tion is love. It required some resolution
and a "steeled" mind for Father Damien to give himself in early
manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and
dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love
that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the
hands of "savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave
up home and country and friends dearer than his life." There was
"steel" in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest
honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude
of Tokat; and "steel" in an earlier and even more memorable decision
when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit,
fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing
India.

But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form
of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on
the human will is manifested. John Howard devoted the comforts
and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle
Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord
Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political
opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing
boys and factory slaves. If ever I knew a man whose resolution
was "steeled," it was this honoured friend of my early manhood,
and the steeling power was simply love. A humbler illustration
of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom
worldly people ridiculed and who "for fifty years seized every
chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school";
and this though a boy's nature is "wax to receive, and marble to
retain." The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even
by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to
be withheld.

I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions
in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind
must be "steeled" and the resolution "set" for a solemn work of
international justice. But hatred will not help us; for hatred
is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily
and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise. Hatred is
natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its
doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples: "A
new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Twelve
men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they c