^ H. Rashdall, Doctriv^ and Development^ 86.
ST. JOHN X. II 457
crucified Him. He lived a life that none other lived, and He died a death that none other died. He lived because He willed to live, and He died because He willed to die. The law of love never expressed itself so gloriously as in the death of Jesus Christ. So He taught mankind through all time that love is sacrifice, when for us men and for our salvation He made that oblation of Himself upon the Cross of Calvary, once, and once for all.
, If Love must be prepared for the greatest sacrifice. We may ' never conclude that love is unreal merely because its thouo-hts , are large. It may have the widest schemes, and be prepared to devote the utmost pains to their accomplishment. It should give itself freely to the most romantic enterprises. The Lord would not be for all time the King of Love if He had shrunk back from the cup of suffering which, as He knew, was to be drained at the
end of that progress to Jerusalem. We need "public souls"
men and women who are capable of cherishing great ideas, and who delight to spend themselves for their brethren. There is a growing demand for such in the Church and in the Empire. If, in the providence of God, the way should open for any of us to some conspicuous path of devotion, let us count it high honour, and prepare ourselves bravely for the cost it will involve, cost far greater than will appear at the outset; cost of opposition, and criticism, and misunderstanding, and disappointment; cost, it may be, of seeming failure to achieve anything, or to make any immediate impression. Love must be prepared for the greatest sacrifice. That is the first criterion and test.^
(2) Christ, the Good Shepherd, in pronouncing goodness to lie in self-sacrifice, is but realizing and consummating that principle which is striving to free itseK from the tangled web of Nature. But have we always recognized that the heart of good- ness, of natural goodness, lies in self-sacrifice ? Have we been loyal to this as the verdict of Nature ? Somehow, as we know, we came to believe a little time ago that whatever supernatural grace might demand, Nature laid its approval not upon self-sacrifice, but upon self-assertion. So Science had seemed to say. It had opened our eyes upon a dismal scene in which beast battled with beast, each struggling with desperate energy for its own survival. Nature appeared as a wild and blind monster, working with tooth
^A. W. Robinson, Th4 Voice of Joy and Health, 167.
458 THE GOOD SHEPHERD
and claw, shrieking against our moral creed. There was no good- ness to be detected at work in a war where egoism alone counted. But ever since the early recognition of the law of natural selection, which Darwin emphasized as the sole determinant of evolution, Science has been limiting and qualifying the range of its activity. ^ To many of us it seems there is too much red in the picture which Darwin painted ; and the trouble is that his picture has been reproduced by cheaper and coarser processes, until it has lost all subtlety and truth, and become a harsh and ugly print of Nature, as if it were a dismal type of vast gladiatorial show. This is not merely bad as a piece of unbalanced cos- mogony ; but by a vicious circle the libel projected upon Nature is brought back to justify one set out of human methods, the egoistic; and to condemn others as altruistic. But the organic process depends on much more than a squabble round a platter, or internecine struggle at the margin of subsistence ; it includes all the multitudinous efforts for others, as well as for self, between the two poles of hunger and love ; all endeavours that mate makes for mate, and parent for offspring, and kin for kin. Love and life are factors in progress as much as pain and death, and the premium in the struggle for existence on tooth and claw is not greater than that on the warm solicitude of the maternal heart, or on the patience of a brooding bird. So, again, we will say if we make a curve of the ascent of vertebrates, marking their position according to the degree of brain development, we find that as the curve ascends the co-ordinates of parental affection and parental love and gentle emotions are heightened. And those organisms so endowed survive, in spite of the admitted egoistic com- petition. And that is the proof of Nature's censure. Earth may be strong, but it is also lovely, and the lovely and the strong exist together. And we see that, according to its own ascending mind and age, the loving become more and more strong. From the dawn of life, as Herbert Spencer said, altruism has been no less essential than egoism ; self-sacrifice is as primordial as self- preservation. More and more we see that it is possible to inter- pret the ideals of ethical progress through love and sociality, through co-operation and sacrifice, not as mere Utopias, con- tradicted by natural experience, but as the highest expression of the central evolutionary process in the natural world.^
Learn in self-sacrifice to find thy joy, The only bliss unmingled with alloy; All lesser pleasures soon must pall and cloy. 1 Greddes, Ideals of Science and Faith, 70.