ng
as the soft waves that lapped its shore.

The self-righteous man will never understand these things. Men and women
of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a passion, will
vehemently disapprove them. People of smooth lives, ignorant of strong
temptations, will refuse even to discuss them. Jesus was well aware of
their implacable indifference or cold hostility, and boldly said that for
such people He had no gospel. His mission was not to the whole, but to
the sick. The Gospel of Jesus is in truth not designed for people of
comfortable lives. He has little to say to the children of compromise,
whose emasculated lives attain the semblance of virtue by the cautious
exercise of niggard passions. They can take care of one another, these
righteous ones, whose very righteousness is a negation.

But Christ's Gospel is for a tragic world. It is for the disinherited,
the weak, and the strong who have become weak; for those who have been
wrecked by folly and passion, and too much love of living; for those
whose capacities for good and evil, being both rooted in passion, are
equally a peril and a potency--it is to these Christ chiefly speaks. To
them the Gospel of unlimited forgiveness and unalterable love is the only
vital, because the only efficacious Gospel. The man whose very virility
of nature makes him the easy prey of murderous joy; the man shut up in
prison, who hears from the lips that once spake love to him, the sentence
of inexpiable disgrace; the outcast from honour, gnawing the bitter husks
of hated sin in far lands, and tortured in his dreams by the sweetness of
recollected happiness; these, and all like these, will understand Jesus,
for it is to them He speaks. Their very sin interprets Him. To their
forlorn ears the love He teaches will sound not strange, for it is the
only kind of love that can redeem them; nor foolish, for it is the only
love that dare stoop low enough to lift them up. These will not fail to
understand what conventional righteousness finds so difficult; these, and
also all good women who have had acquaintance with either deep love or
real grief, because it is a loving woman's sweet prerogative and divine
disposition to forgive, and to draw from her grace of forgiveness a more
tender and maternal power of loving.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

_FELLOW SUFFERERS_

_When men of malice wrought the crown for Thee
Didst Thou complain?
Nay; in each thorn God's