has a direct practical effect upon us, and so had the future upon the mind of Mrs. Butts.  “Why dost thou judge thy brother,” says Paul, “for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of God.”  Paul does not mean that God will punish him and that we may rest satisfied that our enemy will be turned into hell fire.  Rather does he mean, what we, too, feel, that, reflecting on the great idea of God, and upon all that it involves, our animosities are softened, and our heat against our brother is cooled.

One or two reflections may perhaps be permitted here on this passage in Mrs. Butts’ history.

The fidelity of Clem’s wife to him, if not entirely due to the New Testament, was in a great measure traceable to it.  She had learned from the Epistle to the Corinthians that charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; and she interpreted this to mean, not merely charity to those whom she loved by nature, but charity to those with whom she was not in sympathy, and who even wronged her.  Christianity no doubt does teach such a charity as this, a love which is to be:  independent of mere personal likes and dislikes, a love of the human in man.  The natural man, the man of this century, uncontrolled by Christianity, considers himself a model of what is virtuous and heroic if he really loves his friends, and he permits all kinds of savage antipathies to those of his fellow creatures with whom he is not in harmony.  Jesus on the other hand asks with His usual perfect simplicity, “If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?  Do not even the publicans the same?” It would be a great step in advance for most of us to love anybody, and the publicans of the time of Jesus must have been a much more Christian set than most Christians of the present day; but that we should love those who do not love us is a height never scaled now, except by a few of the elect in whom Christ still survives.  In the gospel of Luke, also, Mrs. Butts read that she was to hope for nothing again from her love, and that she was to be merciful, as her Father in heaven is merciful.  That is really the expression of the idea in morality, and incalculable is the blessing that our great religious teacher should have been bold enough to teach the idea, and not any limitation of it.  He always taught it, the inward born, the heavenly law towards which everything strives.  He always trusted it; He did not deal in exceptions; He relied on it to the uttermost, never despairing.  This has always seemed to me to be the real meaning of the word faith.  It is permanent confidence in the idea, a confidence never to be broken down by apparent failure, or by examples by which ordinary people prove that qualification is necessary.  It was precisely because Jesus taught the idea, and nothing below it, that He had such authority over a soul like my friend’s, and the effect produced by Him could not have been produced by anybody nearer to ordinary humanity.