# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 02/Ten Sermons of Religion/Sermon 04

IV.
OF LOVE AND THE AFFECTIONS.
LOVE IS OF GOD.—1 John iv. 7.
Conscience deals with universal principles of morals. It has for its object justice, the divine law of the world, to be made ideal in the consciousness of mankind, and then actual in the facts of our condition and history. The affections deal with persons; with nothing but persons, for animate, and even inanimate, things get invested with a certain imaginary personality as soon as they become objects of affection. Ideas are the persons of the intellect, and persons the ideas of the heart. Persons are the central point of the affectional world. The love of persons is the function of the affections, as it is that of the mind and conscience to discover and accept truth and right.
This love is a simple fact of consciousness; a simple feeling, not capable of analysis, not easily described, yet not likely to be confounded with any other fact of consciousness, or simple feeling. It is not directly dependent on the will, so is free from all immediate arbitrariness and caprice of volition. It is spontaneous, instinctive, disinterested, not seeking the delight of the loving subject, but of the object loved. So it is not a desire of enjoying, but of delighting. As we love truth for itself, justice for its own sake, so we love persons not for their use, but for themselves; we love them independently of their convenience to us. Love is its own satisfaction; it is the love of loving, not merely of enjoying, another.
Such is love itself, described by its central character; but it appears in many forms, and is specifically modified by the character and condition of the person loved, the object of affection; by the person who loves, the loving subject; and by the various passions and emotions mingling therewith. So it appears as fraternal, filial, connubial, ​ and parental love; as friendship, love of a few who reciprocrate the feeling; as charity, love of the needy ; as patriotism, love of your nation ; and a philanthropy, the love of all mankind without respect to kin or country. In all these cases love is the same thing in kind, but modified specifically by other emotions which connect themselves with it. Love is the piety of the affections.
Of course there are not only forms of love, where the quality is modified, but degrees which measure the different quantity thereof. The degree depends on the subject, and also on the object, of love.
There is a state of consciousness in which we wish no ill to a man, but yet wish him no good. That is the point of affectional indifference. The first remove above that may be regarded as the lowest degree of love, hardly worthy of the name, a sort of zobphytic affection. You scarcely know whether to call it love or not.
The highest degree of love is that state of feeling in which you are willing to abandon all, your comfort, convenience, and life, for the sake of another, to sacrifice your delight in him to his delight in you, and to do this not merely by volition, as an act of conscience, and in obedience to a sense of duty,—not merely by impulse, in obedience to blind feeling, as an act of instinct,—but to do all this consciously, yet delightedly, with a knowledge of the consequences, by a movement which is not barely instinctive, and not merely of the will, but spontaneous; to do all this not merely out of gratitude for favours received, for a reward paid in advance, nor for the sake of happiness in heaven, a recompense afterwards; with no feeling of grateful obligation, no wish for a recompense, but from pure, entire, and disinterested affection.
This highest ideal degree of love is sometimes attained, but, like all the great achievements of human nature, it is rare. There are few masterpieces in sculpture, painting, architecture, in poetry or music. The ideal and actual are seldom the same in any performance of mankind. It is rarely that human nature rises to its highest ideal mark; some great hearts notch the mountains and leave their line high up above the heads of ordinary men,—a history and a prophecy. Yet the capacity for this degree of love belongs to the nature of man as man. The human excellence which ​ is actual in Jesus, is possible in Iscariot; give him time and opportunity, the man will appear in him also. I doubt not that the worst man ever hanged or even honoured for his crime, will one day attain a degree of love which the loftiest men now cannot comprehend. This power of loving to this degree, it seems to me, is generic, of the nature of man; the absence of it is a mark of immaturity, of greenness, and clownishness of the heart. But at this day the power of affection is distributed as diversely as power of mind or conscience, and so the faculty of loving is by no means the same in actual men. All are not at once capable of the same quality of love.
There are also different degrees of love occasioned by the character of the object of affection. All cannot receive the same quantity. Thus you cannot love a dog so well as a man, nor a base, mean man so much as a great, noble man, with the excellences of mind and conscience, heart and soul. Can you and I love an Arnold as well as a Washington? a kidnapper as well as a philanthropist? God may do so, not you and I. So with finite beings the degree of love is affected by the character of both the subject and the object of affection.
It is unfortunate that we have but one word in English to express affectional action in respect to myself and to other men; we speak of a man loving himself, and loving another. But it is plain that I cannot love myself at all in the sense that I love another; for self-love is intransitive,—subject and object are identical. It is one thing to desire my own delight, and something quite opposite to desire the delight of another. So, for the sake of clearness, I will use the words Self-love for the normal feeling of a man towards himself; Selfishness for the abnormal and excessive degree of this; and Love for the normal feeling towards others.
