ngth; their temptation develops their
power. The angels of God have come and ministered unto them.

{174}

LXIX

LOVING WITH THE MIND

_Mark_ xii. 30.

In the great law of love to God and love to man which Jesus repeats as
the law of his own teaching, there is one phrase that seems not wholly
clear. You can love God with your heart and your soul; you can even
increase your strength by love; but how can you love with the mind? Is
it not the very quality of a trained mind to be unmoved by love or
hate, dispassionate and unemotional? Is not this the scientific
spirit, this attitude of criticism, with no prejudice or affection to
color its results?

Of course one must answer that there is much truth which can be
discovered by a loveless mind. Yet there is, on the other hand, much
truth which cannot be discerned without love. There are many secrets
of literature, of art, of music, and of the higher traits of character
as well, into which you cannot enter unless you give your mind to these
things with sympathy and affection and responsiveness; loving them, as
Jesus says, with the mind. One {175} of our preachers has lately
called attention to the new word in literature which illustrates this
attitude of the mind.[1] When people wrote in earlier days of other
people and their works they wrote biographies or criticisms or studies,
but now we have what are called "appreciations;" the attempt, that is
to say, to enter into a character and appreciate its traits or its art,
and to love it with the mind. Perhaps that is what this ancient law
asks of you in your relation to God, to come not as a critic, but as a
lover, to the rational appreciation of the ways of God. Here is the
noblest capacity with which human life is endowed. It is a great thing
to love God with the heart and soul, to let the emotions of gratitude
to Him or of joy in his world run free; but to rise into sympathetic
interpretation of his laws, to think God's thoughts after Him, and to
be moved by the high emotions which are stirred by exalted ideas,--to
love God, that is to say, with the mind,--that, I suppose, is the
highest function of human life, and the quality which most endows a man
with insight and power.

[1] Rev. Leighton Parks, D. D., in a sermon at the Diocesan Convention
of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Boston, May, 1895.

{176}

LXX

AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?

_Genesis_ iv. 9.

Cain was the first philosop