g.
The art she knew was how to ease
The sick man's pain, the weak man's wrong;
And every night as she came home
She said, "O Lord, when wilt Thou come?"_

_The truths men praised she deemed untrue,
The light they hailed to her was dim,
But that the Christ was kind she knew,
She knew that she must be like Him.
Like Mary, in her darkened home,
She sighed, "O Christ, that thou would'st come!"_

_Her hair grew white, her house was bare,
Yet still her step was firm and glad,
The feet of Hunger climbed the stair,
For she had given all she had.
She died within her empty home
Still seeking One who did not come._

_She rose from out the wave of death,
A Stranger stood beside the shore;
The robe she wrought with failing breath,
And staining tears, the Stranger wore.
He drew her tired heart with His smile,
"Lo, I was with thee all the while."_

XIII

THE EMPIRE OF LOVE

But if this spirit of compassion were general, would virtue itself be
secure? Would not a fatal lenience towards vice become the temper of
society? Would not the immediate effect be the declaration of a
general amnesty towards every kind of wrong-doer, and from such an act
what could be expected but a rapid dissolution of the laws and
conventions that maintain the structure of society?

These are natural fears, and they are not altogether the fears of weak
and timid men. They will certainly be shared by all tyrants, all
persons whose tempers incline to absolutism, all believers in force as
the true dynamic of stable social government. To reason with such
persons is impossible, because their opinions are the fruit of temper,
and are therefore irrational. But even such persons are not destitute
of powers of observation, and in the long history of the world there is
a field of observation which no person of intelligence can neglect.

Do we find, as we survey this field, that force has ever proved the
true dynamic of stable social government? We find the exact contrary
to be true. The great empires of the past were founded on force and
perished, even as Napoleon discovered in his final reveries on human
history. Whenever force has been applied to maintain what seemed a
right social system it has uniformly failed. The Church of Rome
applied force to produce a world consonant with her ideas of truth; she
was all but destroyed by the recoil of her prolonged persecutions. The
Puritans