Self-love is the lesser cohesive attraction which keeps the man whole and a unit, which is necessary for his consistency and existence as an individual. It is a part of morality, and is to the man what impenetrability is to the atoms of matter, and what the centripetal force is to the orbs of heaven; without it, the man's personality would soon be lost in the press of other men. ​ Selfishness is the excess of this self-love; no longer merely conservative of myself, I become invasive, destructive of others, and appropriate what is theirs to my own purposes.
Love is the greater gravitation which unites me to others; the expansive and centrifugal power that extends my personality, and makes me find my delight in others, and desire them to have theirs in me. In virtue of this I feel for the sorrows of another man; they become, in some measure, my sorrows, just in proportion to the degree of my love; his joys also are my joys just in the same degree; I am gladdened with his delights, honoured in his honours; and so my consciousness is multiplied by all the persons that I love, for my affectional personality is extended to them all, and with a degree of power exactly proportionate to my degree of love. So affection makes one man into many men, as it were.
The highest action of any power is in combination with all the rest. Yet there is much imperfect action of the faculties, working severally, not jointly. The affections may act independent of the conscience, as it of them. It is related that an eminent citizen of Athens had a son who committed an offence for which the law demanded the two eyes of the offender; the father offered one of his to save one of his son's. Here his heart, not his conscience, prompted the deed. When the affections thus control the conscience, we have the emotion called Mercy, which is the preponderance of love for a person, not love for right, of love for the concrete man over the abstract idea of justice. In a normal condition, it seems to me that love of persons is a little in advance of love of the abstract right, and that spontaneous love triumphs over voluntary morality; the heart carries the day before the conscience. This is so in most women, who are commonly fairer examples of the natural power of both the moral and affectional faculties, and represent the natural tendency of human nature better than men. I think they seldom sacrifice a person to an abstract rule of conduct; or at least, if there is a collision between conscience and the heart, with them the heart carries the day. Non-resistants, having a rule of conduct which forbids them to hurt another, will yet do this for a wife or child, though not for ​ themselves, their love being greater than their selfishness. This is so common that it seems a rule of nature,—that the affectional is a little stronger than the moral instinct, and where both have received due culture, and there is still a collision between the two, that mercy is the law. But here no private love should prevail against right, and only universal love come in to its aid to supply the defect of conscience. Brutus, so the story goes, finds his son committing a capital offence, and orders his head struck off, sacrificing his private and paternal love to his universal and human love of justice, his love of a special man to his love of what is right for all men. This is as it should be.
Conscience may be cultivated in an exclusive manner to the neglect of the affections. Then conscience is despotic; the man always becomes hard and severe, a stern father, a cold neighbour, a harsh judge, a cruel magistrate. He will err often, but always on the side of vengeance. Love improves the quality of finite morality, for it is the same as divine justice. Absolute justice and absolute love are never antagonistic, but identical. The affections may be cultivated at the expense of con- science. This often happens with such as limit the range of their love to a few friends, to their own family, class, or nation. The world is full of examples of this. Here is one who loves her own family with intense love, — her husband, children, grandchildren, and collateral relations,—the love always measured by their propinquity to her. Like the crow in the fable, she thinks her own young the fairest of the fair, heedless of their vulgarity, and worldly and ignoble materialism. She is generous to them, no she-crow more bounteous to her young, but no hawk was ever more niggardly to all beyond. Here neglect of justice and scorn of conscience have corrupted her affections; and her love is only self-love,—for she loves these but as limbs of herself,—and has degenerated into selfishness in a wider form, not simple, but many-headed selfishness.
I once knew of a man who was a slave-trader on the Atlantic, and a proverb for cruelty among the felons of that class; he was rich, and remarkably affectionate in his own family; he studied the comfort of his daughters and wife, was self-denying for their sake. Yet he did not hesi​ tate to break up a thousand homes in Africa, that he might adorn his own in New England. The lion, the tiger, the hyena, each is kind to his whelps,—for instinctive love affects the beast also. No man has universal love ; conscience gives the rule thereof, and so in applying justice applies God's universal love to that special case. Seek to exercise love without justice, and you injure some one.
The same form of affection appears on a larger scale in the members of a class in society, or a sect in religion; it leads to kindliness within the circle of its range, but intense cruelty is often practised beyond that limit. All the aristocracies of the world, the little sects of Christendom, and the great sects of the human race, furnish examples of this.
