability when Paul said that love ' was greater than the “tongues” of angels or men he had in mind the gift of tongues which was one of the charisms most prized in the. Corinthian church. The tongues in Corinth needed interpretation. They seemed to the uninitiate a mere jumble or jargon of sounds. They evidently were not any known tongues of men; so those who exercised them claimed that they were the tongues of angels. It was celestial speech with which they were gifted, they said; but it surely did not suggest the harmony of heaven. When many were speak- ing at once-they produced a discord like that of a blacksmith shop or a metal-worker’s estab- lishment, filled with sounding brass and clang- ing cymbals. The cymbal is a shallow disc, capable of making only a harsh and clanging sound. It cannot vary its tone in order to get into har- mony with any other instruments in an orchestra; but it can make itself heard in any din and it can drown out other sounds with its clanging. Paul makes it a symbol of the hollow and shallow and pretentious loud talker who is noisy enough to drown out all opposition but who is all sound and fury, sig- nifying nothing. The Corinthians esteemed the gift of 28 CLIMBING THE TRAIL tongues very highly. They thought it was pure gold. Paul suggests that it is only sound- ing brass. Did they think they were Chry- sostoms? They were not men of “golden mouths’ but simply men of brazen throats. They might be very fluent and very loud, but they might have very little to say and no very good reason for saying it. It took patience and mental discipline and hard work to say things worth saying; but the gift of tongues fell upon those who were nervously unbal- anced and who easily passed into an ecstatic state for the purpose of receiving it. It made its possessors prominent in the church and ministered to their vanity, since they thought themselves superior to all without the gift; and if in consequence they became arrogant and self-assertive, they might display their pride and their gift and they might attempt to outtalk and outshine their brothers, but their babble and their prattle would only give others the headache, and their assertion of superiority would only give others the heart- ache. It would be as nothing without love. A preacher to-day may preach like an angel, but if he displays bad temper or pride it all goes for naught with those who hear. Excellency of speech and of wisdom are as nothing in comparison with the excellencies 29 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE of love. Paul proceeds, “Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and have not love, I am nothing.” 2. Prophecy. There have been wonderful prophets in all history—weather prophets, war prophets, prophets of good and prophets of evil, men who have prophesied truly, men who have seemed to possess a spirit of real prophecy, who nevertheless have been utterly devoid of the spirit of Christ. John Wesley tells us of a man who prophesied the over- throw of dynasties and royal lines, unexpected and unforeseen tempests and battles and acci- dents, and whose prophecies came strangely true. The story is so interesting that we will give it place here. Wesley says: “A little before the con- clusion of the late war in Flanders, one who came from thence gave us a very strange relation. I knew not what judgment to form of this; but waited till John Haime should come over, of whose veracity I could no more doubt than of his understanding. The account he gave was this: “¢Jonathan Pyrah was a member of our so- ciety in Flanders. I knew him some years, and knew him to be a man of unblamable char- acter. One day he was summoned to appear 30 CLIMBING THE TRAIL before the board of general officers. One of them said: What is this that we hear of you? We hear that you are turned prophet, and that you foretell the downfall of the bloody house of Bourbon, and the haughty house of Austria. We should be glad if you were a real prophet, and if your prophecies came true. But what sign do you give, to convince us you are so; and that your predictions will come to pass? He readily answered: Gentlemen, I give you a sign: to-morrow at twelve o’clock, you shall have such a storm of thunder and lightning, as you never had before since you came into Flanders. I give you a second sign: as little as any of you expect any such thing, as little appearance of it as there is now, you shall have a general engagement with the French within three days. I give you a third sign: I shall be ordered to advance in the first line. If I am a false prophet, I shall be shot dead at the first discharge. But if I am a true prophet, I shall only receive a musket ball in the calf of my left leg. ““At twelve the next day there was such thunder and lightning as they never had be- fore in Flanders. On the third day, contrary to all expectation, was the general battle of Fontenoy. He was ordered to advance in the first line; and at the very first discharge he 31 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE did receive a musket ball in the calf of bis left leg.’ 99 | Wesley adds: “All this profited him noth- ing, either for temporal or eternal happiness. It quite turned his brain. In a little time he ran stark mad. And so he continued to the day of his death.” Balaam, the son of Beor, had a gift of true prophecy; but he was a lover of gold more than of God, and he was slain by the sword of Israel. 3. Knowledge. There have been men who understood all mysteries and all knowledge, men of marvelous attainments in the sciences and arts, men who in their study of created things have lost all sight of the creating God; and Paul says they are as nothing in com- parison. Voltaire may have known more than most men; but it were better to be the most humble Christian on the continent of Europe than to have been Voltaire at the height of his fame. “If a choice were necessary between the two, I would rather have Christian love than encyclopedic knowledge, or prophetic in- sight, or the understanding of all mysteries.” That is.what we understand Paul to say at this point. The highest knowledge is impossible with- out love. Jean Ingelow says rightly, 32 CLIMBING THE TRAIL “Learn that to love is the one way to know Or God or man. It is not love received That maketh man to know the inner life Of them that love him; his own love bestowed Shall do it.” 4, Faith. Paul leads us one step further. “Tf [ have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, 1 am nothing.” Here is one of the surprises of this chapter. If a higher critic had discovered this passage and knew only that it had come from the New Testa- ment but nothing at all about its context, he surely would have said: “This sentence must have been written by the apostle John, for he was the apostle of love among the New Testa- ment writers; and it probably was written as a protest against the apostle Paul’s over- emphasis upon the value of faith. Asa rebuke to Paul, John asserts that if he or any man has faith enough to remove mountains but has not love, he counts for nothing in Christian experience or the Christian Church.” Such a higher critic might found a whole new school of theological views upon this opposition and antagonism between the two apostles Paul and John, even as the Tiibingen School was founded upon the supposed antagonism be- tween Peter and Paul. How surprising it would be to such a critic to find that this sen- tence had been written by Paul himself! 33 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE It is the Apostle of Faith who says that faith is as nothing in comparison with love, and even the greatest faith which removes mountains is valueless without love. The Jews called certain of their rabbis “removers of mountains” because of their great skill in removing mountains of obscurity and diffi- culty in their interpretations of the Scripture. Jesus had taken that title and applied it not to men of great learning and profound scholar- ship but to men of great faith in God who might see difficulties overcome and the im- possible accomplished because they believed that they received their petitions when they prayed. Now Paul, recalling the title which he had heard in Gamaliel’s school and the Lord’s application of it to men of faith, makes this most astonishing statement that moun- tain-removing faith, like mountain-removing scholarship, is null and void without the sav- ing grace of love. Does faith save? No; only faith working by love. Does adherence to a creed guarantee salvation? No; there must be conduct con- sonant with the creed. Does orthodoxy avail to keep a man in the Kingdom? No; even devils believe and tremble, knowing that love- less orthodoxy has no power to save. Men have fought like devils to put an end to war, 34 CLIMBING THE TRAIL and they have hated each other and hurt each other and persecuted and killed their brethren in the name of the God of love and the Prince of Peace. They seemed to do it in all sin- cerity. They verily believed that they were doing God’s service, even as Paul had believed that he was the servant of God in persecuting the Christian Church. Paul knew better when he wrote this letter. He knew then that dog- matism and cruelty and persecution and mur- der might prove one’s faithfulness to one’s faith or creed, but it at the same time proved one’s unfaithfulness to the first and great com- mandment of God and the primary principle of the Christian Church. Without love, faith can become fiendish. Has history any better example than that ~~ of King Philip II of Spain? He was a sincere man. He had great faith in his Catholicism. He believed that he was doing God’s service in persecuting the Protestant Church. He re- moved mountains of opposition and made whole districts and lands level with his own conception of what was proper and allowable in religious belief. When Don Carlos, his son, was accused of a crime, the father de- clared that he would be like Abraham in his obedience to the Lord. He said, “I have chosen in this matter to make the sacrifice to 3D THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE God of my own flesh and blood, and to prefer his service and the universal welfare to all other human considerations.” He was very strict in all his religious observances and as faithful as any monk in the performance of his religious duties. Yet when he heard of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in France he was transported with joy, and we are told that he “seemed more delighted than with all the good fortune or happy incidents which had before occurred to him.” He was the very embodiment of faith, and he was a fiend in human form. He was as orthodox as any man in Europe, and he was as great a villain as ever sat upon a throne. He was an extreme example of the ferocity of loveless faith; but there have been many others less conspicuous than he who have had the same spirit in like or less degree. They have been furiously orthodox and with fire and sword they have set about the task of bringing others to the level of their own faith. With relentless energy they have re- moved the mountains which lay in their way and they have piled them upon the heads of all who ventured to think differently from themselves; and if they have crushed out some lives in the process and even if the mountains have become mountain monumentS over a 36 CLIMBING THE TRAIL myriad dead they have rejoiced in the triumph of their faith, though it be through the loss of their love. Let all the narrow and intolerant perse- cutors for the faith hear what Paul has to say at this point: “Your zeal may work wonders. It may remove mountains; but across all the level plains of your making there shines the clear sunlight of God’s truth that hate does not come forth from his heart and that mur- der is not according to his will, and that love, and love alone, represents him and his throne. _ All your labor as long as it is without love or contrary to love is without him and contrary to him. It avails nothing as far as his favor is concerned. When you come to stand before his judgment seat you will not be asked whether you believed this or that and whether you fought valiantly for your faith. You will be asked only whether your lives were filled with works of mercy and love. Did you love God and did you love your brothers? If you did not, your faith will avail you nothing be- fore him. Even though it be miracle-working, mountain-removing faith, it is nothing with- out love.” Judas Iscariot as one of the twelve apostles went out on that first mission, and he did many wonderful works with the others. The 37 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE sick were healed, the lepers were cleansed, the dead were raised, the devils were cast out, mountains of prejudice were removed, moun- tains of difficulty were overcome, the way was prepared for the kingdom of heaven; and yet he came back from that mission Judas Iscariot still. In the end it seemed that he would rather have thirty pieces of silver than thirty years of such Messianic ministry. He lacked in love for his Master and for his fellow men. James and John loved the Master, and they were indignant when the Samaritans proved inhospitable to him; and they asked permis- sion to call down fire from heaven upon the Samaritan village to destroy it. Jesus told them they did not know of what spirit they were. It might be a spirit of faith, certain of the power which could work a_ punitive miracle; but it was not a spirit of love. They had faith enough to believe that Jesus was able to do it; they did not have love enough to know that he never would think of doing it. In the Great Sermon Jesus declared : “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we do not cast out demons? and in thy name do many wonderful works? And then will I pro- fess unto them, [ never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” It may be that 1 Matt. 7. 