If some human beings are abject and
contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high
dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ?
Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he
was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by
preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he
ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best
and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally
capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of
which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and
redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the
love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon
the human race by the love Christ bore to it. And it was because the
Edict of Universal Love went forth to men whose hearts were in no
cynical mood but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, that
words which at any other time, however grandly they might sound, would
have been but words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of
love the power of Jove was given.
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