What is called patriotism is another form of the same limited love,—a culture of the affections without regard to justice. Hence it has been held patriotic to build up your country by the ruin of another land, to love Jacob and hate Esau. This feeling is of continual occurrence. "Lands intersected by a narrow with abhor each other;" cities that are rivals in trade seek to ruin each other; nations do the same.
In all these cases, where love is limited to the family, class, sect, or nation the aim is this : Mutuality of love within the narrow circle ; without its range, mutuality of selfishness. Thus love is deemed only a privilege of convention and for a few, arbitrarily limited by caprice; not a right of nature and for all, the extension thereof to be limited only by the power, not the will, of the man who loves.
All the above are common forms of limited affection. The domestic, social, ecclesiastical, and political institutions of the world, the educational and commercial machinery of the world, tend to produce this result. All the religions of the world have practically fostered this mistake, by starting with the idea, that God loved best the men who worshipped Him in a certain conventional form.
But this expansive and centrifugal power may be culti- vated to the neglect of natural and well-proportioned self-love. This also is a defect, for the conservative or self-preserving power is quite as necessary as the beneficent and expansive power. Impenetrability is the necessary concomitant of attraction. The individual is first an integer, then a fraction of society ; he must keep his per​ sonal integrity and discreteness of person, and not be lost in the press and crowd of other persons. What is true of bodies is not less so of spirits. Here is a man with so little self-love, that his personality seems lost; he is no person, but now this man, now that, — a free port of trade, where all individualities are unloaded and protected; but he has none. His circumference is everywhere; his centre nowhere. He keeps other men's vineyards, not his own. This is a fault; doubtless a rare one, still a fault which destroys the individual character of the man.
There is, doubtless, a large difference amongst men in respect to the original power of the affections, — a differ- ence of nature ; a great difference in respect to the ac- quired power of love, — a difference of culture ; a difference, also, in respect to the mode of culture of the heart, which may be developed jointly with mind and conscience, or in- dependent of them, — a difference in proportion. Thus, practically, the affectional power of men varies as much as the intellectual or the moral power.
Look at the place which the affections occupy in the nature of man. In point of time they precede the intellectual and moral powers in their order of development, they have a wider range in the world than those other faculties. You find affection in animals. In some, love is very powerful. True, it appears there as rudimentary, and for a, short time, as in birds, grouping them into brief cohesions. In some animals it is continual, yet not binding one individual to another in a perpetual combination, but grouping many individuals into a flock. The flock remains ; all the individuals sustain a constant relation to the flock, but most unconstant relations to one another, — the male and female parting fellowship when the annual season of passion is over, the parents neglecting their child as soon as it outgrows the mother's care. Throughout the animal world love does not appear to exist for its own sake, but only as a means to a material end ; now to create, then to protect the individual and the race. Besides, it is purely instinctive, not also self-conscious and voluntary action. The animal seems not an agent, but only a tool of affection, his love necessitated, not spontaneous. Accordingly, in ​ its more permanent forms love is merely gregarious, and does not come to individual sociality; it seems but a more subtle mode of gravitation. A herd of buffaloes is only an aggregation of members, not a society of free individuals, who group from choice. Friendship, I think, never appears amongst animals, excepting such as are under the eye of man, and have, in some manner not easily understood, acquired his habits. The animal does not appear to have private affinities, and to attach himself to this or that fellow-being with the discrimination of love; development of the affections is never sought for as a thing good in itself, but only as a means to some other good.
With man there is this greater gravitation of men into masses; which, without doubt, is at first as instinctive as the grouping of bees or beavers; but man is capable of modifying the action of this gregarious instinct so, on the one side, as to form minute cohesions of friendship, wherein each follows his private personal predilections, his own elective affinities; and also, on the other, to form vast associations of men gravitating into a nation, ruled by a common will; and one day we shall, no doubt, group all these nations into one great family of races, with a distinct self-consciousness of universal brotherhood.
It is instructive to look on the rudimentary love in animals, and see the beginnings of human nature, as it were, so low down, and watch the successive risings in successive creations. It helps us to see the unity of the world, and also to foretell the development of human nature; for what is there accomplished by successive creation of new races, with us takes place by the continual development of the same individual.
It is according to the order of nature, that the power to love should be developed before the power to think. All things with us begin with a feeling ; next enlarge to an idea ; then take the form of action, the mind mediating between the inward sentiment and the outward deed. We delight in love long before we have any conscious joy in truth or justice. In childhood we are acquainted with persons before we know things; indeed, things are invested with a dim personality in the mind of children and of savages. We know father and mother long before we ​ have any notion of justice or of truth. The spontaneous development of the heart in children is one of the most beautiful phenomena in nature. The child has self-love, but no selfishness; his nebulous being not yet solidified to the impenetrability which is to come. His first joys are animal, the next affectional, the delight of loving and of being loved!
