The Self-Denial of Love
“Love endureth all things.”
Charity is not fickle, unsteady, and easily discouraged; not soon disheartened, or induced to relinquish its object; but is persevering, patient, and self-denying, in the pursuance of its design to relieve the wants, assuage the sorrows, reform the vices, and allay the animosities, of those whose good it seeks. It is as patient in bearing, as it is active in doing; uniting the uncomplaining submission of the lamb, the plodding perseverance of the ox, with the courage of the lion.
It is no frivolous and volatile affection, relinquishing its object from a mere love of change; nor is it a feeble virtue, which weakly lets go its purpose in the prospect of difficulty; nor a cowardly grace, which drops its scheme, and flees from the face of danger; no, it is the union of benevolence with strength, patience, courage, and perseverance. It has feminine beauty, and gentleness, and sweetness, united with masculine energy, and power, and heroism. To do good, it will meekly bear with the infirmities of the meanest, or will brave the scorn and fury of the mightiest. But let us survey the opposition, the difficulties, the discouragements, the provocations, which it has to bear, and which, with enduring patience, it can resist
Sacrifices of ease, of time, of feeling, and of property, must all be endured: for it is impossible to exercise Christian charity without making these. He that would do good to others, without practising self-denial, does but dream. The way of philanthropy is ever up hill, and not unfrequently over rugged rocks, and through thorny paths. If we would promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, it must be by parting with something or other that is dear to us. If we would lay aside revenge when they have injured us, and exercise forgiveness, we must often mortify our own feelings. If we would reconcile the differences of those who are at variance, we must give up our time, and sometimes our comfort. If we would assuage their griefs, we must expend our property. If we would reform their wickedness, we must part with our ease. If we would, in short, do good of any kind, we must be willing to deny ourselves, and bear labour of body and pain of mind. And love is willing to do this; it braces itself for labour, arms itself for conflict, prepares itself for suffering: it looks difficulties in the face, counts the cost, and heroically exclaims, “None of these things move me, so that I may diminish the evils, and promote the happiness, of others.” It will rise before the break of day, linger on the field of labour till midnight, toil amidst the sultry heat of summer, brave the northern blasts of winter, submit to derision, give the energies of body and the comfort of mind: all to do good.
Misconstruction is another thing that love endures. Some men’s minds are ignorant, and cannot understand its schemes; others are contracted, and cannot comprehend them; others are selfish, and cannot approve them; others are envious, and cannot applaud them; and all these will unite, either to suspect or to condemn: but this virtue, “like the eagle, pursues its noble, lofty, heaven-bound course, regardless of the flock, of little pecking cavilling birds, which, unable to follow, amuse themselves by twittering their objections and ill will in the hedges below.” Or, to borrow a scriptural allusion, love, like its great pattern, when he was upon the earth, goes about doing good, notwithstanding the maUgnant perversion of its motives and actions on the part of its enemies. “I must do good,” she exclaims: “if you cannot understand my plans, I pity your ignorance; if you misconstrue my motives, I forgive your malignity; but the clouds that are exhaled from the earth, may as well attempt to arrest the career of the sun, as for your dulness or malevolence to stop my attempts to do good. I must go on, without your approbation, and against your opposition.”
Envy often tries the patience of love, and is another of the ills which it bears, without being turned aside by it. There are men Viho would enjoy the praise of benevolence without enduring its labours; that is, they would wear the laurel of victory without exposing themselves to the peril of war: they are sure to envy the braver, nobler spirits, whose generous conquests, having been preceded by labour, are followed by praise. To be good, and to do good, are alike the objects of envy with many persons. “A man of great merit,” said a French author, “is a kind of public enemy. By engrossing a multitude of applauses, which would serve to gratify a great many others, he cannot but be envied: men naturally hate what they highly esteem, yet cannot love.” The feeling of the countryman at Athens, who, upon being asked why he gave his vote for the banishment of Aristides, replied, “Because he is every where called the just,” is by no means uncommon. The Ephesians expelled the best of their citizens, with the public announcement of this reason, “If any are determined to excel their neighbours, let them find another place to do it.” Envy is that which love hates and proscribes, and, in revenge, envy hates and persecutes love in return; but the terror of envy does not intimidate love, nor its malignity disgust it: it can bear even the perversions, misrepresentations, and opposition, of this fiend-like passion, and pursues its course, simply saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Ingratitude is often the hard usage which love has to sustain, and which it patiently endures. Into such a state of turpitude is man fallen, that he would bear any weight rather than that of obligation. Men will acknowledge 5ma/Z obligations, but often return malice for such as are extraordinary; and some will sooner forgive great injuries than great services. Many persons do not know their benefactors, many more will not acknowledge them, and others will not reward them, even with the cheap offering of thanks. These things are enough to make us sick of the world: yes; but ought not to make us weary of trying to mend it; for the more ungrateful it is, the more it needs our benevolence. Here is the noble, the lofty, the godlike temper of charity: it pursues its course like the providence of Jehovah, which continues to cause its sun to rise and its rain to descend, not only upon the irrational creatures, who have no capacity to know their benefactor, but upon the rational ones, many of whom have no disposition to acknowledge him.
Derision is often employed to oppose the efforts of love by all the artillery of scorn. Spiritual religion, and especially that view of it which this subject exhibits, has ever been an object of contempt to ungodly men. Banter and ridicule are brought to stop its progress; the greatest profaneness and buffoonery are sometimes employed to laugh it out of countenance; — but it has learned to treat with indifference even the cruel mockings of irony, and to receive upon its shieldarm all the arrows of the most envenomed wit.
Opposition does not disgust, nor persevering obstinacy weary, it. It can endure to have its schemes examined and sifted by those who cannot understand them, cavilled at by those who cannot mend them, and resisted by those who have nothing to offer in their place. It does not throw all up in a fit of passion, nor suffer the tongue of petulance, nor the clamour of envy, to stop its efforts.
