tement, those who
were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would
be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying,
in the absence of positive experience of an authentic kind--for there
are few active examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples
are legendary,[168]--what the effects might be: they might conceivably
transform the world.

[168] As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the
fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar--having previously shaken
himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should
perish with him.

Psychologically and in principle, the precept "Love your enemies" is
not self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of
magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our
oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would
involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a
whole, and with the present world's arrangements, that a critical point
would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom
of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be
close at hand, within our reach.

The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the
showing of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is
personally loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious
mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its
part; and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the
desire to disclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before
God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of
Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of
filthy beggars. All three are at work when religious persons
consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly
unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to which
the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the fact that church
traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we
find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only explicable
by the frenzy of self-immolation simultaneously aroused. Francis of
Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St.
John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcers
of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives of such
s