ligion of the British Empire,"
in the course of which he said that, if I knew as much about
stage-plays as he did, I should distrust the word "love," for it was
bound up with an amount of false and gusty sentiment. He himself
preferred the word "life" to express what I meant by the word "love."
But love is too good a word to be given over to the sentimentalists,
although Mr. Shaw was perfectly right as to the way in which it has
been misused. Love _is_ life, the life eternal, the life of God.
Jesus and His New Testament followers used both terms as expressive of
the innermost of God. The life of God is such that in the presence of
need it must give itself just as water will run down hill; this is the
law of its being. Where no need exists, that is, where life is
infinite, love finds no expression. To realise itself for what it is,
sacrifice, that is self-limitation, becomes necessary. Love is
essentially self-giving. It is the living of the individual life in
terms of the whole. In a finite world this cannot but mean pain, but
it is also self-fulfilment. "Whosoever shall save his life shall lose
it, but whosoever will lose his life shall find it." This profound
saying of Jesus is older even than Jesus; it is the law of God's own
being, the law of love, the means to the realisation of the life
eternal. It is so plain and simple, and withal so sublime, that we
cannot but see it to be true, and can do no other than bow before it.
The law of the universe is the law of sacrifice in order to
self-manifestation. In this age-long process all sentient life has its
part, for it is of the infinite, and to the infinite it will return.
When, therefore, you feel compassion for the rabbit which is being
killed by the weasel, or the stag that falls before the hounds, you can
remember at the same time that this is not meaningless cruelty, but the
operation of the same law that governs the highest activities of your
own soul. You are right to feel the compassion; you were meant to feel
it; and there is good reason why you should, for the suffering is real
enough to awaken it. But do not forget that the suffering is not quite
what it appears to you; it is only yours as it enters into your own
consciousness and you suffer along with the actual victim. Compassion
in such a case is the initial impulse toward self-offering, the desire
to take the victim's place. But the suffering of the rabbit or the
stag is to be measured by t