Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/64

 run"? Can we leave anybody alone without covert or open detraction from his or her merits? Even in the most ordinary, every-day life do we not see people taking a malicious, insane delight in making their next-door neighbours as uncomfortable as possible in every petty way they can? These persons, by the way, are generally the class who go to Church most regularly, and are constant Communicants. Do they not by their profane attempt to assimilate the malignity of their dispositions with the gospel of Christ, deserve to be considered as mere blasphemers of the Faith?

Yet, as a matter of fact, it is much easier to love than to hate. Love is the natural and native air of the immortal soul. "While we fulfil the law of love in all our thoughts and actions, we cannot fail to grow." Hatred, discontent, envy, and pessimism, cramp all the higher faculties of the mind and very often actually breed disease in the body. To love all creation is to draw the responsive health and life of creation into one's own immortal cognizance. "Love easily loosens all our bonds. There is no discomfort that will not yield to its sovereign power." But it must not be a selfish love. It must be a Love which is the keynote of the Christian Faith—"Love one another as I have loved you."

It follows very plainly that if we truly loved one another there would be no wars, no envyings, no racial hatreds, no over-reaching of our brethren for either wealth, place or power. There would be no such hells as the Lancashire factories, for example, where, as Allen Clarke graphically tells us,