nt have attended the ministries of all
apostolic men and women, of Francis and Catherine, of Wesley and
Whitfield, of Moody and General Booth. Men know by instinct the lover
of his kind. Men forgive a hundred defects for the sake of reality.
Perhaps the sublimest of all justifications of Christ's law of love is
that no man has truly practiced it in any age without himself rising
into a life of memorable significance, without immediate attestations
of its virtue in the transformation of society, without attracting to
himself the reverence and affection of multitudes of fellow workers who
have rendered him the same adoring discipleship that the friends of
Jesus gave to Him.

No doubt it will also be said that were the ideals thus indicated to
triumph, there would be nothing left for the direction of society but a
mischievous and sentimental spirit of amiability. The general fibre of
virtue would disintegrate. Pity for the sinner, pushed to such
extremes, would in the end mean tolerance for sin. But to such an
objection the character of Jesus furnishes its own reply. The
character of Jesus displays love in its supreme type, but it is wholly
lacking in that weak-featured travesty of love which we call
amiability. His hatred of sin was at times a furious rage. His lips
breathed flame as well as tenderness; "Out of His mouth proceeded a
sharp two-edged sword." We may search literature in vain to discover
any words half as terrible and scathing as the words in which Jesus
described sin. The psychological explanation is that great powers of
love are twin with great powers of hatred. The passionate love of
virtue is, in its obverse, an equally passionate hatred of vice. In
the same way the passionate love of our kind has for its obverse an
equally passionate hatred for the wrongs they endure. For this reason
justice and virtue are nowhere so secure as in the hands of men who
love their kind intensely. They are most insecure in the hands of the
cynic, who despises his kind, and therefore misapprehends their
conduct. For love, in its last analysis, is understanding, and where
there is understanding of our fellows there can hardly fail to be
wisdom in our method of treating them. That was the great secret of
Jesus in these examples which we have reviewed. He understood Simon
Peter. He understood the woman who was a sinner. He therefore knew
the only wise method of treating them. One with less pity might have
se