But now I see, as I look back, that at the root of all my inconsistency
there lay this one thing, I was not a lover of my kind. I did not love
men as men, humanity as humanity, as Jesus did. Of course I loved
individuals, and even groups of men and classes of men, who could
understand my thoughts, recognize my qualities, and repay my affection
with affection. But to feel love for men as men; for those whose
vulgarity distressed me, whose ignorance offended me, whose method of
life repelled me; love for the drudge, the helot, the social pariah;
love for people who had no beauty that men should desire them, nor any
grace of mind or person, nor any quality that kindled interest; love
for the dull average, with their painful limitations of mind and ideal,
the gray armies of featureless grief, whose very sorrows had nothing
picturesque in them and no tragic fascination--no, for these I had no
real love. I had a deep commiseration, but it was that kind of
romantic or aesthetic pity which begins and ends in its own expression.
I did not know them by actual contact; I could not honestly say that I
wished to know them. And then the thought came to me, and grew in me,
that Jesus did love these people with an unconquerable passion. The
multitudes to whom He preached were composed, as all multitudes are, of
quite ordinary immemorable people.
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