Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/223

Rh is the meaning of the precept, Love your enemies? What sort of practice or discipline does this text, in the first instance at least, enforce? What but this? act against your natural hatred of them, resist the anger you naturally entertain towards them, quell and subjugate the boiling indignation of your heart. Whatever subsequent progress a man may make, under the assistance of divine grace, towards entertaining a positive love of his enemies, this negative step must unquestionably take the precedence; and most assuredly such assistance will not be vouchsafed to him, unless he first of all take the initiative by putting forth this act of resistance against that derivative modification of his heart, which, in the shape of hatred, springs up within him under the breath of injury and injustice, just as naturally as noxious reptiles are generated amid the foul air of a charnel-house.

The groundwork, then, of our love of our enemies, the feature which principally characterises it, and the condition which renders it practicable, is an act of resistance exerted against our natural hatred of them; and this it is which gives to that kind of love its moral complexion. Thus, we see that this kind of love, so far from arising out of the cherishing or entertaining of a natural passion, does, on the contrary, owe its being to the sacrifice of one of the strongest passive modifications of our nature; and we will venture to affirm that, without this sacrificial act, the love of our enemies is neither practicable nor