[Frederic Greeves, B. A., in the Christian World Pulpit, London, England]

How often love is not sufficiently "broad"! It is because family life can become so narrow in its loyalties, so selfish in its scope, that many social reformers have seen the destruction of the family as one the clews to the ideal society. The existence of this very real danger is the explanation of many of Christ [Jesus'] hard sayings about the occasions when parents must be disregarded and family ties broken. He himself showed in his own life the necessity, ... and the reason for such actions. Love cannot be limited in its scope and remain true love for long. Charity that not only begins at home but also ends there soon becomes disruptive even in the home. For our loved one's sake, as well as for our own sake and God's sake, duty to God must come before duty to parent, brother, child. Just as patriotism that does not grow from nation to world patriotism becomes vicious in its results, so family love which is not the school in which we learn to love the whole family of God becomes destructive in its effects upon the common good.

[Dr. Allen Knight Chalmers, as quoted in the Boston Evening Transcript, Massachusetts]

Man should live his life as the captain of a ship, thinking of others, and not just as the captain of his own soul. The captain is the last to leave his ship, even though it sinks beneath him, and as long as one passenger on his ship, or a member of his crew, is in danger, the captain has no right to think of self-preservation. We have been wrong in calling the so-called law of self-preservation one of the first laws of human nature, and accepting it as one of our rights. ... Selflessness is not against nature. It is a fulfillment of nature, giving nature meaning and dignity.

To learn to think first of others is to know the need of being born again. Man must really be born again if the kingdom of God is to come on earth. The greatest obstacle to the victory of the spirit over life is that men are not sure they care to live—when they are recalled to life—or if they do care to live, are not sure they can live. It is no soft gospel Jesus preaches; no easy truth he teaches. He says we must be born again. Not merely once, but that we must become new men. This means that we must learn to think, not of ourselves, but of other men. This can be brought about in two ways—first, by living close to human need; and second, by putting yourself in the way of ideas.

[Richard Roberts, D. D., in the New Outlook, Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

Love, said Henry Drummond, is the greatest thing in the world. But he could have said much more. Since God is Love, Love is the only world there is—the rest is sham and illusion and lies. For us, there is an immediate duty to recover the Christian, that is, the New Testament, sense and use of the word.

The first thing we have to observe is that in the New Testament love is regarded as a duty. Here Jesus commands us to love. Evidently love is, then, an affair of the will, something that is within our own choice. And here our trouble begins. For our way is to think of love as something which is provoked in us by the people who are pleasing to us—an emotional response in us with which we have nothing to do. It is something we cannot help. Clearly, we are thinking of something different from what Jesus had in mind. We say that we cannot love people whom we do not like; Jesus says, on the contrary, that these are precisely the people whom we should love. ...

It was the very genius of spiritual insight that led the early Quakers to call themselves a Society of Friends: for that is what the Gospel calls for—but on the scale of the whole race—a society of friends as wide as the world and more enduring than time. But you can have no society of friends without integrity and love—integrity the foundation and love the cement.

Integrity—Speak ye truth to one another and lie not, says St. Paul; and this is the reason he gives: For ye are members one of another. You cannot create or preserve any human unity except upon a firm base of common rectitude. When men cease to trust one another, they fall apart.

And for cement—love. Walter Rauschenbusch defined love as "no flickering or wayward emotion, but the energy of a steadfast will bent on creating fellowship"—fellowship, that is, without respect of persons. It is the energy of a steadfast will—and it covers a great deal of ground. The word includes all the attitudes and the activities, and is (shall I say?) militant—where it goes out to provoke love, and that without respect of persons. Every loving soul is a neighbor to be loved; and the enemy is to be regarded as a possible friend. William Blake has a fine sentence in one of his poems, "Our wars are wars of love"—Love goes on the warpath to destroy the enemy by turning him into a friend.

