The Empire of Love

mmunities; some have received the pliant idolatries of nations, such as heroes and national deliverers; but in every instance the sense of love thus excited has been intimatel

erent; He possessed the genius to be loved in so tr

ssions of human emotion. The curious thing is that He Himself anticipated this kind of love as His eternal heritage with men. He expected that men would love Him more than father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a love a condition of what He called discipleship. The greatest marvel of all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly verified in the event. He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love, unrealizable as it is by touch, or

and custom, to survey the movement of human thought from some lonely height above the floods of Time, as Napoleon in t

l of life and of the universe. It is a St. Catherine who thinks of herself as the bride of Christ, and dreams the lovely vision of the changed hearts-the heart of Jesus placed by the hands that bled beneath her pure bosom, and her heart hidden in the side of Him who died for her. It is a St. Theresa who melts into ecstasy at the brooding presence of the heavenly Lover, and can only think of the E

n the category of the poets must be included the saints, whose religion has always been interpreted to them through the imagination. The poets have understood; the theologians rarely or never. Thus it happens that men, being the general and accepted interpreters of Christ, have all but wholly misinterpreted Him. The lyric passion of that life, and the lyric love which it excites, has been to them a disregarded music. They have rarely achieve

over of

o Thy bo

ame type; but Pilate could not understand, because he had been trained in the hard efficiency of Rome; nor Judas, because the masculine vice of ambition had overgrown his affections, and deflowered his heart. What is it then in Paul and John and Peter, what element or quality, which we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or Napoleon? Clearly there is no lack of force, for the personality of these three first apostles lifted a world out of its groove and changed the course of history. Was it not just this, that each had beneath his masculine strength a feminine tenderness, a power of loving and of begetting love in others? John lying on the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of love and sorrow at the last Supper; Peter, plunging naked into the Galilean sea, and struggling to the shore at the mere s

CHRIST

DS GA

urate world I

f the brazen w

ds that build t

ts where feeble

k beneath thy

martyrs crue

edetermined

uffered, yea,

last, anothe

l gardens, by

aves beside th

its for me at t

world! In vain

et my Lord