284 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
enemy was a thing to be commanded x but not between brothers. That was to be expected. 2 Anything that prevented such fraternal feeling was to be removed, even at the cost of religious punctuality. 3 It is true that if men fail to appreciate their fraternal relations when they exist, they will need the command to love one another. 4 But this, like all law, is but a provisional matter. As the realization of their relations to one another as members of a fraternity deepens, men will love less and less from a sense of duty and increasingly from impulse. And this new love was to be like Jesus' own, ready for any sacrifice that might seem necessary. 5
But evidently at this point we are dealing with social motives. A man thus inspired is no longer living for his individual, his atomistic self, but for his social, his altruistic self. In his rev- elation of the love of God and the possibility of a new and divine sonship, Jesus prepared the way not only for the saving of each individual sinner. He did more. Every man who comes thus into a conscious reinstatement in the love of God, becomes also a brother of all other men in the same relation. And so is set in motion a multitude of fraternal loves which, disregarding place, and time, and birth, and social station, will forever remain unsatisfied until they express themselves in recip- rocal deeds of kindness and bring in a new social order. Each man will seek to minister, not to be ministered unto ; to become a servant of all. 5
1 Matt. 5 : 44. 3 Matt. 5 : 22-24.
2 Matt. 5 :47; 18 :2I, 22.
4 John 13 : 34 ; 15 : 12. Vet even here the example of Jesus himself is to be an incentive.
5 But self -sacrifice is not the central principle of Christianity as some urge. A man must be ready to sacrifice himself if there be need, but sacrifice in itself may be wrong. The center of the teachings of Jesus cannot be found in any such ascetic notion of life. It lies in the person of Jesus himself that object lesson in the divine life in human life. Love involves self-sacrifice but self-sacrifice does not of necessity involve love.
Nor does self-sacrifice mean self-annihilation be it from never so holy motives. Jesus is the last man to preach either Nirvana or pantheism. 5 Matt. 20 : 26, 28.
