Article December 5, 1914 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from Thomas Arthur Smoot, R. J. Campbell

[Thomas Arthur Smoot, D.D., in The Homiletic Review]

The efficacy of love to meet every possible social, economic, and political condition is clearly indicated by the claims of Jesus. To his mind, no contingency in life can possibly arise that is able to defeat love. Only by loving can the heart gain, and only by hating can it lose. It is the one positive principle of existence—the love which he declares in his doctrine to be his distinctive attribute. By it all enemies are to be overcome. And that seems a hard, not to say inconceivable, thing to believe; for my enemy is certainly hostile to my welfare; he is, by the nature of the case, unlovely, and may be inherently very wicked, but not totally so. The Teacher of this new philosophy could not ask me to love any one that is totally bad; that were a monstrous thing to require. But there is nothing arbitrary or unreasonable in the injunction, for to love an enemy is the only way by which I can work toward his uplift into a place of unity and utility in my own life. I am not to love him for the bad that is in him, but the rather, despite the bad I am to love him for the modicum of goodness that he possesses. When love has drawn whatever goodness there is in him to the plane of whatever goodness there is within myself, there is a union of two human forces that coalesce with that infinite force of divine love, and the united stream sweeps on toward that "far-off divine event." The supreme task of love is to draw into this current every individual force in the race. This achievement, as the ideal of Jesus, is the mystery of godliness that so attracted and exercised St. Paul.

[Rev. R. J. Campbell in The Christian Commonwealth]

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