“Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love.  Though men should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it.  We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgiveness.  O, strive to enter into something of that large celestial charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the overbearing world cannot withstand forever!  Learn the new commandment of the Son of God.  Not to love merely, but to love as He loved.  Go forth in this Spirit to your life duties, go forth, children of the Cross, to carry everything before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like his.”—­Frederick W. Robertson.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE LOVE THAT PERFECTS LIFE.

The purpose of Christ’s mission to earth was the development of ideal manhood.  The instruments he fashioned and the agents he ordained all wrought unceasingly toward a manhood that was ample in faculty, fertile in resource and ripe in those qualities that make for maturity of character.  He sought to teach men how to carry their faculties through all the strife, collisions and rivalries of life, without damaging men or being damaged by them.

Always to the children of good fortune right living has seemed easy, for these live midst sheltered conditions and exhibit goodness as naturally as the sheltered southern nooks have grass and flowers when all the northern hillsides are brown with death or white with snow.  But Christ came teaching the children of weakness and misfortune how to bear up midst adversity, how to sing songs at midnight and how, through defeat, to march to final victory.  So beautiful was the manhood he unveiled before men that, beholding it, men low and men high, the publican and prodigal, the centurion and ruler also, quivered with hope, as the harp quivers under the touch of the harper.

For his ideal includes every quality that kindles admiration and delight; all gentleness, all goodness, all simplicity, the refinement of the scholar, the insight of the seer, the courage that makes the youth a hero.  In luminous hours men behold visions of ideal perfection hanging like stars in a midnight sky.  Unfortunately for many, these visions burst like bubbles and soon pass away.  Artists and sculptors look forward to an hour when, by a touch here and a touch there, the statue shall be perfected and the portrait completed; so Christ pointed forward to an hour when, having been wrought upon by darkness and by light, by defeat and by victory, by sorrow and by joy, at last wisdom shall be made perfect, judgment know no error, love have full disclosure and the soul enter into unhindered perfection.

Great are the achievements of the chisel upon the block of marble, marvelous the skill with which a master turns a dead canvas into lustrous life and beauty.  Matchless the power that turns a clod into a rosy apple, a seed into a sheaf of wheat, a babe into a sage; yet neither nature nor art knows any transformation like unto that wonder of time when, by slow processes, God develops man out of rude and low conditions of life unto those high and spiritual moods when selfishness gives place to self-sacrifice, coarseness to sweetness, hardness to gentleness and love, and perfection dwells in man as ripeness dwells in fruit, as maturity dwells in harvests.