The Empire of Love

ed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind. The elder brother still makes broa

f object is not the punishment of the wrong-doer, but his reclamation? No existing society is organized on these principles, and the only defense the apologists of a bastard Christianity make is that it is totally impossible to apply the principles of Jesus to the administration of society. That is, at all events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one? Was Jesus merely a

ely, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern of life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on a social system w

of life yield instantly to His touch. He penetrates to their roots and makes us feel that He has touched the essential element in them. The dreamer vindicates himself by making it manifest

convalescence in youth which has been betrayed through folly. Sooner or later the manly nature kindles with resentment at its own weakness. Moreover, social law allows a certain opportunity of recuperation to man which it denies to woman. The sin of the wo

f her life. She had loved much-that is her history in a sentence. Cruelty and unkindness, malice and bitterness, had no part in her misdoing. She had been undone through the very sweetness of her nature, as multitudes of women are. That which was her noblest attribute-her power of affection-had been the minister of her ruin through

nd and he are strangers. Which nature is radically the better, his or "this woman's"? Which presents the more hopeful field to the moralist? The soil of Simon's heart is thin and meagre; but in "this woman's" heart is a soil overgrown with weeds indeed, but delicately tempered, rich and deep, in which the roots of the fair tree of life may find abundant room and nour

the penitent boy back to the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy? Does not the entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his sin, drive u

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