proved suspicions,
causeless jealousies, to stifle by the mere force of prejudice and
mistaken opinion the warmth of feeling natural to him.

But we shall have a closer illustration if we suppose the cold-hearted
society itself to be addressed by a preacher who wishes to bring them
to a better mind. He too may fairly use the imperative mood of the verb
to love. For he may say, "Your mutual coldness does not spring from an
original want of the power of sympathy. If it did, admonitions would
indeed be useless. But it springs from a habit of thought which you have
formed, a maxim which has been received among you, that all men are
devoted to self-interest, that kindness is but feebleness and invites
injury. If you will at once and by a common act throw off this false
opinion of human nature, and adopt a new plan of life for yourselves and
new expectations of each other, you will find the old affections natural
to all of you, weakened indeed and chilled, but existing and capable of
being revived by an effort."

Such a preacher might go further and say, "If but a small minority are
convinced by my words, yet let that minority for itself abandon the
selfish theory, let it renounce the safety which that theory affords in
dealing with selfish men, let it treat the enemy as if he were indeed
the friend he ought to be, let it dare to forego retaliation and even
self-defence. By this means it will shame many into kindness; by
despising self-interest for itself it will sometimes make it seem
despicable to others; by sincerity and persistency it will gradually
convert the majority to a higher law of intercourse."

The world has been always more or less like this cold-hearted society;
the natural kindness and fellow-feeling of men have always been more or
less repressed by low-minded maxims and cynicism. But in the time of
Christ, and in the last decrepitude of ethnic morality, the selfishness
of human intercourse was much greater than the present age can easily
understand. That system of morality, even in the times when it was
powerful and in many respects beneficial, had made it almost as much a
duty to hate foreigners as to love fellow-citizens. Plato congratulates
the, Athenians on having shown in their relations to Persia, beyond all
the other Greeks, "a pure and heartfelt hatred of the foreign
nature."[76] Instead of opposing, it had sanctioned and consecrated the
savage instinct which leads us to hate whatever is strange or