^ " Lovest thou me ? " It is a question that goes down very deep ; for it goes dov/n to the eternal springs of all life. It is God's and Nature's great secret; and man's only hope. Love is life, hatred is death. Love, in its essence, is attraction, combination, sympathy, blending. It is so even in what we call the unconscious world of matter. God's immense laboratory, the Universe, so far as we know it, is the ceaseless arena of love-attractions and blcudiugs. There is never an atom that is content alone ; never a molecule that is at rest in its isolation ; never a crystal that is not flashed into form by aspiration ; never a leaf or bud or blade of grass that does not reach out after its beloved ; never a throb that is not responded to throughout all space. Gravitation itself
* Adolpho Monod.
ST. JOHN XXI. 15-17 427
is like the ceaseless infinite breathing of an all-pervading Lover — attracting all things to itself. Throughout the Universe, so far as we can penetrate, every atom is crying to every other, " Lovest thou me ? " Science calls it " affinity." We might just as well call it " love."
Everywhere, too, Nature — the great patient Mother — stands waiting for the lover's appeal. It is true that we can capture many of her treasures without affection ; but never her joys and benedictions so. She is very wonderful in her teachings, and very gracious in her consolations to her lovers ; but there must be love if there is to be communion. You will only be miserable in her solitudes if you are without love. Night and day she whispers to the wanderer, " Lovest thou me ? " Emerson was right. We get her stare — not her music — because we love her not. You accuse Nature of cruelty ; you say,
Nature has miscarried wholly Into failure, into folly. Alas ! thine is the bankruptcy Blessed Nature so to see.
These young atheists
Who invade our hills Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world.
And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the Same. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, " Not in us " ;
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant and mineral say, " Not in us " ;
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain,
We devastate them unreligiously.
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them ; yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due ;
428 LOVE AND SERVICE
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
And, in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve.
We praise the " strong men," the empire-makers, the remorse- less soldiers, the commercial pioneers ; and, indeed, they have their mission, and some of them deserve their meed of praise ; but these are not the great instruments of nature and of God. The poets, the artists, the moralists, the idealists, the Buddhas, the Christs, the lovers, are the saviours of the world.
" Lovest thou me ? " is the question which determines every stage of evolution. From beast to man, and from the beast-man to the angel-man — all is a question of love. Until love comes, no high manhood comes, and, by so much as love lingers, the beast lingers. " Lovest thou me ? " is the preliminary question which is the secret of that Divine Shekinah, that symbol of the Divine Presence — the Home. " Lovest thou me ? " whispers about all the subsidences of family feuds, and tribal isolations, and clannish spite, and class pride, and national greed. It is the mightiest factor in true nation-making ; it is the life and soul of sane and sober patriotism; it is the advance-guard, the evangel, of the great ideal — the Brotherhood of Man. In fine, it is that which determines all the upward evolutionary stages of the race.^
^ In simple and homely ways see how true it is that love is life and joy and progress. It is nothing to accumulate treasure, and to surround yourself with splendid defences against the intrusions of the careworn world, if you have a loveless and careworn heart. There is profound truth in Hood's quaintly humorous but pathetically serious lines concerning
Love that sweetens sugarless tea. And makes contentment and joy agree
With the coarsest boarding and bedding; Love that no golden ties can attach. But nestles under the humblest thatch, And will fly away from an Emperor's match,
To dance at a Fenny Wedding.^
^ It is amazing to find how Christ simplifies religion and morality and reduces them to their elemental terms. He de- * J. P. Hopps, Sermons of Life and Love, 7. * Ibid, 12.