22, 23. 38 CLIMBING THE TRAIL many a modern pastor and evangelist is satis- fying his own conscience with the fact that he is successful in making converts and build- ing up the membership of the church, even while he knows that he is selfish at heart and far from Christlike in his personal and _ pri- vate life. Any degree of success in wonder- working is no guarantee of personal salvation. A faith which removes mountains may be devoid of the saving grace of perfect love. Any amount of fundamentalist fervor may be com- patible with a woeful lack of brotherly affec- tion in the bonds of peace. ». Charity. Paul leads us higher by an- other step. ‘Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.” A man may be a world-famed philanthropist, he may found great benevo- lent institutions, hospitals, asylums, and uni- versities; and if in his benevolence he simply is building his own monument and burning incense to his own name, all of it will be unacceptable to God. If the money with which he does these things is blood money, tainted money, money gotten by un- fair methods, by forcing all competitors out of the field or by sweating his employees, or money gained by unrighteous occupations, manufacturing war munitions or whisky or 39 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the implements of vice, his philanthropies are doubly unacceptable to God. We are told that Jesus looked upon the rich young man and loved him. If the rich young man had looked upon Jesus and loved him, he would have been accepted as a disci- ple at once; but-he wanted to inherit the king- dom by obeying the other commandments and leaving out the primary love to God which would eventuate in genuine love for man. Jesus gave him the test of wholesale philan- thropy just to show him that he lacked in the love which would make it possible and give it any value in the sight of God. Had the young man sold all he had and given his great possessions to the poor, that would not have saved him. That was only half of the Master’s command to him. It still would have been necessary to prove that his philanthropy was rightly motived by a hearty and unhesitating following of Jesus in the devotion of love. | There is so much giving which does not have the right motive. Tammany Hall is said to be a great charitable institution; but when its politicians take care of the poor they do it partly or principally to maintain a polit- ical party, to court popularity, and to cap- ture votes. There are Welfare Departments in connection with great corporations which 40 CLIMBING THE TRAIL have many philanthropic and benevolent fea- tures and which cost the proprietors a great deal of money; but they sometimes lie under the suspicion that they are maintained at great expense simply to keep the working people contented with the manifest injustice and inequalities of their lot in their industrial dependence and to pacify the rising tide of discontent in their ranks. A man may give to a beggar just to be rid of his importunity, or to a civic or church enterprise just because others are giving and it would be something of a disgrace to be left off the subscription list; and he may give gen- erously because of the reputation it will give him in the community. There is a great deal of sounding of trumpets in connection with almsgiving in our day as well as in the days of the Lord. Charity bazaars and charity balls and charity circuses too often minister more to personal vanity and social frivolities than to any real sympathy with a brother’s need. Paul was taking up a collection for the needy Jews in Jerusalem and he was asking the Corinthians to subscribe and to give liber- ally to that end, but he warns them at the same time that the only constraining motive in their giving ought to be the motive of Chris- tian love. They might give twice as much as 41 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE Zaccheus gave and as much as Jesus asked the young ruler to give and be no better off as far as their standing in the Kingdom was con- cerned, if they gave without love. 6. Martyrdom. Paul presses on to the heights. He says, “Though I give my body to be burned, and-have not love, it profiteth me nothing.” Is it possible that a man would suffer martyrdom for any other reason than uncalculating devotion to the right and the good? Could a man go to the stake and cherish hatred on the way? There is that old story in the early ages of church history of the presbyter who was on the way to his death as a confessor of the faith, and to whom an- other Christian came with whom he had quarreled and the brother Christian asked for his forgiveness before he died. The presbyter refused to listen to his earnest pleading. We are not surprised therefore to read that when they came to the place of execution the unfor- giving presbyter faltered and finally denied the Lord while the other who had been asking forgiveness in vain took his place. He could face death without flinching. He could go into the Master’s presence with the palms of martyrdom and with the assurance of his per- fect love. Martyrdom without love would not admit to heaven. 42 CLIMBING THE TRAIL There might be such a thing as martyrdom because of self-love. Strabo tells us of Zar- manochegas, a Hindu who had himself burned at Athens during the reign of Augustus; and then a magnificent tomb was erected over his ashes with a pompous inscription upon it to the effect that he had immortalized himself. He had immolated himself, in the hope that he might immortalize himself in that osten- tatious way. Paul says that he was profited nothing by this extremity of self-sacrifice in extreme self-exaltation. Paul had read the inscriptions on various monuments in Athens and he doubtless had read this one: “Here lies Zarmanochegas, the Indian from Bargosa, who after the fashion of his Indian forefathers made himself im- mortal.” This man was a devotee and fanatic who had made a public display of his zeal for his religion, and after advertisement of his purpose and in the presence of a vast mul- titude of people and with a smile upon his face had leaped into the flames of the funeral pyre. The affair had made quite an im- pression throughout the Roman Empire, and Josephus tells us that one of the Jewish out- Jaws, when his band was hard pressed by the Romans, exhorted them to self-destruction according to the example of Zarmanochegas. 43 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE Many applauded at the time and the name and fame of Zarmanochegas were carried from end to end of the Empire and made their way into the pages of Strabo and Josephus. We recall them to-day. In a sense the Hindu fakir has become immortal, but he is remembered as a fanatic and a fool. It is the immortality of folly to which he has attained. See the ascent through which Paul has led us. He began with eloquence and then led us upward into prophecy and onward into knowl- edge and onward and upward into faith, good works, and suffering even unto martyrdom. These are unusual heights of human attain- ment and excellence; but Paul has led us so far to point out to us that Christian love towers high above all these, is necessary to give them value and make them worth the while. They are great, but Love is greater than them all. The ecstatic talker with tongues, the prophetic seer, the profound sage, the hero of faith, the unfailing philanthropist, and the unfaltering fanatic, sacrificing prop- erty and life to the cause, have all been passed in review, and now Paul says to them: “Orator, prophet, scholar, sage, believer, philanthropist, martyr, you are nothing unless you are lover too. Love is worth more than all your graces and gifts.” 44 CLIMBING THE TRAIL IX. Tur NATURE or LOVE Paul proceeds next to prove the greater ex- cellence of love by introducing us to its nature which he describes in detail: “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vyaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked into any paroxysm, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, be- lieveth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” It is a description characterized by simplicity and sublimity combined. It is so plain in its appearance that we scarcely realize its grandeur, until we remember how perfect a description it is of the greatest man. Substitute for the word “love’ the name “Jesus,” and we have a perfect description of the disposition and character of our Lord. 1. Manifest in the Character of Jesus. Jesus suffered long, and was kind. Jesus envied not. Jesus vaunted not himself, was not puffed up. Jesus did not behave himself unseemly, sought not his own, never was pro- voked into the loss of his self-control. He took no account of evil, rejoiced not in unrighteous- ness, but rejoiced with the truth. He bore all things, believed all things, hoped all things, 45 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE endured all things. How true all of that was of Jesus! In him we find the perfect example of Christian love. It is as though Paul had taken Jesus for his model and had noted down the characteristics of his disposition and char- acter and thus had formed his picture of Per- fect Love. The apostle John has told us God is love. Jesus was the manifestation of the Father to men. He said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” His life, then, would reproduce fully the love which was the essential being of God. His life was the in- carnation and human realization of all the characteristics of love which Paul has put into this picture. Love is greatest, because in the human life of Jesus it showed itself so essentially divine. It is love which begets love. We love Jesus because of his perfect love. He had all those other gifts which Paul has mentioned, all the other graces of Christian character; but he never would have been the perfect Saviour to us if it had not been that perfect love for us constrained him to the exercise of all these gifts and graces. 