Indeed, with most men the affections take the lead of all the spiritual powers ; only they act in a confined sphere of the family, class, sect, or nation. Men trust the heart more than the head. The mass of men have more confidence in a man of great affection than in one of great thought; pardon is commonly popular, mercy better loved than severity. Men rejoice when the murderer is arrested; but shout at his acquittal of the crime. The happiness of the greater part of men comes from affectional more than intellectual or moral sources. Hence the abund- ant interest felt in talk about persons, the popular fondness for personal anecdotes, biographies, ballads, love-stories, and the like. The mass of men love the person of their great man, not his opinions, and care more to see his face and hear his voice than to know his ideas of truth and of justice. It is so with religious teachers. Men sympathize with the person before they take his doctrine. Hence the popular fondness for portraits of great men, for their autographs, and even for relics. The person of Jesus of Nazareth has left a much greater impression on the hearts of men, than his doctrines have made on the mind and conscience of Christendom. For this reason, religious pictures preserve scenes which have nothing to do with the truth or the right that the man represented, but are merely personal details, often destitute of outward beauty, of no value to the mind, of much to the affections. This explains the popular fondness for stories and pictures of the sufferings of martyrs. A crucifix is nothing to the mind and conscience;—how much to the heart of Christendom! Hence, too, men love to conceive of God in the person of a man.
Now and then you find a man of mere intellectual or moral power, who takes almost his whole delight in the exercise of his mind or conscience. Such men are rare and wonderful, but by no means admirable. ​ Without the culture of the affections life is poor and unsatisfactory; truth seems cold, and justice stern. Let a man have the piety of the body, of the mind and con- science, it is not satisfactory without the piety of the heart. Let him have this also, and what a world of delight it opens to him!
Take the whole population of Christendom, there are but one or two in a thousand who have much delight in intellectual pursuits, who find a deep and reconciling joy in science or literature, or any art; even music, the most popular of all, has a narrow range. But almost every one has a delight in the affections which quite transcends his intellectual joy. When a new book comes into being, if it be brave and good, it will quicken the progress of mankind; men rejoice, and the human race slowly folds to its bosom the works of Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and will not willingly let them die. When a new child is born into some noble and half-starved family, it diminishes their "comforts," it multiplies their toil, it divides their loaf, it crowds their bed, and shares the unreplenished fire; but with what joy is it welcomed there! Men of great genius, who can judge the world by thought, feel less delight at the arrival of some great poet at his mind's estate, than many a poor mother feels at the birth of a new soul into the world; far less than she feels in the rude affection of her home, naked, comfortless, and cold. I know there is a degradation caused by poverty, when the heart dies out of the man, and "the mother hath sodden her own child." But such depravity is against nature, and only takes place when physical suffering hath worn off the human qualities, one by one, till only impenetrability is left.
You find men that are ignorant, rich men too; and they are not wholly ashamed of it. They say, "Early circumstances hindered my growth of mind, for I was poor. You may pity, but you should not blame me." If you should accuse a man of lacking heart, of having no culture of affection, every one would feel it was a great reproach, and, if true, a fault without excuse. No man ever confesses this,—a sin against human nature.
All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little, something which they value for more than its ​ use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. Rich men attempt to do this with beautiful houses, with costly furniture, with sumptuous food, and "wine too good for the tables of pontiffs," thereby often only thickening and gilding the chain which binds the soul to earth. Some men idealize their life a little with books, music, flowers; with science, poetry, and art; with thought. But such men are comparatively rare, even in Scotland and New England,—two or three in the hundred, not more. In America the cheap newspaper is the most common instrument used for this purpose—a thing not without great value. But the majority of men do this idealizing by the affections, which furnish the chief poetry of their life,—the wife and husband delighting in one another, both in their children. Burns did not exaggerate in his Cotter's Saturday Night, when he painted the labourer's joy:
"His wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily,
His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile,
The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
Does a his weary kiaugh and care beguile,
An' makes him quite forget his labour an' his toil."
I have heard a boorish pedant wonder how a woman could spend so many years of her life with little children, and be content! In her satisfaction he found a proof of her "inferiority," and thought her but the "servant of a wooden cradle," herself almost as wooden. But in that gentle companionship she nursed herself and fed a higher faculty than our poor pedant, with his sophomoric wit, had yet brought to consciousness, and out of her wooden cradle got more than he had learned to know. A physician once, with unprofessional impiety, complained that we are not born men, but babies. He did not see the value of infancy as a delight to the mature, and for the education of the heart. At one period of life we need objects of instinctive passion, at another, of instinctive benevolence without passion.
