William Dawson - The Empire of Love

To

M. M. D.,

who, during the last two years of our residence in London, practiced the teachings of this book before I taught them:

proving daily in her compassionate toil for others the divine efficacy of simple love to redeem the lives, that were most estranged from virtue, and most lost to hope.

Love feels no burden, regards not labours, would willingly do more than it is able, pleads not impossibility, because it feels that it can and may do all things.

In the history of the last two thousand years there is but one Person who has been, and is supremely loved. Many have been loved by individuals, by groups of persons, or by communities; 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 intimately associated with some triumph of intellect, or some resounding achievement in the world of action. In this there is nothing unusual, for man is a natural worshipper of heroes. But in Jesus Christ we discover something very different; He possessed the genius to be loved in so transcendent a degree that it appears His sole genius.

Jesus is loved not for anything that He taught, nor yet wholly for anything that He did, although His actions culminate in the divine fascination of the Cross, but rather for what He was in Himself. His very name provokes in countless millions a reverent tenderness of emotion usually associated only with the most sacred and intimate of human relationships. He is loved with a certain purity and intensity of passion that transcends even the most intimate expressions 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 glance, or spoken word, or momentary presence, men and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and surrender all things. The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his last lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing in universal history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, I, have founded empires. They were founded on force, and have perished. Jesus Christ has founded an empire on love, and to this day there are millions ready to die for Him."

Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the baffling, inexplicable marvel. Were we able to detach ourselves enough from use and custom, to survey the movement of human thought from some lonely height above the floods of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea-silences of St. Helena, we also might feel the wonder of this most wonderful thing the world has ever known.

That the majority of men, and even Christian men, do not perceive that the whole meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a thing too obvious to demand evidence or invite contradiction. I say men, and Christian men, thus limiting my statement, because women and Christian women, frequently do perceive it, being themselves the creatures of affection, and finding in affection the one sufficing symbol 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 Evil One himself with commiseration as one who cannot love. It is true that Francis of Assisi also thought and spoke of Christ with a lover's ecstasy, but then Francis in his exquisite tenderness of nature, was more woman than man. No such thought visited the stern heart of Dominic, nor any of those makers of theology who have built systems and disciplines upon the divine poetry of the divine Life.

Love, as the perfect symbol of life and the universe, does not content men, simply because for most men love is not the key to life, nor an end worth living for in itself, nor anything but a complex and often troublesome emotion, which must needs be subordinated to other faculties and qualities, such as greed, or pride, or the desire of power, or the dominant demands of intellect. Among men the poets alone have really understood Jesus: and in 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 achieved more than to tell us what Christ taught; they have wholly failed to make us feel what Christ was. But Mary Magdalene knew this, and it was what she said and felt in the Garden that has put Christ upon the throne of the world. Was not her vision after all the true one? Is not a Catherine a better guide to Jesus than a Dominic? When all the strident theologies fall silent, will not the world's whole worship still utter itself in the lyric cry,

Is it then not within the competence of man to interpret Christ aright, simply because the masculine temperament is what it is? By no means, for such a statement would disqualify the evangelists themselves, who are the only biographers of Jesus.