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Conference Sermon.

THE PROGRESS OF COMPASSION.

BY REV. GEORGE HODGES, D.D.,

DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

'Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?". ST. LUKE ix. 54.

"We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.". 'I JOHN iii. 14.

You see how differ

These words were spoken by the same man. ent they are. One expresses the spirit of narrowness, of hard prejudice, of inconsiderate passion: the other is the utterance of fraternal affection. Yet they came out of the same lips, out of the same heart.

The people of a Samaritan village having refused hospitality to the Master and his disciples because they were Jews, and had their faces set to go to Jerusalem, the apostle John proposes to make them suffer for it. He suggests thunder and lightning. He quite forgets that the men, women, and children of this village are really men, women, and children, with sensitive nerves, with human affections, to whom pain and death mean just what they would mean to him. He forgets that they are fathers and mothers, and sons and daughters, with homes and friends,- human beings, having souls. To his mind they are a common crowd, wherein he has no acquaintances. And, being offended with them,— justly, as he thinks,— he wishes to burn them alive.

But, after a good many years of Christian experience, all the time coming into better knowledge of Jesus Christ, and thus getting to be a better Christian, the apostle with the hasty temper has an altogether different spirit. When he wrote the Epistle out of which

came that fine expression of brotherly love, he had completely outgrown all that old disposition. He could not possibly have repeated then what he said in Samaria. He was a different man. If, as is commonly thought, he wrote the book of the Revelation, it appears that this growth out of darkness into light was a slow process. For the book of the Revelation was not written by a saint, that is evident enough. It has a good many dark places in it: a good deal of old, fierce, animal hatred lingers about it. The writer was no ideal Christian who loved his enemies. He wanted to see his enemies' pain and blood. In any case, the fact of growth is clear. The long distance between these two sentences shows that sufficiently. When we put them together, we see out of what unpromising materials a saint was made. The perfections of the saints are a discouragement rather than an inspiration. Looking upon them, we say to ourselves, "We can never attain that." But the sins of the saints give us help and cheer. They assure us that even the saints were of like passions with us, and that they won their faith and serenity of soul by just such struggles as enter into our own experience. They bear witness to the fact of progress.

The reference to Elijah reminds us that the growth of the spirit of compassion in Saint John is the symbol of a similar change in the feelings of people in general. For, in the old time to which Saint John referred, Elijah represented all that was good. Whatever he did was right. He called down white-hot lightning upon several companies of soldiers whose only offence was that they obeyed orders; but he ended his stern life, men said, by ascending into the blessed heaven in a chariot of fire. Accordingly, it seemed plain to Elijah's contemporaries that God liked that sort of thing,-liked blood and flame. It seemed to them in no way inconsistent that a man should be the minister of God and at the same time, for no very weighty reason, desolate a hundred homes. Or, rather, they paid no heed "The king sent unto [Elijah] a captain of fifty with his fifty. And he went up to him; and, behold, he sat on the top of an hill. And he spake unto him, Thou man of God, the king hath said, Come down. And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty." Think of it! "If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven and consume

whatever to the hundred homes.

thee." What an amazing credential! A man is proved to be a man of God by the unprovoked murder of a captain and fifty soldiers! People used to think that miracles were contradictions to the laws of nature; but this miracle contradicted the justice of God. And nobody realized that! This is perhaps the most surprising part of it. Everybody praised Elijah. The fifty soldiers attracted no attention. It seems not to have been considered for a moment that they were individual persons, of flesh and blood, with thoughts and feelings, with names given them by tender mothers, with families of little children, and wives who loved them. They were nothing but soldiers, things in uniform, made of tin or wood, fuel for fire. It seems to us so natural and necessary that Jesus should have disapproved of Elijah that we find it hard to realize the astonishment with which Saint John and the others must have listened to his words. To their confident invocation of the example of Elijah he answered, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." It was the announcement of another step in social progress. In a cruel world, where men had scarcely begun to outgrow the fierceness which they had inherited from the beasts, there was now proclaimed a new idea, a new duty, a new obligation of fraternal relationship, a new affection.

When the disciples learned what spirit they were of, the difference between them and the men of the old time was like the difference between the Saint John of the Third Gospel and the Saint John of the First Epistle. And because Christianity was from the beginning a social religion, which impelled every man to share with his neighbor every good thing which he had, they who became brothers of the new life brought their neighbors into that holy brotherhood. There had been compassionate persons before in all ages and in all religions. No man can say when men began to be tender-hearted. But the coming of Christ was the beginning of a compassionate society. It established a new ideal of social life. It extended that fine fraternity which the Jews had shown toward their own people, until it included the race. It was understood that in the kingdom of heaven - that is, in the Christian state the citizens would not only love one another, according to the old commandment, but would love even their enemies, and that the measure of their love would be the divine self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ himself.

Thus began the progress of compassion. Compassion signifies not pity, but sympathy, not the love which stands without and looks

on, but the love which enters into the interests, the needs, the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of another's life. Compassion is fellow-feeling, fraternal understanding and affection, the quality whereby we put ourselves in our neighbor's place. It is the recognition of the individual, and the ministration of our heart and hand to the enrichment of his life in the spirit of Jesus. It is the high virtue to which this Conference is committed, the ideal after which we are all striving, the common impulse which has brought us here together, the heart of our discussion. The purpose of these meetings is to set forward more and more the progress of compassion. It must be confessed that that progress has been amazingly and perplexingly slow. Some deny that there is any progress at all, holding that the world is as bad to-day as ever it was. Some even argue that the family of man is actually growing worse. It is plain that the progress of compassion is not a triumphal progress. cannot compare, for instance, with the progress of scientific discovery. We have not advanced in knowledge of our neighbors and in the control of social forces in anything like the way in which we have advanced in knowledge of the material world and in the control of physical forces.

It

Christianity began as the religion of compassion. The essential characteristic revelation of it is that God is our Father, and that we are, therefore, brethren; and its message to society is that we are to act and speak and think like brothers. Jesus preached the gospel of compassion. He came to help men to be fraternal, tenderhearted, kindly affectioned one toward another. All that he said, all that he did,—even to the death upon the cross,— all that he was as Son of God and Son of Man, had to do directly with the progress of compassion. It seems sometimes, in reading the New Testament, as if this were the whole of religion. The creed, so far as it voices the metaphysical side of Christianity; the Church, so far as it expresses the political aspects of Christianity, where are they in those pages? The splendid chapters are filled from beginning to end with inspiration to brotherly behavior. The important thing is fraternal conduct. That the strong should help the weak; that the rich should minister to the poor; that the saints should save the sinners, this is the purpose for which the Christian religion exists. And at the judgment-seat of God, Christ says, this is the one matter by which our destiny shall be determined.