I am not going to undervalue the charm of wisdom, nor the majestic joy which comes from loving principles of right ; but if I could have only one of them, give me the joy of the affections,—my delight in others, theirs in me,—the joy of delighting, rather than the delight of enjoying. ​ Here is a woman with large intellect, and attainments which match her native powers, but with a genius for love, developed in its domestic, social, patriotic, human form, with a wealth of affection which surpasses even her affluence of intellect. Her chief delight is to bless the men who need her blessing. Naturalists carry mind into matter, and seek the eternal truth of God in the perishing forms of the fossil plant, or the evanescent tides of the sea; she carries love into the lanes and kennels of society, to give bread to the needy, eyes to the blind, mind to the ignorant, and a soul to men floating and weltering in this sad pit of society. I do not undervalue intellect in any of its nobler forms, but if God gave me my choice to have either the vast intellect of a Newton, an Aristotle, a Shakspeare, a Homer, the ethical insight of the great legislators, the moral sense of Moses, or Menu, the conscience of men who discover justice and organize unalienable right into human institutions,—or else to take the heroic heart which so loves mankind, and I were to choose what brought its possessor the greatest joy,—I would surely take, not the great head, but the great heart, the power of love before the power of thought.
​ See the array of natural means provided for the development and education of the heart. Spiritual love, joining with the instinctive passion which peoples the world, attracts mankind into little binary groups, families of two. Therein we are all born of love. Love watches over our birth. Our earliest knowledge of mankind is of one animated by the instinctive power of affection, developed into conscious love. The first human feeling extended towards us is a mother's love. Even the rude woman in savage Patagonia turns her sunniest aspect to her child; the father does the same. In our earliest years we are almost wholly in the hands of women, in whom the heart emphatically prevails over the head. They attract and win, while man only invades and conquers. The first human force we meet is woman's love. All this tends to waken and unfold the affections, to give them their culture, and hasten their growth. The other children of kindred blood, asking or giving kind offices; affectionate relations and friends, who turn out the fairest side of nature and themselves to the new-born stranger, — all of these are helps in the education of the heart. All men unconsciously put on amiable faces in the presence of children, thinking it is not good to cause these little ones to offend. As the roughest of men will gather flowers for little children, so in their presence he turns out "the silver lining" of his cloudy character to the young immortals, and would not have them know the darker part. The sourest man is not wholly hopeless when he will not blaspheme before his son.
The child's affection gets developed on the smallest scale at first. The mother's love tempts forth the son's; he loves the bosom that feeds him, the lips which caress, the person who loves. Soon the circle widens, and includes brothers and sisters, and familiar friends; then gradually enlarges more and more, the affections strengthening as their empire spreads. So love travels from person to person, from the mother or nurse to the family at home; then to the relatives and frequent guests; next to the children at school, to the neighbourhood, the town, the State, the nation ; and at last manly love takes in the whole family of mankind, counting nothing alien that is human.
You often find men lamenting the lack of early educa​ tion of the intellect; it is a grievous deficiency ; and it takes the hardest toil in after years to supply the void, if indeed it can ever be done. It is a misfortune to fail of finding an opportunity for the culture of conscience in childhood, and to acquire bad habits in youth, which at great cost you must revolutionize at a later day. But it is a yet greater loss to miss the opportunity of affectional growth; a sad thing to be born, and yet not into a happy home, — to lack the caresses, the fondness, the self-denying love, which the child's nature needs so much to take, and the mother's needs so much to give. The cheeks which affection does not pinch, which no mother kisses, have always a sad look that nothing can conceal, and in childhood get a scar which they will carry all their days. What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.
In a world like this, not much advanced as yet in any high qualities of spirit, but still advancing, it is beautiful to see the examples of love which we sometimes meet, the exceptional cases that to me are prophecies of that good time which is so long in coming. I will not speak of the love of husband and wife, or of parent and child, for each of these is mainly controlled by a strong generic instinct, which deprives the feeling of its personal and voluntary character. I will speak of spontaneous love not connected with the connubial or parental instincts. You see it in the form of friendship, charity, patriotism, and philanthropy, where there is no tie of kindred blood, no impulsion of instincts to excite, but only a kindred heart and an attractive soul. Men tell us that the friendship of the ancients has passed away. But it is not so ; Damon and Pythias are perpetually reproduced in every walk of life, save that where luxury unnerves the man, or avarice coins him into a copper cent, or ambition degrades him to lust of fame and power. Every village has its tale of this character. The rude life of the borderers on the frontiers of civilization, the experience of men in navigation, in all the difficult emergencies of life, bring out this heroic affection of the heart.
