1 T. G. Selby.
ST. MARK 323
myself to my church, and to my work as a minister. Then God has come to rebuke me, and has said to me, " Is not everything which is for the good of your fellows your true and proper work as a Christian ? " There is nothing the man of God should not touch. And everything he touches should be better for it. He should be like the sunlight, bringing healing and blessing where- ever he comes.^
ii. Thou shalt love thy Neighbour as thyself. 1. " How," it is asked, " can I fulfil it ? I have done my best, and I cannot make myself love a man I do not like ; there is a tract of my life that lies beyond control, I simply cannot fulfil this second commandment." There are six things that men forget when they so speak.
(1) First of all, they forget, surely, who gave the command- ment. Who told me to love my neighbour as myself ? Did He not know, could He not read, the human heart ? Did He not understand what He was saying to me, and what my nature is in which He bids me fulfil His commandment ? Am I to look to Him, my Maker, my Eedeemer, my Judge, and tell Him, "This commandment which Thou, 0 Lord, hast laid on me, I cannot keep, I am not made to keep it, it is not within my power " ? Can we say that when we remember who gave the commandment ?
(2) In the second place, when men so speak, are they not forgetting the lives of the saints ? Are we not of one nature, with the same difficulties, with them ? Had not they to struggle ? and are not we to struggle ? and why should that obedience which was possible to them be impossible to us ? When you say, " I cannot love So-and-so, I cannot fulfil that commandment," imagine the words coming from the lips of St. John, or St. Bernard, or St. Francis ; think of them saying such a thing as that ! One cannot, surely, conceive that they would have allowed themselves to press that as an excuse.
(3) Again, do we not really recognise in some spheres of life that men can command, control their love ? Should we be satisfied with a father who pleaded that he could not love his children ? Should we say that the inability to love lus children which he pleaded could be real, could be a final answer, could
1 0. Leach.
324 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
excuse him from the love he owed them ? Surely we do recog- nise the control over affection.
(4) Eemember, again, that it is one thing to like and another to love ; and often when people say they cannot love, do they not mean they cannot like ? Now Hking is, of course, a much lower thing than loving, a much poorer, more earthly thing than loving ; and as it is poorer and lower and more earthly, so very often it may be harder. For liking may be sometimes, to some extent, a matter of temperament, of sympathy, of taste ; but love is a matter of duty, and therefore for love, at all events, we can turn to the grace of God, and often when we find it hard to like, we may find it, God helping us, more possible to love.
(5) Let us once more ask ourselves, have we really tried all we can do ? We say that we have done what we can to love some one whom we find it hard to love : have we really done what we can ? have we, at all events, done what our Lord would bid us do ? The seventy times seven — have we come near that limit of endurance ? And if anybody imagines that he has come near that limit of endurance, let him take a further one, which certainly is that by which he will be judged : has he come near the limitation of the forbearance and the love of God ? Yes, if we have forgiven, if we have put away the past seventy times seven times, still we are challenged by that which we know of our own lives, and of God's dealings with us. Have we ever come near the forbearance and the forgiveness that have been granted to us ?
(6) And last of all, when a man talks of being unable to fulfil the second commandment, surely he is forgetting what grace means — the grace of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit in the heart, the strength that is made perfect in weakness, the very love of God poured into the heart of mau. Are we not forgetting all that that means when we say that anything to which our Lord bids us, anything to which He, our Pattern, bids us, is impossible for us ? ^
^ We are told to love incompatible members of the families and kindreds with which we are associated, and perhaps they are occasions of irritation to us, thorns stabbing our most densely massed and delicate nerve-processes. We are told to love our
^ Bishop Paget.