Being and Doing – 13 April – The Ennobling Influence of Love

JESUS said: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

S. MATT. xxii.37

WHICH of us does not know that the old law, ‘Thou shalt not,’ is weak through the flesh?  Which of us does not recognise that the source of man’s sin is the self in him which sets itself up as an end to itself; that so long, therefore, as his eyes are fixed on himself, even though it be on his own virtue, or his own goodness, he is and must be, in the reason of things, fatally weak?   And that, therefore, Christ has placed the fulcrum that was to lift up man’s nature, outside himself in the principle of faith, made that fulcrum rest, not on self-virtue, but on love – love to God and love to his fellow-man,-something, as we say, that takes him out of himself?   Which of us has not felt a sin that we have gone on carelessly yielding to when only our own character was at stake, become impossible to us when we were made to realise that it involved injury to another, love overcoming where virtue was weak?

ELLICE HOPKINS

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