But please do not suppose that this is a merely sentimental enterprise. It rests upon deep and eternal foundations—upon nothing less than the character of God. It is part of the reason for the slack morality of these times that we suppose that morals are no more than human conventions, having no more authority than a vague general consent. As I have said before, the man who first said that "honesty is the best policy" had made a profound discovery—he had discovered not only a maxim of safe business, but the invaluable fact that this is a moral universe, a universe in which dishonesty does not work: and there are other things that won't work in it: pride, vanity, greed, and much beside, as most of us know to our cost. In fact, you may say that the sum and substance of the New Testament revelation concerning human conduct is that this is a universe in which, in the long run, only love works. The only safe business proposition in this kind of world, because of the kind of God who made it, is stated here: "That ye love one another; as I have loved you."

[From the Herald, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada]

We read in the Scriptures that "it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a great woman; and she constrained him to eat bread. And so it was, that as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread. And she said unto her husband, Behold now, I perceive that this is an holy man of God, which passeth by us continually. Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither." This was done. ...

There is a great deal in the story of the woman of Shunem, and other stories of the nameless in the Bible. She is merely described as a great woman. But there was evidently goodness in her heart. This goodness was brought out by meeting and, no doubt, conversing with the prophet whom she looked upon as "an holy man." There is a lesson in this—the influence of the good in us on those with whom we come in contact. By being lovers of good, holding to all that is good in the way we conduct our lives, we even unconsciously, and without intention, influence the lives of others for good, bringing out all the good that is in them, and so are workers, though we may not know it, in building up the kingdom of God on earth.

The story of the woman of Shunem arouses a great thought. It is the wonderful influence of good. It is true, as the Bible story tells us, that she had her reward in her dead son being brought back to life later on by the prophet. But it was with no hope of reward that she did a kindly deed for the holy man. The reward came in a way she least expected. She did good for the pleasure in doing it. Her name is not known, but her good deed, like those of the nameless in the Bible, remains with greater remembrance than if it had been inscribed on marble—a lesson of the influence of good.

[Rev. David P. Gaines, as quoted in the News-Times, Danbury, Connecticut]

We are too prone to estimate life by externals. A few years ago we thought we had found the secret of the abundant life in our golden age of prosperity. The mind of the whole world was fixed on externals. And when that prosperity collapsed, we blamed the system, and many of us are now looking around for another system to bring us material plenty. But abundance comes from within, not from a system. If we truly learn to love God, that is the door to life. Life is something between ourselves and God, not between ourselves and circumstances. Our task is to adjust our relation to God. It is our fault if we lead impoverished lives.

[Professor William Lyon Phelps, as quoted in the New York Times, New York]

Human nature has not changed in the past few thousand years, and the same evils that were described in the Bible exist today. In the Old Testament the root of all misfortune is said to lie in a person's own temperament, and that is as true today as it was then.

Human nature has never changed. But there is such a thing as overcoming it. All civilization depends upon the control of human instincts. We cannot cahnge the past, but we can overcome the power of the past.

When we realize that the root of all evil is the inordinate love of self, we can understand jealousy and why many dislike to hear competitors praised. Someone defined a true Christian as one "who rejoices in the superiority of a rival." It is not impossible to be that way. The moment one can say, "It doesn't make any difference through whom it advances so long as it advances," that person has risen and is happy.

The spiritual life in which jealousy and self-love are washed away like poisons is open to all, but first one must let oneself go. The more we cultivate the spiritual life the less we think of ourselves. And some day when we overcome these vices that give no satisfaction, there will be people who won't hate foreigners, who won't hate people of another race, and who will rejoice in each other's successes. It is foretold in the Bible, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."

[Justice Joseph B. Perskie, in the New Jersey Courier, Toms River, New Jersey]

Justice is ... a meaningless word unless it is based on common decency and honesty of all those entrusted with its administration. Justice is and must ever continue to be so kindly in its nature that it shelters the frailest right of the humble, so strong and invulnerable that it checks and stays the assault of the mightiest baron of the land.