What examples do we all know of friendship and of ​ charity! Here is a woman of large intellect, well disciplined, well stored, gifted with mind and graced with its specific piety, whose chief delight it is to do kind deeds to those beloved. Her life is poured out, like the fair light of heaven, around the bedside of the sick. She comes like a last sacrament to the dying man, bringing back a reminiscence of the best things of mortal life, and giving a foretasted prophecy of the joys of heaven, her very presence an alabaster box of ointment, exceeding precious, filling the house with the balm of its thousand flowers. Her love adorns the paths wherein she teaches youthful feet to tread, and blooms in amaranthine loveliness above the head laid low in earth. She would feel insulted by gratitude; God can give no greater joy to mortal men than the consciousness whence such a life wells out. Not content with blessing the few whom friendship joins to her, her love enlarges and runs over the side of the private cup, and fills the bowl of many a needy and forsaken one. Self-denial is spontaneous,—self-indulgence of the noble heart to her. In the presence of such affection as this, the intellect of a Plato would be abashed, and the moral sense of a saint would shrink and say to itself: "Stand back, my soul, for here is somewhat far holier than thou! In sight of such excellence I am ashamed of intellect!" I would not look upon the greatest mind that ever spoke to ages yet unborn.
There is far more of this charity than most men imagine. You find it amid the intense worldliness of this city, where upstart Mammon scoffs at God ; in the hovels of the poor, in the common dwellings of ordinary men, and in the houses of the rich; drive out nature with a dollar, still she comes back. This love is the feminine saviour of mankind, and bestows a peace which nothing else can give, which nought can take away. From its nature this plant grows in by- places, where it is not seen by ordinary eyes, till wounded you flee thither; then it heals your smart, or when beheld fills you with wonder at its human loveliness.
The calling of a clergyman in a great, wicked town brings him acquainted with ghastly forms of human wickedness,—with felons of conscience, and men idiotic in their affections, who seem born with an arithmetic instead of a conscience, and a vulture for a heart: but we also find ​ those angels of affection in whom the dearest attribute of God becomes incarnate, and his love made flesh ; else an earnest minister might wear a face grim, stony, battered all over by the sad sight of private suffering, and the sadder sight of conscious and triumphant wickedness trampling the needy down to dust, and treating the Almighty with sneer and scoff.
Books tell us of but few examples of patriotism : they are common. Let us see examples in its vulgarest, and so most honoured form,—love of country, to the exclusion and hate of other lands. Men tell of Regulus, how he laid down his life for his country, the brave old heathen that he was. But in the wickedest of modern wars, when America plundered Mexico of soil and men, many a deluded volunteer laid down his life, I doubt not, with a heroism as pure, and a patriotism as strong, as that of Regulus or Washington. Detesting the unholy war, let us honour the virtue which it brought to light.
This virtue of patriotism is common with the mass of men in this republic. In aristocratic governments the rich men and nobles have it in a large degree; it is, however, somewhat selfish,—a love of their private privileges more than of the general rights of their countrymen. With us in America, especially in the seat of riches and of trade, there seems little patriotism in the wealthy, or more educated class of men; small fondness for the commonwealth in that quarter. Exclusive love of gain drives that out of their heart. To the dollar, all lands, all governments are the same.
But apart from patriotism, charity, friendship, I have seen most noble examples of the same affection on a yet wider scale,—I mean philanthropy, the love of all mankind. You all know men, whose affection, at first beginning at home, and loving only the mother who gave her baby nature's bread, has now transcended family and kin, gone beyond all private friendships with like-minded men, overleaped the far barriers of our native land, and now, loving family, friend, and country, loves likewise all humankind. This is the largest expanse of affection ; the man's heart, once filled with love for one, for a few, for men in need ​ beneath his eye, for his countrymen, has now grown bountiful to all. To love the lovely, to sympathize with the like-minded,—everybody can do that;—all save an ill-born few, whom we may pity, but must not blame, for their congenital deformity and dwarfishness;—but to love the unlovely, to sympathize with the contrary-minded, to give to the uncharitable, to forgive such as never pity, to be just to men who make iniquity a law, to pay their sleepless hate with never-ceasing love,—that is the triumph of the affections, the heroic degree of love; you must be but little lower than the angels to do that. It is one of the noblest attainments of man, and in this he becomes most like God. The intellect acquaints you with truth, the thought of God; conscience informs you with his justice, the moral will of God; and the heart fitly exercised gives you a fellowship with his eternal love, the most intimate feeling of the Infinite Father ; having that, you can love men spite of the imperfections of their conduct and character,—can love the idiot, the criminal, hated or popular,—be towardly to the froward, kind to the unmerciful, and on them bestow the rain and the sunshine of your benevolence, your bounty limited only by your power, not your will, to bless, asking no gratitude, expecting no return.
