1 Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, % 39 ( Works, xviii. 420). 8 N. D. Hillis.
i90 THE GOLDEN RULE
God has made these our neighbours. And if we were in their place ! If we were the condemned, the pain-stricken, the crippled, the diseased, and they were here to-day in our places, in health and hope, what should we wish that men should do for us ? The question answers itself. We should long that all that skill and care and comfort and kindness can do should be done for us in our lamentable lot. If a man lives a dissolute life, and nature begins to exact her penalties and wrecks the physical frame, we maintain a costly staff of physicians and an expensive system of hospitals to stand between that man and the direct consequences of his evil living. Logically, that is indefensible. But there are higher principles in life than the merely logical. And we have con- cluded that life is so sacred, and its opportunities are so precious, that we will direct all our skill and all our care to enlarging and extending life's opportunities for every man, even for the worst.
^[ There are vessels on our seas that bear an ill name, and have an evil notoriety. But let the worst of these run upon the rocks, and the men of your lifeboats will not stay to haggle about character and deserts. They will do for the worst what they would do for the best. Such is the inspiring influence of our Chris- tian conception. Christ Himself died for an evil world that was in peril of shipwreck.1
3. It is not too much to say that the spirit of the Golden Rule created a new atmosphere for the world. But it needed to be illumined and reinforced, and this our Lord proceeded to do. If the Golden Rule is the high-water mark of the other teaching, it is the lowest round in the ladder which Christ begins to climb. Where the other teachers stopped on the hill of aspiration and difficulty, Jesus begins, and rushes on and up to hitherto undreamed- of heights. At the beginning of His ministry He said, " Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." After three years of self-abnegating service He parted the curtains, and showed them the heights where perfect love had her dwelling-place, from which she beckoned men out of the low plains of selfishness up to the realms where perfect truth and beauty have their dwelling- place. " A new commandment I give unto you " — that abrogates that lower Golden Rule — " that ye love one another, as I have loved you." The Golden Rule was a mere embodiment of absolute
1 C. S. Home, The Model Citizen, 148.
ST. MATTHEW vn. 12 191
justice ; Christ proposes to break the alabaster box of love unmerited and undeserved. " As I have loved you " — what word is this? For three years He had shown them the pattern of earth's most glorious friendship. Jesus has not done unto the Twelve simply and alone what He would have the Twelve do unto Him. He has done more. Peter denies His Master, and Jesus stretches forth His hand and draws Peter up out of the abyss, and gives the sceptre of power and the keys of influence into Peter's hand.
If The solid blocks or tables on which the Ten Commandments were written were of the granite rock of Sinai, as if to teach us that all the great laws of duty to God and duty to man were like that oldest primeval foundation of the world — more solid, more enduring than all the other strata ; cutting across all the secondary and artificial distinctions of mankind ; heaving itself up, now here, now there ; throwing up the fantastic crag, there the towering peak, here the long range which unites or divides the races of mankind. That is the universal, everlasting character of Duty. But as that granite rock itself has been fused and wrought together by a central fire, without which it could not have existed at all, so also the Christian law of Duty, in order to perform fully its work in the world, must have been warmed at the heart and fed at the source by a central fire of its own — and that central fire is Love — the gracious, kindly, generous, admiring, tender movements of the human affections ; and that central fire itself is kept alive by the consciousness that there has been in the world a Love beyond all human love, a devouring fire of Divine enthusiasm on behalf of our race, which is the Love of Christ, which is of the inmost essence of the Holy Spirit of God. It is not contrary to the Ten Commandments. It is not outside of them, it is within them ; it is at their core ; it is wrapped up in them, as the particles of the central heat of the globe were encased within the granite tables in the Ark of Temple.1
1 A. P. Stanley, History of the Church of Scotland, 8.
Choosing a Road.
ST. MATT. — 13
Literature.
Bersier (E.), Twelve Sermons, 19.
Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 337.
Campbell (J. M.), Sermons and Lectures, i. 41.