What we believe of the Divine Love, thus dealing with human transgression, we may well believe of human love, when it is called by duty to chastise unrighteousness.  I do not suppose that John Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some people so bad that they “ought to be blotted out of the catalogue of living men.”  It was the dispassionate judgment of philosophy on crime.  When the convicted murderer exclaimed, “Don’t condemn me to death; I am not fit to die!” a great Judge replied, “I know nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live”; but I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock.  Even so, though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of God, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent wrong-doing.

VI

HATRED AND LOVE

I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:  “Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do.”  The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.

However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always recognize.  It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals.  “The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing a dog’s savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an exactly similar spirit may be concealed—­and not always concealed—­in a human frame.  We have lived so long, if not under the domination, still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling.  Hence the poignancy of the bitter saying:  “I forgive him as a Christian—­which means that I don’t forgive him at all.”  Under a decent, though hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial Rome.

Hatred generally has a personal root.  An injury or an insult received in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime.  “Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold”; and there are unhappy natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a long-cherished grudge.  There is an even deeper depravity which hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable.  “I have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without longing to throw a stone at him.  Do you comprehend what she meant?  No?  Well, I do.”  It was a woman who wrote the words.