2. Manifest in the Use of His Gifts. He spake as never man spake before him. His words were gracious words and words of power. He spake with the tongues of men and 46 aw CLIMBING THE TRAIL of angels, even as the Son of God, ambassador from heaven’s throne; but all his words of in- struction, exhortation, warning, supplication were words of love. It was his love for the race which constrained him to speak; and every uttered syllable sounded forth his soul of love. He had the gift of prophecy. He was given to understand some of the mysteries of the world beyond and of the life to come. He drew aside the veil and told us of the last things, the resurrection and the Judgment and the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness would reign. In him were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He had faith, not the faith as of a mustard seed which could remove mountains, but the perfect faith of the Sin- less Son which could move heaven and earth, bring them together, and make them one. He lived a life of Christian communism, sharing all his goods with the poor. At last he gave his body to be crucified upon a tree. Herein he commended his love to us that while we were yet sinners he died for us. In all his prophecy and revelation of mysteries and im- partation of wisdom, the philanthropy of his life and the sacrifice of his death, it was love, and love alone, which led him to these things; and above all these things it is the love which 47 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE inspired him to them which attracts the world to his feet to-day. X. THE ETERNITY OF LOVE Paul next declares that Love is greater be- cause it is most enduring. “Love never fail- eth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” The Old Testament prophets have been replaced by the New Testa- ment preachers. The gifts of tongues as the early church had them were revived for a season by the Irvingites in England and by others since their day, only to prove the more clearly that they belonged to the past child- hood of the faith. The knowledge of the ancients has vanished away. Monro Gibson, of London, has said: “Imagine, if you can, a conversation between Pliny the elder and Professor Huxley on biology. The great naturalist of the first cen- tury would have to go to school for twenty years before he was ready to begin a conversa- tion with Professor Huxley. His knowledge. 48 CLIMBING THE TRAIL vast as it seemed in his time, would be two thousand years out of date to-day. But would the apostle Paul have to go to school for twenty years before he could begin to talk with an advanced Christian of the twentieth century on faith and hope and love? Not at all. Paul could begin the minute he arrived.” What is true to-day of the knowledge of two thousand years ago will be equally true of our knowledge two thousand years from this date. In his lecture room in Stanford University we heard President Jordan tell how badly be- hind the times both Darwin and Spencer had come to be in some of their hypotheses; and in a few centuries Darwin and Spencer and Professor Huxley and President Jordan will be as badly out of date as Pliny the elder is to-day. We know in part, and our knowledge soon becomes obsolete and vanishes away. What has become of the work of the great uni- versities of the Middle Ages? The Scholastics, as we call them, piled up gigantic tomes upon tomes, which were supposed to represent all knowledge possible to the human mind. They either have passed out of existence now, or in our great libraries the dust has gathered thick upon them; for they are archeological curi- osities and nothing more to-day. The time will come when faith will have 49 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE been turned into sight, and hope will have become realization. Our present faith and hope in that sense will cease, but love lives on forever. It is the greatest force in the uni- verse, greatest because most enduring, the Force behind and above all other forces. It is greater than physical force and greater than intellectual force. It flows from the heart and represents the essential being of God. As Browning said, “There is no good of life but love—but love! What else looks good is some shade flung from love; Love gilds it, gives it worth.” Paul has shown us that it is greatest in com- parison with all other gifts and graces, great- est because it most perfectly reproduces the nature Divine, and greatest because it will outlast all these other things. Perfect love is eternal, and he who possesses it has the assurance of his own immortality. Now that we have climbed the trail with Paul to this broad and sunny tableland of the highest height of Christian experience we will look about us a little more carefully until we real- ize the beauty of the landscape as we study the various features of it and begin to compre- hend something of the harmony and suffi- ciency of the whole. 50 a ear” PART TWO iganied mug * A” i 4 at 3 rr is 4 ON THE BROAD TABLE-LAND _ * bw ei ‘ ae f ¢ bt j ', ) 4 ve ) if i vy fe it gate Se a arke Mt . ned Ae: ont * ‘y Wes Si, x 7 we 7 ies " 4 P B3! § ' ed , id ' ‘ ‘ ny oat AG Pot G3 | aS am > a hi as : ‘ ae re ve . ee hie mR Pe? ees ov mal . 4 A x et ‘e at = ~ Mi ce ee js < y | : * : oe te | 3 i Wis | fis . e ‘ ‘ Ps ! “a ’ i ; ' f 14 . oe 9 jhe mf AP og coi ae a i. : . iM # ' is . 4 ‘ $5) ., 7 - . ‘ ‘ « j e i } ae “ ; A Nn 7 ’ f J ig ‘it ) 4 PR Lal 4 , ; if ae } hava et e7yaar? he ’ Fal ih Ate . Sit 7 if ee Pe hw j - 4 a ae vey Ps 4 dk Rah A Ha eee © * Sy iT CHAPTER I LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING AND KINDNESS In the clauses in which Paul gives his de- scription of love he sets before the Corinthian church his ideal of Christian character. The members of that church were to incorporate this ideal. They were to incarnate the spirit of Jesus. It will be worth while to study in detail this Pauline ideal of Christian love. His first statement concerning it is the affirmation that “Love suffereth long, and is kind.” I. Lone TEMPER ‘'H adyarn paxpoOvuei, Love is long-tempered, Paul says. We speak of sweet-tempered and quick-tempered and _ short-tempered people, but we do not speak of long-tempered ones. We have no exact equivalent in English for this Greek word. It is the opposite of short- tempered. Paul in using this word meant to say that love would not fly to pieces at the first provocation. It would preserve its placidity a long, long time. We heard a sister at a camp meeting tell about the sugar-making in the maple grove in the early spring. She 53 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE said that when the black kettles first were filled with the maple sap the surface of the unstable liquid could be ruffled by the slight- est breeze but there came a time in the process when the maple syrup became too dense to be ruffled by any breeze, however violent, and it presented a placid surface in the midst of the storm. Then she likened her own experience to that dense sweetness, and she said it never was ruffled in any winds of temptation or any storms of adversity. Her love endured all things without losing its sweetness or its placidity. If she reported her experience cor- rectly, she must have been a long-tempered woman. There is a tale in the sayings of Suleiman the Small to this effect: The Great Sheikh of Kahiri listened to evil concerning the Little Sheikh of Gheeza. When they met the Great Sheikh spoke with abundant abuse. The Little Sheikh simply bowed and said, “God and I can wait.” His temper did not snap under the unexpected and undeserved attack. He did not break out into any violent action or any unadvised speech. He was a long- tempered man. The Greek historians have preserved this tradition concerning Pericles: One day he was attacked on the public street with a torrent 54 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING of abuse, and the enraged person continued his tirade until it became dark before he had exhausted his spleen. When he finally paused Pericles said quietly to his servant, “Bring a lamp now and light him home.” Pericles was a long-tempered man and a great statesman. The Greeks regarded him as the consummate flower of the Greek culture and life. Susannah Wesley was the mother of many children and not one of them was born a saint. At one time her husband said to her, “That is the twentieth time you have told that thing to that child; why do you repeat it twenty times?” Susannah Wesley replied, ‘Because nineteen times are not sufficient.” Susannah Wesley was a long-tempered woman. There are such women and there are such men. If any one says, “I cannot be that way,” Paul says, “Love can.” Susannah Wesley must have been such a woman as Lowell described in his verse, when he said, “Cloudless forever is her brow serene, Speaking calm hope and trust within her, whence Welleth a noiseless spring of patience, That keepeth all her life so fresh, so green, And full of holiness—that every look, The greatness of her woman’s soul revealing, Unto me bringeth blessing, and a feeling As when I read in God’s own holy Book.” 55 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE John Wesley was the son of Susannah Wes- ley, and he wrote, “Let thy love be long-suffer- ing and patient. . . . Let it be kind, soft, benign; inspiring thee with the most amiable sweetness and the most fervent and tender affection. . . . In love, cover all things, hope all things, and endure all things, not some, not many things only; not most, but absolutely all things. . . . Call nothing in- tolerable; never say of anything, ‘It is not to be borne.’ Love is proof against all. Love triumphs over all.” Philo called patience the queen of the vir- tues. It is so much easier to fight than it is ‘to keep one’s temper. It is so much easier to relieve oneself in violent speech and action than it is to be patient and endure. The peo- ple who can do great and valiant deeds far outnumber those who can bear great wrongs. There are many great soldiers where there are few saints. Faith stops the mouths of lions, quenches the power of fire, waxes mighty in war, turns to flight armies of aliens. Faith does all of that, and it is easy enough for some people to have the faith which will do all of that. Love suffers long, and is kind; and that is quite a different thing. Most peo- ple do not find it so easy to do that. 56 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING II. KINDNESS Love suffers long, paxpoO@vyei, and Love is kind, ypnoreverat. It is necessary to look at the words which Paul used to be sure of his mean- ing. These two words are joined again and again in Paul’s writings. In the Epistle to the Galatians Paul essays to give the component elements of the one fruit of the Spirit, and in making the list he begins with “love, joy, peace,” and then immediately he adds, “long- suffering and kindness,” wpaxpoOvuia and xenotérns.! In the Epistle to the Romans Paul mentions these two attributes together as characteristic of God’s treatment of the sin- ning race, “Dost thou despise the wealth of his kindness, ypyorétntos, and forbearance and long-suffering, puaxpoOvuias?”’? In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians Paul declares that he and his fellow workers have commended their ministry as the servants of God in many ways and, among others, in “long-suffering, ‘sv paxpoOupia, in kindness, ‘ev ypyorérnte.’’*® In the Epistle to the Colossians toward the close of his ministry Paul still exhorts all Chris- tians to put on, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, “kindness, ypnorérnra, and long-suffer- ~1Gal. 5. 22. 2 Rom. 2. 4. 82 Cor. 6. 6. 57 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE ing, paxpoOviay,”’* The two go together and they are characteristics both of God and of Christ the revealer of God. Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest to your souls; for my yoke is a kindly one, ypyords.” It had no rough edges. It never galled. Jesus had made yokes there in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth and he had seen to it that no yoke went out of his hands until it had been smoothed to the last possible degree. He had too much compassion for the dumb, driven cattle of those Galilean plains and hills to allow any portion of his handiwork to add a particle to their discomfort and their pain. Would he not be just as compassionate and as kindly to those poor people who became his disciples and followed with him? If they took his yoke upon them, they would find it a kindly one. ‘The kindliness of Jesus was simply a revelation of the kindliness of God. Peter wrote in his epistle that all that the Christians needed to do was to taste and see for themselves that God was a kindly God, “oTt ypnotos ‘o Kvplos.’’6 * Col. 3. 