The Duty of Being Lovable.
If my neighbor finds it as hard to love me as I do to love him, I am sorry for him. Christ’s words mean something more positive than the quiescent good will which wishes no harm, and in an emergency would do a kindness. But if there is nothing lovable in a person, how can you love him, except in this negative, benevolent spirit? Christ loved us in our “low estate,” and his children should thus love one another. So the loyal Christian enlarges his heart and broadens his sympathies to live out the spirit of his Master. Yet human nature asserts itself: antagonistic temperaments recoil from each other. Good people are often very disagreeable. Coarse manners and coarse tastes are repulsive, though found in the church. Tiresome people are bores, even if Christians. Our nerves are tortured, our sensibilities are shocked, our temper exasperated by brothers and sisters in the church. There are some who act as if they did not want you to love them. To be let alone is all they want. How shall we have tenderness and sympathy and warm affection, when the heart does not find anything to fasten on? Christ’s new “commandment” must have a reflex meaning. If we are required to love, it is implied that we make ourselves lovable. Are we not to soften the asperities of our temper, “round the sharp knobs of character,” change the repellent manners into a genial approachableness, and sweeten the severities of our virtues so that our condemnation of another’s wrong shall be sorrowful rather than stern? Is it not a duty to avoid those habits which are uncomfortable to others; to check the indulgence of personal peculiarities which may be even more disagreeable than faults, and to cultivate those graces of heart and manner which make our presence a pleasure to others? Are we not to exercise ourselves continually in active, generous service, using all our faculties and opportunities in such a way that others can always believe in us, finding in us an inspiration, strength and joy? Sir Philip Sidney speaks of “A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of gospel books.”
If we were all seeking to grow into the likeness of Christ, in little things as well as in great, this brotherly love would spring spontaneously in the heart, and we should find continual comfort in each other’s faces. I read the “new commandment” again, and, underlying the familiar words, I seem to see the corresponding precept: “Be lovable to one another.” I look across to my neighbor over the way, and in striving to be lovable myself, lo! I find him so. Has he, too, been studying the lesson, or are my eyes just opened to see the good in him? Possibly we shall find it easier to love our neighbor than to be always deserving of his love.—Christian at Work.