IN one of those inimitable essays which keep bright the memory of a radiant and dauntless personality, Stevenson decries the idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbor good. "One person," he says, "I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy—if I may."
Tolerance in our attitude toward our neighbor's life and creed, which may differ widely from our own, is frequently an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace—a Christian courtesy that goes hand in hand with loving-kindness. That most tolerant of men, the Nazarene, who found sermons in stones, in the fall of a sparrow, and in the smile of a little child, was master of the rare art of sympathy,—that intuitively divines some common ground on which, first, to win the confidence of men: thence, to meet their need. In reverence for the real man, which the mirage of false sense and sin and shame could not hide from his clear vision, he ministered alike unto rich and poor, high and low, saint and sinner. They felt his spiritual wealth to be no barrier, shutting them out in their sordid materialism from his unfailing tenderness. Royal in his humility, he answered to the timid touch upon his garment amid the throng, to the despairing wail "Unclean," to the penitence of a dying thief; while at the bitter cry of Mary and Martha, "Master, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died," his own tears fell. Wherever he found sin setting up its false claim, he smote and destroyed it; the sinner he saved.
With the smug respectability of the Pharisee, however, the great Teacher seems to have had scanty patience. This is worth remembering. Error has sought out many inventions. To lull us to sleep in the complacent belief that we are the people and that wisdom dies with us, is not the least of these. It is such a temptation to pick flaws in our neighbor's point of view, to look down from our own dizzy height of the "unco' guid," with a relishing sense of complacency, upon a standard of conduct and morals quite different from and hence very much inferior to our own.