12. ° Matt. 11. 29, 30. 61 Pet. 2. 3. 58 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING Long-suffering and kindness are attributes of God and were characteristics of Jesus. Paul appropriates them here to his deserip- tion of Christian love, and we may be sure that he regards them not as natural gifts but only as gifts of grace. They come from God and make man Godlike and Christlike in char- acter. Til. Girts oF GRACE 1. Not temperamental. There are people whose long-suffering is merely a matter of temperament. One man is born into this world with a sanguinary temperament, and the inside of him is all fire and flame, and his spirit is continually in motion, and his heart like a Vesuvius within him is always trem- bling as with earthquake shock or else in vio- lent eruption. It is natural for such a man always to be impatient. On the other hand a man may be born into this world with a phlegmatic temperament, and his heart naturally will be as quiet as a millpond, and in the worst circumstances with most admir- able patience and most enviable long-suffer- ing he will be ready to fold his hands and say, “Let everything alone; it will all come right in the end.” The patience which is a matter of tempera- 59 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE ment is the patience of the donkey who meekly ducks his head under the severest shower of blows and refuses to make any faster time in spite of all beating and urging, but suffers these things long and is still gentle-spirited and kind because these things are all a matter of course to him; for through centuries of ill treatment he has come into hereditary expec- tation of nothing better than these. Such patience has no consideration here. It never entered Paul’s thought. 2. Not stoical. There are people whose long-suffering is a matter of schooling or of philosophy. The red Indian of America thought it was unmanly to display any emo- tion either in fortune or misfortune; and his impassive countenance might have been mis- taken for an illustration of the long-suffering of love. The old Stoics of Rome sought to show themselves superior to all the flings of fortune and all the chances of life; and by strength of their human will they bade defi- ance to fate. Quintus Fabius Maximus was busied with the affairs of state, and they brought him word that his wife whom he dearly loved had been killed under a fallen house, and im- mediately another messenger brought the news that his younger son, upon whom he had 60 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING set all the hopes of his heart, had died in Umbria. Quintus Fabius Maximus never changed countenance, the old chroniclers tell us, but went calmly on with his administra- tion of the affairs of the state as if no calamity had befallen him. Such Stoicism is as far removed from Paulinism as darkness from light. Such external expression of long-suf- fering may cover an internally cold and eternally despairing heart. The long-suffering which arises from real or assumed indifference to all earthly things is sottish insensibility. The long-suffering which arises from a donkeylike disposition to let things go as they will because things always have gone so and even the worst things some time will have an end is the long-suffer- ing of laziness or of the beast and is unworthy of a man, endowed with reason and freedom. The long-suffering of love has nothing to do with long-suffering of this sort. 3. Not mechanical. There are people whose kindness is mechanical. We have seen school- teachers, and especially kindergarten school- teachers, who thought that it was a part of their professional duty to be pleasant with the children; and we have seen shopgirls, clerks in department stores and similar estab- lishments, who thought that it was a part of 61 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE their business equipment always to present a pleasant countenance to every customer; and we have seen these people turn on a smile just as you would turn on an electric light. One moment their countenance would be as blank as the glass globe about the electric wire, and then by a turn_of the inner mechanism a smile would come flashing, just as when you pressed the button the electric light would flash out; and the effect was as mechanical in the one case as in the other. 4. Not calculated. There are people whose kindness always is calculated, and for the display of it they always expect an equal or a larger return. Their kindness is like that of Cicero, who said, “Kindness must not be shown to a young man, nor to an old man; not to the old man, because he is likely to die before he can have an occasion to repay the benefit; and not to a young man, because he is sure to for- get it.” Cicero’s kindness then, limited to the middle aged who would be likely to have ample opportunity to pay back all they re- ceived with interest, may be kindness indeed to the recipient but on the part of the giver it is self-evident selfishness. The long-suffering and kindness mentioned here are twin streams from one source, but that source is radically different from any we 62 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING have as yet suggested. Paul says that genuine long-suffering and kindness, independent of temperament and independent of circum- stance, spring from Christian love. Love suffers long and is kind, and love never fails. Love’s gifts and graces are compatible with any degree of energy and with every form of activity. Anyone can have them in any con- dition of life; but they are flowers which do not grow wild in any man’s garden. They are blossoms from the heavenly paradise, and they are plucked with the two hands of prayer and of faith. They are not natural gifts. They are gifts of grace. We need to look, then, for men whom God has called and whom he has richly gifted with his grace to find the best examples of that love which suffers long and is kind. The Bible is full of illustrations. 1V. BreteE EXAMPLES 1. Noah found grace in the sight of God; and God told him to build an ark. For days and for weeks and for months and for years he hammered away, and the people laughed at him and told him he was crazy; but he never quit his work except to preach to them re- pentance and consequent salvation. He was a carpenter, and the apostle Peter tells us 63 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE that he was a preacher of righteousness. In these respects he was like Jesus, the carpenter evangelist, and he was like Jesus too in his long-suffering kindness; for the more the peo- ple jeered the more patiently he labored and preached. Yet he made no impression upon their hardened-hearts. He suffered long with them and was kind to them to the very end, but half an hour before the flood came he could have sold the ark to them for kindling wood and that was the only use they would have made of it. According to the story, Noah endured the contradiction of sinners against himself for six hundred years with all kind- ness of heart. and patience of soul. Then he went into the ark with all his family and the door was shut; and there was no further use for kindling wood in that vicinity while the ark proved itself to be otherwise handy. 2. Job’s patience was tried with business losses, bereavement, and suffering, but the Book says that he was perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil. When the Sabeans had stolen his oxen and the Chal- deans had carried away his camels and a cyclone had slain his seven sons and three daughters, the long-suffering and patience of Job was such that he sinned not nor charged God foolishly; but, sitting down amid the 64 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING ruins of all his earthly happiness, Job said without bitterness and in all kindliness of spirit and submission of soul, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” 3. Moses was the meekest man, and we read of him that “Moses was tried above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” He was an active spirit, but the Lord tried him by sending him out for forty years into the wilderness to feed sheep. Sheep are most unreasonable creatures. Sometimes they seem to have no sense at all. Moses suffered long with them and learned to be kind to them even when their stupidity exasperated him most. Then for forty years God made him the leader of the people of Israel, and Moses found them more unreasonable and unmanageable than any flock of sheep ever pretended to be. If any man ever was tempted to lose his tem- per, it was Moses. If any man ever had his patience tried, it was Moses. He had done everything imaginable for the people, and they ought to have followed him without a ques- tion wherever he might choose to lead; but instead of this they grumbled and grumbled, complained and complained, rebelled and re- belled. Now they wanted water, and now manna, and now meat, and now the onions 65 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE and leeks of Egypt, and now the golden calf of the heathen worship. Moses bore with them, suffered long with them and was kind. If he had not been one of the most patient men who ever lived he could not have done it. One time, and one time only, we are told that his patience failed under the heavy strain. 4. The apostle James tells us, “Take the prophets who have spoken in the name of the Lord for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience.”* See how in all their difficulties and discouragements they never became bitter in spirit. See how they suffered long and were kind. Elijah was full of zeal, a prophet of fire; but the prejudices and the idolatries of the people were like icebergs round about him and he could not melt them down. He had to flee into the wilderness to be fed by the ravens and then by a poor widow. He, the man of zeal, the prophet of fire, had to be quiet and keep himself hidden; for despite all his preaching the people worshiped Baal and the king worshiped Jezebel. He suffered long and was kind, and yet it seemed to him that he alone served the Lord. 5. Isaiah was told at the time of his call that the hardened people would not hear nor understand, and he preached through the 7 Jas. 5. 10. 66 ON OE LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING reigns of four kings and at the end of his long ministry he cried, “I have labored in vain; I haye spent my strength for nought, and in vain; yet surely my work is with my God.’ 6. Jeremiah is the prophet of lamentation. His lifelong lamentation was that the people would not heed his warning and be saved. They derided him daily. They mocked him and defamed him. They imprisoned him and put him into the lower pit. They burned the roll of his prophecies, and they disobeyed him in every command. They carried him bound and a prisoner with them to Egypt; and they said to him at the same time, “As for the word that thou speakest to us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee.” What was true of one was in a large measure true of all the ancient prophets. They were examples of suffering affliction and of pa- tience. They suffered long and kept their Spirits sweet, for it was their love to God and their love of souls which constrained them to all their crucifixion of natural tempers and all their sacrifice of self. V. EVeRY-DAY EXAMPLES 1. Love suffereth long and is kind. That is true of love alone. Even the most admirable 8 Isa. 49. 4. ) 67 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE natural temperament will fail us sometimes. Nothing less than the Christian experience of love will keep our tempers sweet always. Love can do that. Love will do it. See this mother whose wayward son long ago has ex- hausted the patience of every other member of the household. They have said bitter things to him, and they have treated him with the severity which his conduct deserved; but his mother loves him and prays for him and pleads with him and speaks kindly to him still, even when he knows that he has wrung her heart with anguish by his wrongdoing and that her strength is fast failing under the heavy burden he has put upon her to bear. It was Bishop Westcott who said, ““What we can do for another is the test of Power; what we can suffer for another is the test of Love.’ The mother’s love stands the test. When all the rest of the world has given the boy up as a hopeless case and is ready to turn its back upon him in disgust or despair, her love never fails. The mother suffers long and is kind, and some day a miracle is wrought in her behalf. The vagabond son wanders into some church or some mission or some Salvation Army Corps, and listens to the message of the forbearance of God and the long-suffering 68 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING kindness of the Saviour of men, and he says to himself, “I can believe that is true; for I have seen the love of God and the spirit of Christ in my mother;” and he accepts the message, kneels at the penitent form, stands up a new man in the Lord, drops his tobacco and his whisky and his opium and his filthy habits and his evil associates and lives an honest and respectable life in the world. Everybody is astonished except that good mother whose long-suffering kindness and love had made his regeneration possible. We have known such cases in our own community; and we have been glad at last that Christ’s love and the mother’s love, unlike our own, have been will- ing to suffer long and be kind. 2. There is that patient wife who suffers and is silent and who smiles in her suffering. Through all her husband’s neglect and ill treatment she clings to him, is faithful to him, loves him still. Her folks say to her: “Leave him and come back to your home. We will see that you have enough to eat and to wear at least.” The neighbors all tell her: “You ought to shut the door in his face, and lock it too. It would do him good to sleep out of doors a few nights, and he does not deserve a decent home with you.” The wife says never a word. She suffers on and is silent. She 69 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE suffers long and is kind. Only love will do that. 3. We have seen men and women of God in the city missionary work labor with and for the weak and erring ones, lift them to their feet, help them into honest employment, give them time and attention and words of con- stant cheer and encouragement, rejoice that they were stable for a few weeks or a few months at a time. Then the word would come that they had fallen again, gone back to the drink or gone back into vice; and we have seen those missionaries search diligently for the wanderers through all the city slums, find them in some den of iniquity and in some fathomless depth of despair, speak to them kindly, assure them of forgive- — ness and the possibility of another attempt at — reformation with better result. We have seen them do that again and again and again; and we never have seen anything else which made us so sure that the spirit of Jesus the Good Shepherd still was alive in this world, the spirit of love which would suffer long and be kind. VI. THE PATIENCE OF JESUS _ The long-suffering and kindness of this chapter are those which flow from Christian love, such love as the life of Jesus constantly 70 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING showed. How patient he was with every one! 1. His own nation of the Jews ought to have received him with open arms as the longed-for Messiah. They ought to have heeded his counsel and thus have prepared the way for the kingdom of God upon the earth; but they rejected his teaching and re- fused to believe in his authority. Yet he suf- fered long with them; for he loved them to the end, and he died for them at the last. 2. How long-suffering and kindly-spirited and patient he was with his disciples! The clearest revelations were made to these. The Lord had every reason to expect from these unswerving faith and implicit obedience and unfailing love; but they were so slow of heart and so dull of hearing. Even to the end they seemed to be incapable of receiving the spir- itual conception of the Kingdom he had so persistently taught. Yet the Lord always was patient with them. He gave them line upon line, precept upon precept. He told them twenty times, if nineteen were not sufficient ; and he forgave them when, after all, they showed that though they had been so long time with him yet they had not known him. 3. How patient he always was with the publican and the sinner! When the world had given them up as irredeemably lost, he said, 3 71 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE “It is my mission to save you.” When they wandered into the far countries of willful transgression, he followed them with shep- herd faithfulness and with fatherly solicitude and care. When everybody else was ready to stone them and inflict the full penalty of the offended law, he said, “I do not condemn you; go, and sin no more.” That was the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of love which suffered long and was kind. Paul knew what the long-suffering of Jesus was. Paul called himself the chief of sinners, and he said that Christ Jesus had shown forth in him all of his long-suffering, tiv dzacav paxpoOvpiav,? Paul had persevered in his perse- cution of the Christians until he deserved to be smitten from the face of the earth, but a vision of the nonresisting Christ was granted him, asking in all long-suffering, “Why per- secutest thou me?” and Paul was won by the Patient Sufferer as he never would have been by a retaliating and punishing Lord. At the end of his own career Paul exhorted Timothy to follow the example he had set in all his ministry and to reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all long-suffering, év don paxpoOupia, those who were under his care.*° Paul had 94 Tim. 1. 16. 102 Tim. 4. 2. 72 LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING learned from Jesus what long-suffering was. Let Timothy now learn from him. Paul reproduced the spirit of Jesus and Jesus represented and revealed to men the spirit of the Father. God is love, and that means that God is long-suffering. Through all world history there has been presented to the eyes of the universe the moral scandal of Sin and the sufferance of sin. Men have sinned against God and against light in every age, as they sin against God and against light to-day. Sin has deserved death; but sinners have sinned on and have reached old age. In the forbearance and infinite patience of God they have been permitted to prolong their days, even in continuous rebellion against the God who gave them. As Jesus the Saviour was patient, so God the Father is patient. He keeps his faith in the race. If it is difficult sometimes for men to keep their faith in God, how much more difficult it must be at all times for God to keep his faith in men. He does it! That is the miracle of his love. He knoweth our frame. He remembereth that we are dust. He is full of pity. As a father pitieth his children, so he pitieth us. He knoweth our divine origin. He remembereth that we are made in his own image, and that our spirits 73 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE never will rest until they find their rest in him. He is our Father. We are his children. He has faith that the children of God will come home. If he can be patient under the infinite diffi- culties of dealing with the shortcomings of the race, we surely ought to be patient with each other and with all men. If he has forgiven us ten thousand talents, we ought to be will- ing and able to forgive a hundred shillings. It was Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians, “Become kind, ypyoroit, to each other, com- passionate, forgiving each other even as God in Christ forgave you. Become therefore imi- tators of God.” It is a lofty ideal, that of the imitation of God. It is the ideal of the Ser- mon on the Mount, in which Jesus told us to be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. The perfection he demanded was the perfection of long-suffering love. i Eph. 4. 32—5. 1. 74 CHAPTER IT LOVE AND ENVY PAUL’s description of Love begins with two positive statements, “Love suffereth long, and is kind.” It is continued with eight negative statements. Sometimes we are driven into negatives to make positive excellencies more vivid by contrast. When Peter would de- scribe the Christian’s inheritance he says that it is one that is “incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.”' Those three negatives, without corruption, without defile- ment, and without fading beauty and failing strength, suggest the purity and eternity of an inheritance unlike any which this world knows. We know so little of heaven. Almost all that we feel sure about in our conception of it is that it is different from this earth. When John attempts to describe it he runs into a series of negatives. He tells us that there is no sin there and there is no sorrow and all tears are wiped away. There is no darkness and there is no death. There is no falsehood and there is no church. There is no need of a 11 Pet. 1. 4. 75 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE temple and there is no need of a sun. God is all in all and God is love. So here Paul gives us eight consecutive negations concerning love, that by contrast its excellence may be made more apparent. He tells us that love is neither envious, nor pompous, nor egotistical, nor ill‘mannered, nor selfish, nor uncon- trolled, nor suspicious, nor sympathetic with sin. We begin with the first of these negative statements, “Love is not envious, ‘H dydry ov CnAol. IT. Envy DESCRIBED Envy is devilish, Love is divine. They are moral antipodes, wholly inconsistent with each other, and absolutely exclusive of each other. The statements can be made without any qualification or any exception whatever, that envy loveth not and love envieth not. Water and oil could be mixed more easily than envy and love. The inherent and ineradicable meanness of envy is apparent in its definition. Webster defines envy to be “pain, uneasiness, mortifica- tion, or discontent excited by the sight of an- other’s superiority or success, accompanied by some degree of hatred or malignity, and often or usually with a desire or an effort to 76 LOVE AND ENVY depreciate the person, or with pleasure in see- ing him depressed.” Can anyone give a better description of meanness than that definition would make? Bacon closes his essay on Envy with this sentence: “Envy is the vilest affection, and the most depraved; for which cause it is the proper attitude of the devil, who is called, The envious man, that soweth tares among the wheat by night; as it always cometh to pass, that Envy worketh subtilely and in the dark and to the prejudice of good things, such as is the wheat.” Burton describes the envious man in this language: “‘So often as an envious wretch sees another man prosper, to be enriched, to thrive, and be fortunate in the world, to get honors, offices, or the like, he repines and grieves. He tortures himself if his equal, friend, neighbor be preferred, commended, do well; if he under- stand of it, it galls him afresh; and no greater pain can come to him than to hear of another man’s well-doing; ’tis a dagger at his heart, every such object. He would damage himself to do another a mischief; as that rich man in Quintillian that poisoned the flowers in his garden, so that his neighbor’s bees could get no more honey from them. His whole life is sorrow, and every word he speaks a satire; 77 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE nothing makes him fat but other men’s ruins.” Chrysostom said, “As a moth gnaws a gar- ment, so doth envy consume a man, to be a living anatomy, a skeleton, to be a lean and pale carcass, quickened with a fiend.” To be lean and pale is bad enough; but to be lean and pale and then possessed by the devil is worse; and that is Chrysostom’s description of an envious man. Spenser drew his picture of how “Malicious Envy rode Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw Between his cankred teeth a venemous tode, That all the poison ran about his jaw; But inwardly he chawéd his own maw At neighbor’s wealth that made him ever sad.” Milton names envy as one of the Seven Deadly Sins and calls it “the eldest born of hell.” Ruskin calls our attention to Giotto’s spiritual insight in his fresco at Padua, where he has painted Envy as an old hag with a snake crawling from her lips and then coil- ing round to strike her in the forehead. She has fingers like claws and she is being con- sumed in flames and she is generating her own suicidal poison. This is the conception of envy which the great poets and artists have given us, and it is one from which any sensi- tive soul naturally would shrink in horror and disgust. 