ave to sin no more and those he healed to go, as custom would have
it, to the priest. He understood the bright good that each sinner was
following when he stumbled into the pit. For this insight he was loved.
To be rebuked in that sympathetic spirit was to be comforted; to be
punished by such a hand was to be made whole. The Magdalene was forgiven
because she had loved much; an absolution which rehabilitates the
primary longing that had driven her on, a longing not insulted but
comprehended in such an absolution, and purified by that comprehension.
It is a charitable salvation which enables the newly revealed deity to
be absolutely loved. Charity has this art of making men abandon their
errors without asking them to forget their ideals.

[Sidenote: Buddhist and Christian forms of it.]

In Buddhism the same charity wears a more speculative form. All beings
are to be redeemed from the illusion which is the fountain of their
troubles. None is to be compelled to assume irrationally an alien set of
duties or other functions than his own. Spirit is not to be incarcerated
perpetually in grotesque and accidental monsters, but to be freed from
all fatality and compulsion. The goal is not some more flattering
incarnation, but escape from incarnation altogether. Ignorance is to be
enlightened, passion calmed, mistaken destiny revoked; only what the
inmost being desiderates, only what can really quiet the longings
embodied in any particular will, is to occupy the redeemed mind. Here,
though creative reason is wholly wanting, charity is truly understood;
for it avails little to make of kindness a vicarious selfishness and to
use neighbourly offices to plunge our neighbour deeper into his
favourite follies. Such servile sympathy would make men one another's
accomplices rather than friends. It would treat them with a weak
promiscuous favour, not with true mercy and justice. In charity there
can be nothing to repent of, as there so often is in natural love and in
partisan propaganda. Christians have sometimes interpreted charity as
zeal to bring men into their particular fold; or, at other times, when
enthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpreted
charity to be mere blind co-operation, no matter in what.

The Buddhists seem to have shown a finer sense in their ministry,
knowing how to combine universal sympathy with perfect spirituality.
There was no brow-beating in their call to conversion, no new tyranny
i