Want of success, that most discouraging consideration to activity, is not sufficient to drive it from the field; but in the expectation of the future harvest, it continues to plough and to sow in hope. Its object is too important to be relinquished for a few failures; and nothing but the demonstration of absolute impossibility can induce it to give up its benevolent purpose.
If instances of this view of Christian love be necessary to illustrate and enforce it by the power of example, many and striking ones are at hand. Few, very few, are worthy of being put in competition with that of Mr. Clarkson, whose illustrious name, and that of his no less illustrious coadjutor, Mr. Wilberforce, will ever be pronounced with tears of gratitude by Africa, as the chief agents in the work of inducing the greatest commercial nation upon earth to abolish the infernal traffic in human beings; and ought to be recorded in letters of gold by their grateful countrymen, for having delivered the nation from the greatest crime which, in her modern history, she ever committed, and from the greatest curse which she could dread at the hands of retributive justice. Perhaps no uninspired book may be so fairly regarded as a beautiful comment on the expression, “Charity endureth all things,” as Clarkson’s “History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Twenty years of that good man’s life were occupied in long and fatiguing journies, at all seasons of the year: in labours of an almost incredible extent, to trace reports to their source, to collect information, and to gather evidence; in braving opposition, bearing all kinds of ridicule, encountering savages, whose trade had made them reckless of crime, and thirsty for blood; in personal exposure, so great, that by nothing less than supernatural strength, granted for the occasion, would he have been rescued at one time from threatened and intended death. Nor was this the full measure of the endurance: disappointment the most bitter and discouraging often extinguished his brightest hopes; lukewarmness on the part of those from whom he had a right to expect the most zealous co-operation often saddened his heart, though it never paralyzed his zeal; and, to try his perseverance and put his benevolence to the severest test, his cause was of a nature which, by the sufferings it brought under review, was enough to sicken and turn from its purpose a compassion of less hardihood than his. What must that man have had to endure, who thus describes his feelings after the details of evidence furnished by only one of the thousands of days spent in familiarizing himself with the various scenes of the biggest outrage ever committed against the rights of humanity? — “The different scenes of barbarity which these represented to me, greatly added to the affliction of my mind. My feelings became now almost insupportable. I was agonized to think that this trade should last another day: I was in a state oi agitation from morning till night: I determined I would soon leave the place in which I saw nothing but misery. I had collected now, 1 believe, all the evidence it would afford; and to stay a day longer in it than was necessary, would be only an interruption to my happiness and health.”
Who but a Christian philanthropist of the highest order could have pursued such a career, year after year, and not be so wearied by labour — so disheartened by opposition — so disgusted by cruelty, — as to abandon the object of his pursuit 1 Here was, indeed, a beautiful illustration of the” love that endureth all things.^^
But a greater than Clarkson might be mentioned. Let the history of St. Paul be studied, and his suffering career be traced, and his declarations heard concerning his varied and heavy tribulations. “I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ: we are weak, but ye are strong: ye are honourable, but we are despised. Even unto this present hour, we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place; and labour, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless: being persecuted, we suffer it *: being defamed, we entreat: we are made as the filth of the earth, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day.” “In labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods; once was I stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I have been in the deep: in journeying-s often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren: in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirsty in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides those things that are without, that which Cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches.” Nor did these sufferings come upon him without his being previously apprized of them, for the Holy Ghost had witnessed to him that bonds and afflictions awaited him. Yet neither the prospect of his varied tribulations, nor the full weight of them, made him for a moment think of relinquishing his benevolent exertions for the welfare of mankind. His was the love that” endureth all things.^^
And a greater, far greater than even the great Apostle of the Gentiles, might be also introduced, as affording, by his conduct, a most striking illustration of this property of Christian charity. Who but himself can conceive of what the Son of God endured while he sojourned in this world? Who can imagine the magnitude of his sufferings, and the extent of that opposition, ingratitude, and hard usage, amidst which those sufferings were sustained, and by which they were so greatly increased ] Never was so much mercy treated with so much cruelty; the constant labour he sustained, and the many privations to which he submitted, were little, compared with the malignant contradiction, resistance, and persecution, he received from those who were the objects of his mercy. The work of man’s redemption was not accomplished, as was the work of creation, by a mere fiat delivered from the throne, on which Omnipotence reigned in the calm repose of infinite majesty: no — the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, as a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief. The wrath of God, the fury of devils, the rage of man, the malignity of enemies, the wayward follies and fickleness of friends, the baseness of treachery, the scorn of official rank, and the many stings of ingratitude, calumny, and inconstancy, — all poured their venom into that heart which glowed with affection to the children of men. Nothing turned him from his purpose — nothing abated his ardour in the work of our salvation. His, too, and above all others, was indeed a love which *’ endureth all things.
Such is the model we are to copy. In doing good we must prepare ourselves for opposition, and all its attendant train of evils. Whether our object be the conversion of souls, or the well-being of man’s corporeal nature — whether we are seeking to build up the temporal, or to establish the eternal, interests of mankind, — we must remember that we have undertaken a task which will call for patient, self-denying, and persevering effort. In the midst of difficulties, we must not utter the vain and cowardly wish, that we had not set our hand to the plough; but press onward in humble dependance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, and animated by the hope of either being rewarded by success, or by the consciousness that we did every thing to obtain it: and we shall do this, if we possess much of the power of love; for its ardour is such, that many waters cannot quench it. Its energies increase with the difficulty that requires them, and, like a well -constructed arch, it becomes more firm and consolidated by the weight it has to sustain. In short, it is “stedfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as it knows that its labour shall not be in vain in the Lord.”