I penetrate their inmost coil of being,
and see with horror the crumbling of the house of life--with horror,
but also with a torturing pity. And then because compassion lives in
me, I can at last separate between the sinner and his sin. The sin
remains abhorrent, but I cannot hate the sinner. I see him as one who
has fallen in a bad cause, but his wounds cry so loud for pity that I
forget the moral treason that has brought him to a battle-field so
ignominious and so disastrous. And out of the pity grows love, for
love is the natural end of pity; and the magnanimity of love,
overleaping moral values, fixes only on the fact of suffering that
appeals for succour, misery that cries for help. This was the vital
fact that Jesus saw when He had compassion on the multitude.
Jesus had compassion on the multitude, and He gives the reason; He saw
them as sheep having no shepherd. It was the element of misdirection
in their lives on which Jesus fixed His glance--it was for lack of
guidance and a shepherd they had gone astray. May not the same be said
of all the lives that fail, whether through ignorance or want, folly or
crime? Rightly guided they might have attained knowledge and esteem,
wisdom and virtue; and if that be so, no man of right spirit can refuse
to feel the pathos of their situation.
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