I do not look for this large philanthropy in all men here, only in a few. All have a talent for loving, though this is as variously distributed as any intellectual gift; few have a genius for benevolence. The sublime of patriotism, the holy charity, and the delicate friendship, are more common. The narrower love between husband and wife, child and parent, has instinct to aid it, and is so common, that, like daily bread and nightly sleep, we forget to be thankful for it, not heeding how much depends thereon.
The joys of affection are the commonest of joys; sometimes the sole poetic ornament in the hutch of the poor, they are also the best things in the rich man's palace. They are the Shekinah, the presence of God in the dwellings of men. It is through the affections that most men learn religion. I know they often say, "Fear first taught us God." No! Fear first taught us a devil,—often worshipped as the God,—and with that fear all devils fade away, they and their misanthropic hell. Ghosts cannot ​ stand the light, nor devils love. My affections bind me to God, and as the heart grows strong my ever- deepening consciousness of God grows more and more, till God's love occupies the heart, and the sentiment of God is mine.
Notwithstanding the high place which the affections hold in the natural economy of man, and the abundant opportunities for their culture and development furnished by the very constitution of the family, but little value is placed thereon in what is called the "superior education" of mankind. The class of men that lead the Christian world have but a small development of affection. Patriotism is the only form of voluntary love which it is popular with such men to praise, — that only for its pecuniary value; charity seems thought a weakness, to be praised only on Sundays ; avarice is the better weekday virtue; friendship is deemed too romantic for a trading town. Philanthropy is mocked at by statesmen and leading capitalists ; it is the standing butt of the editor, whereat he shoots his shaft, making up in its barb and venom for his arrows' lack of length and point. Metropolitan clergymen rejoice in calumniating philanthropy; "Even the golden rule hath its exceptions," says one of them just now. It is deemed important to show that Jesus of Nazareth was "no philanthropist," and cared nothing for the sin of the powerful, which trod men into a mire of blood! In what is called the "highest education," only the understanding and the taste get a considerable culture. The piety of the heart is thought "inelegant" in society, unscholarly with the learned, and a dreadful heresy in the churches. In literature it is not love that wins the palm; it is power to rule by force,—force of muscles or force of mind: "None but the brave deserve the fair." In popular speech it is the great fighters that men glorify, not the great lovers of mankind. Interest eats out the heart from commerce and politics ; controlling men have no faith in disinterested benevolence ; to them the nation is a monstrous shop, a trading city but a bar-room in a commercial tavern, the church a desk for the accountant, the world a market; men are buyers and sellers, employers and employed. Governments are mainly without love, often ​ without justice. This seems their function: To protect capital and tax toil.
Hitherto justice has not been done to the affections in Religion. We have been taught to fear God, not to love Him ; to see Him in the earthquake and the storm, in the deluge, or the "ten plagues of Egypt," in the "black death," or the cholera; not to see God in the morning sun, or in the evening full of radiant gentleness. Love has little to do with the popular religion of our time. God is painted as a dreadful Bye, which bores through the darkness to spy out the faults of men who must sneak and skulk about the world ; or as a naked, bony Arm, uplifted to crush his children down with horrid squelch to endless hell. The long line of scoffers from Lucian, their great hierophant, down to Voltaire and his living coadjutors, have not shamed the priesthood from such revolting images of deity. Sterner men, who saw the loveliness of the dear God and set it forth in holy speech and holy life,—to meet a fate on earth far harder than the scoffer's doom,—they cannot yet teach men that love of God casts every fear away. In the Catholic mythology the Virgin Mary, its most original creation, represents pure love, — she, and she alone. Hence is she (and deservedly) the popular object of worship in all Catholic countries. But the sterner Protestant sects have the Roman Godhead after Mary is taken away.
When this is so in religion, do you wonder at the lack of love in law and custom, in politics and trade? Shall I write satires on mankind? Rather let me make its apology. Man is a baby yet; the time for the development of conscious love has not arrived. Let us not say, "No man eat fruit of thee hereafter;" let us wait; dig about the human tree and encourage it ; in time it shall put forth figs.
