Four Prose Fancies
I.—On Loving One's Enemies
Like all people who live apart from it, the Founder of the Christian religion was possessed of a profound knowledge of the world. As, according to the proverb, the woodlander sees nothing of the wood, because of its trees, so those who live in the world know nothing of it. They know its gaudy, glittering surface, its Crystal Palace fireworks, and the paste-diamonds with which it bedecks itself; they know its music halls and its night clubs, its Piccadillies and its politics, its restaurants and its salons; but of the bad—or good?—heart of it all, they know nothing. In more meanings than one, it takes a saint to catch a sinner; and Christ certainly knew as well as saved the sinner.
But none of His precepts show a truer knowledge of life and its conditions than His commandment that we should love our enemies. He realised—can we doubt?—that without enemies the Church He bade His followers build could not hope to be established. He knew that the spiritual fire He strove to kindle would spread but a little unless the four winds of the world blew against it. Well, indeed, may the Christian Church love its enemies, for it is they who have made it.
Indeed,
