_And so all wounded by the way, He came home at the close of day, And angels met Him at the Gate. Alas, His way I have not known-- The road forlorn, the wounding stone-- And no one waits me at the Gate._ IV LOVE IS JUSTICE Love is the only real justice--never was there a more revolutionary ethic! If Christianity is to be judged by its institutions, it must be reluctantly confessed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind. The elder brother still makes broad his phylacteries in the home, in the Church, and on the seat of justice. The elder brother's sense of offended respectability still masquerades as virtue. Who forgives as this father forgave, with such completeness that he who has wrought the wrong is encouraged to forget that the wrong was ever wrought? Where is the loving and tolerant spirit of the father less visible than in the Church, which crucifies men for a word, and makes a difference of opinion the ground for deadly enmity? Of what administration of law can we say that its chief object is not the punishment of the wrong-doer, but his reclamation? No existing society is organized on these principles, and the only defense the apologists of a bastard Christianity make is that it is totally impossible to apply the principles of Jesus to the administration of society. That is, at all events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one? Was Jesus merely a romantic dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love and justice? Was He a moral anarchist, whose teachings, if interpreted in laws, would destroy the basis of society? A strange thing indeed in human history if One who has been loved as no other was ever loved by multitudes of men and women through the ages, should prove after all to be an impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist! But if Jesus was a dreamer, He dreamed true, and the very reason why He is loved with such wide and deep devotion is that men do dimly, but instinctively, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern of life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on a social system which any wise or good man can approve. Hence the wise and good man is perpetually urged to the enquiry whether Jesus may not after all have been right? Jesus certainly acts as one who is right. He acts always with the assured air of one for whom all debate is closed and henceforth impossible. He knows His way, and the great moral dilemmas of life yield instantly to His touch. He penetrates to their roots and makes us feel that He has touched the essential element in them. The dreamer vindicates himself by making it manifest that he sees deeper into the problem than the moralist, and that his is after all the better morality because it is of higher social value, and makes more directly for social reconciliation.