Still affection holds this high place in the nature of man. Out of our innermost hearts there comes the prophecy of a time when it shall have a kindred place in history and the affairs of men. In the progress of mankind, love takes continually a higher place; what was adequate and well​ proportioned affection a century ago, is not so now. Long since, prophets rose up to declare the time was coming when all hate should cease, there should be war no more, and the sword should be beaten into the ploughshare. Were they dreamers of idle dreams? It was human nature which spoke through them its lofty prophecy; and mankind fulfils the highest prediction of every noble man. The fighter is only the hod-carrier of the philanthropist. Soldiers build the scaffolding; with the voice of the trumpet, with the thunder of the captain, and manifold shouting, are the stones drawn to the spot, the cement of human architecture has been mixed with human blood, but it is a temple of peace which gets builded at the last.
In every man who lives a true life the affections grow continually. He began with his mother and his nurse, and journeyed ever on, pitching his tent each night a day's march nearer God. His own children helped him love others yet more; his children's children carried the old man's heart quite out beyond the bounds of kin and coun- try, and taught him to love mankind. He grows old in learning to love, and now, when age sets the silver diadem upon his brow, not only is his love of truth and justice greater than before,—not only does he love his wife better than in his hour of prime, when manly instinct added passion to his heart,—not only does he love his children more than in their infancy, when the fatherly instinct first began its work,—not only has he more spontaneous love for his grandchildren than he felt for his first new-born babe,—but his mature affection travels beyond his wife, and child, and children's child, to the whole family of men, mourns in their grief, and joys in their delight. All his powers have been greatened in his long, industrious, and normal life, and so his power of love has continually enlarged. The human objects do not wholly satisfy his heart's desire. The ideal of love is nowhere actual in the world of men, no finite person fills up the hungry heart, so he turns to the Infinite Object of affection, to the great Mother of mankind; and in the sentiment of love he and his God are one. God's thought in his mind, God's justice in his conscience, God's love in his heart,—why should not he be blessed?
In mankind, as in a faithful man, there has been the ​ same enhancement of the power to love. Already Affection begins to legislate, even to administer the laws of love. Long ago you see intimation of this in the institutes of Moses and Menu. "The qualitative precedes the quantitative," as twilight precedes day. Slowly vengeance fades out of human institutions, slowly love steals in:—the wounded soldier must be healed, and paid, his widow fed, and children comforted; the slaves must be set free; the yoke of kings and nobles must be made lighter, be broken, and thrown away; all men must have their rights made sure; the poor must be fed, must have his human right to a vote, to justice, truth, and love ; the ignorant must be educated, the State looking to it that no one straggles in the rear and so is lost; the criminals—I mean the little criminals committing petty crimes—must be instructed, healed, and manlified ; the lunatic must be restored to his intellect; the blind, the deaf and dumb, the idiots, must be taught, and all mankind be blessed. The attempt to banish war out of the world, odium from theology, capital punishment out of the State, the Devil and his hell from the Christian mythology,—the effort to expunge hate from the popular notion of God, and fear from our religious consciousness,—all this shows the growth of love in the spirit of men. A few men see that while ir-religion is fear of a devil, religion is love: one half is piety,—the love of God as truth, justice, love, as Infinite Deity ; the rest is morality,—self-love, and the love of man, a service of God by the normal use, development, and enjoyment of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, every particle of power we possess over matter or over man. A few men see that God is love, and makes the world of love as substance, from love as motive, and for love as end.
Human nature demands the triumph of pure, disinterested love at last; the nature of God is warrant that what is promised in man's nature shall be fulfilled in his development. Human nature is human destiny; God's nature, universal Providence. The mind tells us of truth which will prevail; conscience, of justice sure to conquer; the heart gives us the prophecy of infinite love certain to triumph. One day there shall be no fear before men, no fear before God, no tyrant in society, no Devil in theology, no hell in the mythology of men; love and the God of ​love shall take their place. Hitherto Jesus is an exceptional man, the man of love j Caesars and Alexanders are instantial men, men of force and fight. One day this will be inverted, these conquerors swept off and banished, the philanthropists become common, the kingdom of hate forgot in the commonwealth of love. Here is work for you and me to do; for our affectional piety, assuming its domestic, social, national, universal form, will bless us with its delight, and then go forth to bless mankind; and long after you and I shall have gone home to the God we trust, our affectional piety shall be a sentiment living in the hearts of men;—yes, a power in the world to bless mankind for ever and ever.
"Serene will be our days and bright,
And happy will our nature be,
"When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security.
And they a blissful course may hold
Even now, who, not unwisely bold,
Live in the spirit of this creed,
Yet find that other strength, according to their need,"