_
_And so all wounded by the way,
He came home at the close of day,
And angels met Him at the Gate.
Alas, His way I have not known--
The road forlorn, the wounding stone--
And no one waits me at the Gate._
IV
LOVE IS JUSTICE
Love is the only real justice--never was there a more revolutionary
ethic! If Christianity is to be judged by its institutions, it must be
reluctantly confessed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have
almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind.
The elder brother still makes broad his phylacteries in the home, in
the Church, and on the seat of justice. The elder brother's sense of
offended respectability still masquerades as virtue. Who forgives as
this father forgave, with such completeness that he who has wrought the
wrong is encouraged to forget that the wrong was ever wrought? Where
is the loving and tolerant spirit of the father less visible than in
the Church, which crucifies men for a word, and makes a difference of
opinion the ground for deadly enmity? Of what administration of law
can we say that its chief 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.
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