78 LOVE AND ENVY ~~ Il. Envy ILLUSTRATED One would suppose that if envy were so utterly detestable a thing as these masters would seem to think it, “the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused,” it would be a very rare occurrence indeed to find it -harbored in a human heart; but it is one of the most surprising things in connec- tion with our race that envy should be so natural and universal a complaint as it is. From the very beginning the pages of sacred and of secular history have been full of it. The illustrations throng upon us. On the first pages of Genesis they begin. 1. In the Old Testament. Abel offered a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain; and Cain was very angry that his brother should be pre- ferred before him. Envy soured his visage and poisoned his heart and finally crazed him with rage, and he rose up against his brother and slew him. Esau was the elder son, and so deserved the birthright and the blessing. Jacob envied him his rightful preference, and so he lied to his old, blind father and deceived him and supplanted Esau from his place of honor. Then Esau hated Jacob and sought for his life. Envy will lie and cheat and mur- der and do anything else that is bad. 79 ‘ THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE Leah was the mother of four children and Rachel had none at all and the record is that Rachel envied her sister, and there was con- sequent domestic disharmony in the house- hold of Jacob for years. Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son. He loved him more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors; and when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than any or all of them, they hated Joseph and they could not speak peace- ably unto him. When they had the oppor- tunity, if it had not been for Reuben’s inter- ference, they would have slain him; and as it was, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. Jacob had envied his brother, and Jacob’s wives envied each other, and Jacob’s sons envied their brother and almost broke Jacob’s heart. Envy had made him a liar and deceiver in the beginning of his life, envy created dis- cord in the domestic economy of his middle life, and envy deprived him of his favorite son and well-nigh brought down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave in his old age. So much for the illustrations in Genesis. Other books in the Bible are equally full of them. We remember how Saul envied David his popularity and how he sought to take his life, how he threw the javelin at his head, hunted 80 LOVE AND ENVY him from his court, and exiled him from his native land. We remember how Haman had such an envious heart that it almost killed him to honor his enemy Mordecai as he himself had hoped to be honored by putting upon him the royal apparel and giving him the king’s horse to ride and the king’s crown to wear and lead- ing him through the street with the proclama- tion that this was the man whom the king de- lighted to honor. It surely would have killed Haman to have done that over again; but he was hanged before he had the chance to make the experiment. 2. In Ancient History. We read in Plutarch that Dionysius the tyrant of Syra- cuse punished Philoxenus the musician be- cause he sang better than the tyrant himself could, and Plato the philosopher because the philosopher could beat him in an argument. We read in Roman history that Adrian the emperor was a man of the same stamp. He killed all his equals and mortally envied all poets, painters, and artificers who seemed to excel him in anything. Domitian the emperor envied Agricola because, though he was a pri- vate citizen, he was of such excellent char- acter that he seemed to obscure the emperor’s honor and to eclipse the emperor’s fame. Cambyses slew his brother Smerdis because 81 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the brother could shoot better with bow and arrows than he. Caligula slew his brother be- cause his brother was the better-looking man. Richard of England and Philip of France were fellow soldiers in the Holy Land; and the Crusaders soon saw that Richard was the braver of the two. When they began to look to him as the chief, Philip became envious, disagreed with all of his plans, finally came to open defiance, and at last left Palestine in high dudgeon, hastened home, and invaded Richard’s territory with public declaration of war. Theogenes was the prince of Greek wrestlers. Another wrestler was so envious of him that his whole life was embittered. Then Theogenes died and a statue was erected to him in a public place, and the tradition is that the other wrestler went out every night and wrestled with the statue. One night he threw it, and it fell on him and crushed him to death. He was a big fool, but he was no bigger fool than any other envious man. Francis had heard that Raphael was the prince among painters and he sent to Raphael, asking him to send him one of his pictures. Raphael complied with the request. Francis received the picture, looked at it, recognized its inherent worth, fell into a fit of envy and 82 LOVE AND ENVY died. Envy is not always thus fatal. If it were, most of us never would have lived to see this day. Chrysostom was right when he said, “As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume aman.” There was a Roman citizen named Mutius who, as everybody knew, had a very envious and malignant spirit. One day he ap- peared on the streets of Rome looking very sad, and Publius said, “Either some great evil has happened to Mutius, or some great good to somebody else.” 3. In the New Testament. The Greek verb é7ni6w, Which is translated “envieth” in this passage, occurs twice in the book of Acts, and it is fair to conclude that the idea expressed by the verb in these passages in Acts will help us to illustrate the thought here. In the seventh chapter of Acts we read, “And the patriarchs, moved with envy, ¢A@oarvtes, sold Joseph into Egypt.’* The verb in the Greek is the same we have here. The feeling, then, is that of Jacob’s sons toward Joseph. It is the feeling which brethren can have toward a brother preferred. It is the feeling of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son. What was the matter with him, that he would not come in to 2 Acts 7. 9. 83 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE the feast? He was angry and stayed outside of the house, and when his father went out to entreat him to come in he said, “I have be- haved myself all my life, and you never made a banquet like this for me; but now that this scapegrace son has come back, you have killed for him the fatted calf.” It was the devil of envy in his heart. He would rather go hungry and sulk there behind the house than to go in and enjoy the good things of the banqueting table. He said to himself, “This younger son, this spendthrift son who claims to have re- formed, is treated better than I am, and I do not like it.” There was an assembly of ministers at Elberfeldt; and someone asked them, “Whom does this elder brother represent?’ Krum- macher answered: “I know him very well. I met him only yesterday.” ‘They asked, “Who is he?” and he said solemnly, “Myself.” Then. he explained that on the yesterday he had heard of a very gracious visitation of God’s goodness to a man who it seemed to him was very much less worthy of it than he would have been; and he felt a deal of envy and irri- tation because of it. That was a good appli- cation of the parable. That pastor who gets vexed because another pastor has greater revivals or larger collec- 84 LOVE AND ENVY tions or better appointments than he has, that Sunday-school teacher who gives up the class because somebody else seems more popular or successful than she is, that committee man in the Young People’s Society who will not work at all because somebody else seems to be getting the credit or more notice at least than he does, each of these is harboring that Little, mean devil of envy in his heart. It slips into the church membership. It shows _ itself among brethren of the same congregation and denomination oftentimes, and between differ- ent denominations it may be even more clearly manifest. The second instance of the use of this verb in the book of Acts illustrates that fact. It is to be found in the seventeenth chapter. Paul and Silas had been holding a three weeks’ re- vival service in Thessalonica, and they had had a very successful revival. Many of the Jews believed, and of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few. Then we read, “But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, ¢nA@sartes, made an uproar.’® They assaulted the house the apostles were in, and drove them out of the city. We have known other revival services broken up, if not in the same manner, at least 3 Acts 17. 5. 85 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE from the same motive. The members of the congregation of another belief were moved to envy and did all they could by speech and influence at least to break up proceedings. In our hearing the Mountain Evangelist made a confession along this line in one of his public sermons. He said: “I remember when I was a Presbyterian pastor, trying to build up my church. The Reformers on the hill used to come along and say, ‘We are going to have Brother Lord with us for a season.’ Brother Lord was a big man down there. I hated him in my Christian way. I did not like to hear him. He used to say to me, ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,’ and then he would look at me with an air of triumph. I will not say how I felt. He would beat me in argument every time. I did not know the meaning of baptism then nor the scope of it or anything of the kind, and I would just walk off like a beaten dog. When they would say they were going to have Brother Lord, I would say, ‘Brethren, I hope you will have a good time and gather in as many as you can,’ and I never told a bigger lie in my life. So it was with the Methodists and the Baptists. I did not want any of them to get anybody. I did not want them to get ahead of me. I wanted to get ahead of them; 86 ee LOVE AND ENVY and when they would have a big meeting, I would send off and get a popular evangelist and manage to keep abreast.” What a hu- miliating confession that was! What a con- temptible spirit that would have been in any preacher! Yet there are churches and preachers made on that narrow plan. The Lord can deliver from every such thing! He to whom authority was given to cast out devils can cast out this devil of envy from our midst! How can that be done? Marcus Aurelius said, “I have read Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee authors; I have consulted with many wise men for a remedy for envy and I could find none.’ Marcus Aurelius had not consulted the apostle Paul. Paul would have told him, “Love envieth not, and the way to get rid of envy is to get a baptism of Christian love.” Chalners preached one of his great sermons on “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” That phrase gives us the secret of complete victory. Let the heart be opened to the in- coming of the baptism of perfect love, and it will expel everything which is foreign to it and inconsistent with it. Every man who loves God with all his heart will love his neighbor as himself. He will cherish no hatred nor malice, take no pleasure in seeing 87 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE another humiliated or distressed, but, rather, will rejoice in every brother’s success. Love envieth not. Envy is devilish; love is divine. Love is of God; and every one who loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Love is to be lived, in Corinth and in Chicago, in England and in India. There- fore we ask Paul to tell us what the further characteristics of love may be, that we may live them wherever we are. 88 CHAPTER III LOVE AND EGOTISM PAUL Says next, “Love vaunteth not itself, is not pulfed up, od meprepeterat, ob pvorovra,”’ Sometimes a man does not envy because he is so well satisfied with himself and with his own possessions. He is so proud of these that it never occurs to him that anyone else has any- thing of which to be proud or which is to be envied. He is free from envy because he is full of vaunting. There are mutually exclu- sive vices. A miser will not be a spendthrift, and it is not at all to his credit that his one vice frees him from all temptation to the other. So if love envied not simply because love was a braggart, not much would be gained; but Paul says “Love is free from envying and love is just as free from vaunting.” Love is not so mean as to envy and love is not so foolish as to be puffed up. Love is not egotistical. Love never is vain-glorious. Love is no proud self-boaster. Love is no swell. The characteristics of Christian love as out- lined in this chapter seem simple enough in themselves, and yet it seems rarely enough that any individual realizes them. The char- acteristic mentioned now is possibly as rare 89 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE in ordinary life as any other that the chapter contains. Where are the men or the women who never have been known to vaunt them- selves and never have seemed to be puffed up? There are some such people in every com- munity, but they are comparatively rare speci- mens. ac ; ‘ f re Pe I. VAuUNTING ALMOST UNIVERSAL Pascal has written, ““Vanity has taken so firm a hold on the heart of man that a porter, a hodman, a turnspit can talk greatly of him- self, and is for having his admirers. Philos- ophers who write of the contempt of glory do yet desire the glory of writing well; and those who read their compositions would not lose the glory of having read them. We are so presumptuous as that we desire to be known to all the world; and even to those who are not to come into the world till we have left it. And at the same time we are so little and vain as that the esteem of five or six per- sons about us is enough to content and amuse us.”’ It is the universal vice. We all are ready to excuse our own failings, and to veil our own faults under the glamour of some assumed virtue. Thus we form a better opinion of our- Selves than that for which anybody else can 90 LOVE AND EGOTISM see any good reason. Our stinginess we call economy; our cowardice is prudence; our burst of anger is righteous indignation; our mean and cutting words are frankness and plainness of speech. Our selfishness always has solid reasons, and our sins easily can be justified in our own eyes. To us our crows are all doves; and however black they may seem to other eyes and however harsh their cawing may sound in other ears, to us they are gentle and innocent, cooing and pure, the very pride of our household and heart. ‘Could all mankind,” said John Norris, “lay claim to that estimate which they pass upon themselves, there would be little or no difference between lapsed and perfect humanity, and God might again review his image with paternal com- placency, and still pronounce it good.” In the book of Proverbs we read, ‘‘The way of a fool is right in his own eyes.’* Most peo- ple are sure that other people are fools, and most fools are sure that they themselves are wise. The biggest fool is the man who is sure that he alone is wise and all the rest of the world is foolish. It would be very difficult to find a definition of a fool upon which all would agree. Possibly there is no other sub- ject upon which there would be such radically 1 Prov. 12. 15. 01 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE differing opinions. One man’s fool would be another man’s ideal. The wise man’s fool would be the fool’s wise man. Therefore the definition which would suit one man perfectly would be at the furthest remove from another man’s suitable definition. Yet there is one definition to which all men immediately would be ready to agree. Every man is ready to say: “The fool is the man who does not think as I think. The fool is the man whose opinion differs with my own.” The wise man is ready to believe that, for he sees the inherent foolishness of the fool; and the fool is ready to believe that, for, as the book of Proverbs says, “The way of the fool is right in his own eyes.” In the home of one of our neighbors a little fellow who was just learning to talk came to his grandmother and surprised her with the solemn and unprovoked statement: “I is a good boy, Gamma. I is a very good boy. Gamma, you is an old humbug.” Compara- tively innocent that was in the little child; but unfortunately he expressed the sentiment, seldom so bluntly stated, of all mankind. We all are apt to be like that unfettered speci- men of the younger generation, joining our self-congratulation to the condemnation of others. 92 LOVE AND EGOTISM The Republicans are sure that the Demo- crats are humbugs who do not have sense enough to run the government except in the direction of the bowwows. The Democrats are sure that the Republicans are humbugs who really believe just as they themselves do but who talk loudly about the danger of en- tangling foreign alliances and the necessity of high protective tariffs to save the nation. The Communists and the Socialists and the Farmer-Labor Party and the Liberals and all the minority parties are sure that both the Democratic and the Republican parties are humbugs, advocating righteousness and re- forms only to get votes while they really are out for nothing but offices and spoils, while they themselves represent the concentrated and consummated wisdom and sincerity of the nation. Every political party is ready to say: “We are the people. Wisdom is with us and wisdom will die with us. Therefore, you will cast in your lot with us, if you are wise.” Even the way of a fool is right in his own eyes. The religious man is sure that he has chosen the path of wisdom; but the irreligious man is prone to call all religious people fanatics, cranks, and fools. A commercial traveler who was of that opinion was traveling in the same car with a clergyman, and by way of a per- 93 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE sonal thrust he asked the clergyman if he ever had heard that in Paris whenever a priest was hanged a donkey was hanged at the same time. The clergyman smiled at the attempted joke and said, “No, I never had heard that,” and then added, “Let us both rejoice, my brother, that we are not in Paris.” Each sect and denomination is apt to think that all others are more or less humbugs or fools. We cannot conceive how sensible men ean go through the mummeries or hold to the absurdities which we see in other churches and creeds, and what puzzles us in them puz- zles them in us; so that we are exactly even on that score. We are willing to give them credit for honesty of belief and sincerity of soul if they are willing to give us credit for the same; but when we find a man who be- lieves that he has the whole truth of God in his private possession and that everybody who does not agree with him in every par- ticular is unworthy of his fellowship and Christian association, we know that he is a fool of the first water. Yet we have noticed that even if an indi- vidual of that stamp may preach the non- necessity of physical labor to those who have sufficient faith in God to trust him for their daily bread, even if he preach that all sick- 94 LOVE AND EGOTISM ness is sin and all the saints will be perfect in health all the time, even if he preach that death can be avoided by the faith which claims a present immortality, even if he preach that the Lord has come for the second time and we are now living in the midst of the millennium, even if he preach that the Second Coming of the Lord and the end of the world are due to arrive at a certain date near at hand, even if he preach that marriageris not a divine institution and that God has nothing to do with it, even if he preach that all the churches are unclean and therefore we ought to have nothing to do with them, even if he preach the most extravagant nonsense imagin- able, he always can find some fools who will follow him. While we have respect for the sincerity of those in other churches who may differ with our church or with us in their opinions in certain matters, we have very little respect for either the sense or the sincerity of the man who professes to be such a saint of God that no one of the churches is good enough for him. Jesus never became so holy as that. He belonged to the visible church, corrupt as it was in his day; and he was faithful to all of its services and ordinances as long as he lived. They had to crucify him to get him out of it. 95 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE There was no other way to do it. John Wes- ley lived and died in the Established Church, | corrupt and dead as it was in his day. They called him hard names and persecuted him and mistreated him in every imaginable way; but he was a Churchman to the end. They refused him the use of their church pulpits for a time, but they could not refuse him admit- tance to their communion; and Wesley lived in loyal union and communion with the church all his days. A man once came to Spurgeon and asked him if his church was a pure church, and he said that he was looking for a pure church that he might belong to it. Spurgeon said that he did not know about his church. He did know that there were many good people in it, saintly people and truly Christian peo- ple; but there might possibly be a Judas among them, as there was in the company of the Lord’s first apostles; and there might be an Ananias and a Sapphira among them, as there were in that first Christian church founded at Pentecost; and there might be some deceivers and idolaters and those who would walk unruly, as there seemed to have been in the churches at Rome and Corinth and Galatia and Ephesus and Colosse and Philippi and Thessalonica and all the others 96 —— = — a = LOVE AND EGOTISM to which Paul and Peter and James and John and all the apostles ministered and to which the New Testament epistles were written. He did not know that his church was any better than these New Testament churches had been. On the whole he thought that his church was not the one this brother was looking for. In- deed, he did not know that there had been such a church in all history; “but,” said Spur- geon, “if you should happen to find such a church, I beg of you do not join it, for you would spoil the whole thing.” If we were in charge of a church and any- one desired to leave the church because he thought he was not good enough to stay in it, we would plead with him to fight on in the ranks and we would pray with him that he might become good enough to stay with us and it would be with the most sincere regret that we would permit his name to be dropped from the church record on that ground; but if we were in charge of a church and anyone de- sired to leave the church because he was too good for the church and the church was not good enough for him, we would not ask any questions and we would make no objections. We would dismiss him with great fluency and facility and felicity, glad to be freed from his presence on earth and hopeful that he would 97 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE be changed in character before we met him in heaven. No man ever was too good to associate with his fellows, in the church or anywhere else. It is nothing but vain boasting if he claims otherwise. Many of those whom he despises are his superiors in many things. They are better than he, in some ways if not in all. His vaunting is empty. The word carries the suggestion of emptiness with it. No man is infallible. No man is perfect, in the absolute sense. The man who begins to vaunt himself proclaims his own emptiness. The man who begins to boast proclaims his own poverty. That little French lady fell to disputing with her sister and she said, “I do not know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself who is always in the right.”’ Most of us are tempted to feel that way, even if we do not say it. The savage in the simplicity of his egotism and the civilized man in the sublimity of his self-conceit are very much akin. We read that a Harvard professor has made the calculation that if men really were as big as they sometimes feel, there would be room in the United States for only two professors, three lawyers, two doctors, and one reporter on a city paper. The rest of us would be 98 LOVE AND EGOTISM crowded into the sea and would have to swim. How continuously and unconsciously our egotism shows itself! A certain preacher de- vised a plan to interest his people in the study of the Bible. At each midweek meeting he would announce the subject for discussion one week from that date, so that his people would have one week in which to think about it and to prepare their remarks upon the topic chosen. One evening the subject was “The Character of the Apostle Paul.” One of the deacons in the beginning of the meeting began to describe the apostle’s personal appearance. He said Paul was a tall, rather spare man, with black hair and eyes and a dark com- plexion. His picture of Paul was a faithful portrait of himself. Another leading mem- ber of the church rose next and said, “I think the brother preceding me has read the Scrip- ture to little purpose if his description of the apostle Paul is a sample of his Bible knowl- edge. Paul was, as I understand it, a rather short, thick-set man, with sandy hair, gray eyes, florid complexion, and a _ nervous, sanguine temperament.” As it happened, this again was a fairly accurate picture of the speaker himself. Then another man took his turn. He had a keen sense of the ludicrous and he was an inveterate stammerer. He said, 99 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE “My bre-bre-brethren, I never have fo-found in my Bi-Bible much about the p-per-personal ap-pe-pear-ance of P-P-Paul; but one thing is clearly established and tha-that is, P-P-Paul had an imp-p-pediment in his speech.” Un- ‘ conscious egotists! Admiring the great apostle they each were prone to make him in their thought very much like themselves. » <) + i We are all prone to be proud of ourselves. We are proud of our possibilities. If we only had a chance to prove them, then the world might see what great men we are. We are proud of our achievements and we exaggerate them in our boasting, like those old Romans ~who boasted that all the world was subject to Augustus. Eusebius again brags that Con- stantine governed all the world. The same thing was said of Alexander, that he wept be- cause there were no more worlds to conquer. Whereas the fact of the case was that neither ~¢he Greeks nor the Romans ever held the fif- teenth part of the now known world, and not even half of that which was then described. They simply were vaunting themselves, in exaggerated self-adulation. We all are proud of our wisdom in these days. Says Burton, “In former times they had but seven wise men, 100 LOVE AND EGOTISM now you can scarce find so many fools.” In those days the tradition tells us that some fishermen found a golden tripos, and the oracle commanded that it be sent to the wisest man; and Thales sent it to Bias, and Bias to Solon, and Solon to Pittacus, and so on till it had been sent by each one to each one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece. Those wise men were really wise and yet so truly humble that each thought another more worthy than hin- self. “If such a thing were now found, we should all fight for it, we are so wise. We have women politicians, children metaphysi- cians; every fellow can square a circle, make perpetual motions, find the philosopher’s stone, interpret the Apocalypse, make a new system of the world, new logic, new philos- ophy, etc. We think so well of ourselves, that that in itself is an ample testimony of much folly.” That beautiful tradition of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, each of whom preferred in honor another rather than himself, comes from the very early history of the nation and may be only a tradition after all. The Greeks of later and more reliable history were not men of that sort. Socrates used to say that if the crier should make proclamation in the public assembly, “Let all the ¢obblers stand up,” or 101 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE “Let all the weavers stand up,’ only those so named would rise from their seats; but if the order should be, “Let all the men of sense stand up,’ not one would remain sitting. Socrates declared that the most damaging mis- take in life was that the majority of men were fools and yet believed themselves to be wise. Probably that is just as true now as in his day. Suppose that everybody in our country to- morrow noon could be just what he thinks he is capable of being, and that when the town clock struck twelve every man could step into the position which he considers himself worthy to occupy. Where would we all land? The cadets would all be captains, the clerks would all be managers of the concern, the preachers would all be bishops, and most of the congressmen and senators would be Presi- dent. Most of us would move up somewhere. if everybody could step into the position he thinks himself worthy to occupy, are there many of us who would move down? Now over against this almost universal vanity the apostle writes this sentence: “Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” If that is true of love, it ought to be true of us; for these characteristics of love are the char- acteristics of the Christ, and they ought to be 102 LOVE AND EGOTISM the characteristics of every professor of Chris- tian love, every disciple of the Christ. Puff- ing up is not lovely; and it is sinful, and it is deceitful, and it is dangerous. Ill. Purrine Up The Greek verb which Paul uses, gvotovrat, means, ‘is puffed up as by the use of a bellows, is filled with wind.” These little colored bal- loons which are sold on the street corner are pretty to look at and sail loftily enough for a little while if you let them go; but they are very frail indeed and liable to make sudden shipwreck. They will collapse at the first puncture and all the gas or wind will ooze out of them in twenty-four hours at the long- est. Those little balloons are suggestive of the little bladders of pride with which people are wont to buoy themselves up in the winds and currents of this world. We recall that speech of Wolsey after his fall, “T have ventured, like little wanton boys that swim on blad- TS ae summers in a sea of glory; But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me; and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must forever hide me.” It is dangerous to trust to these blown-up bladders of pride, these little puffed-up bal- 103 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE loons of self-vaunting which last us so little © while and then burst above us or break under us and leave us helpless and flat. Love is not puffed up, like that frog of Asop’s fable. The ox came along and stepped on one of the little frogs in her absence and when the mother returned they told her how a huge beast had crushed one of their brothers to death, and the mother frog puffed herself out and wanted to know if the beast was as big as that in size. One of the little frogs said, “Cease, mother, to puff yourself out; for you would, I assure you, sooner burst than successfully imitate the hugeness of that mon- ster.” We think of that fable whenever we read Paul’s statement here, and we think of the many people we have known who would not be content to be one of the biggest frogs in their puddle, but who puffed and puffed themselves out in the vain -endeavor to rival in size every ox in the meadow; people who in their desire to push their way into society maintained domestic establishments beyond their income and beyond their ability and in their desire to keep up appearances strained and strained and overstrained until at last they burst into bankruptcy, and then they were only lifeless frogs instead of life-size oxen. It is dangerous to be puffed up beyond 104 | LOVE AND EGOTISM measure. Even if the result is not fatal, it is likely to make one ridiculous. We heard John B. Gough say once in a lecture: “A Boston minister told me that when he was a young man he preached a sermon in a strange church and made a brilliant effort and sat down quite well satisfied with him- self. An old Scotch minister who was in the pulpit made the closing prayer, and he said, ‘O Lord, bless this young man who has ad- dressed us; and, O Lord, prick him hard till he has lost all his wind;’ and the Boston min- ister told me, ‘It was the best lesson I ever had in my life.” It is dangerous to be puffed up. Sooner or later one is sure to be puffed down. TV. Love’s HuMILITY In the Corinthian church to which Paul writes this epistle there were those who meas- ured themselves by themselves alone and who fully satisfied their own standard of excel- lence. In Pharisaical pride they put them- selves on public parade as patterns of pro- priety in every respect. There were some among them who thought they were much su- perior to the apostle Paul. They said of him: “In personal appearance he is contemptible and base. His bodily presence is insignificant 105 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE and weak. In speech he stammers. His rhet- oric is of the rudest kind. He is a weakling, and we have serious doubts as to his sanity or his personal responsibility for either his actions or his sayings.” Then they said of themselves, “We have not come to you unau- thorized and irresponsible, as he did. We have these letters of recommendation from the brethren at Jerusalem.” Paul heard of these things there in Mace- donia and he wrote to the Corinthians in the second epistle, “Not he who commendeth him- self is approved, but whom the Lord com- mendeth.”? Whom did the Lord commend? These slanderers and vain boasters are un- heard of in the after history. Paul went on about his business and God commended him everywhere and wrote his biography in the race in letters large and plain for evermore. He was God’s chosen vessel to bear his name unto Gentiles and Jews and before the kings of the earth. Yet what did he continually say of himself? “I am the least of the apostles who am not meet to be called an apostle.”* “Unto me who am less than the least of all the saints is grace given.’* “Christ Jesus 21 Cor. 15. 9. 32 Cor. 10. 18. ‘Eph. 3. 8. 106 LOVE AND EGOTISM came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief.”° “God resisteth the proud, but he giveth grace to the humble.’® He condemneth the vain boaster. He commendeth the humble in heart. Milton says that it was pride that made the angels fall, and all the world knows that it is human pride which most often stands between a soul and the commendation of God. Egypt was proud, and Ezekiel prophesied, “Thus saith the Lord, They also who uphold Egypt shall fall, and the pride of her power shall come down.’* Moab was proud, but Isaiah prophesied, “God shall bring down your pride.’®> Babylon was proud, but Jere- miah prophesied, “Behold, I am against thee, O thou most proud, saith the Lord God of hosts; for the day is come, the time that I will visit thee; and the most proud shall stumble and fall, and none shall raise him up.” The children of Ammon were proud, but Zephaniah prophesied, ‘‘As I live, saith the Lord of hosts, the children of Ammon shall be as Gomorrah, even the breeding of nettles and saltpits and a perpetual desolation. This 81 Tim. 1. 15. 6 Jas. 4. 6. 7 Ezek. 30. 6. ® Isa. 25. 11. ® Jer. 50. 31. 107 THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE shall they have for their pride, because they have magnified themselves against the people of the lord of Hosts.’*® The overthrow of these nations and the humiliation of their pride simply illustrates the truth stated again and again in the Word. A man’s pride shall bring him low. Pride goeth before destruc- tion. Pride shall stumble and fall. Pride cometh, and then cometh shame. Woe to the crown of pride! The Lord will destroy the house of the proud. Every one who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord. The Lord hateth a proud look.