The Law of Christ the Law of Humanity

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”—Galatians vi. 2

Certain writers never tire of saying “it is a law of our nature” to do this or that. Often they mean almost nothing by it — the phrase disguises ignorance, or dresses up an empty truism, or lets them mistake a narrow generalization for a discovered principle. Sometimes, though, a real fact is being pointed to — a genuine tendency of human beings everywhere — yet the word “Law” is still the wrong word for it. The fact may deserve close attention and be essential to our self-knowledge, without being a Law; some older, controlling principle may hold that title instead.

Many people have convinced themselves that the scramble to possess more money, or the goods money buys, than one’s neighbor is a necessary, eternal law — as fixed as gravitation, and just as absurd to resent as to be angry that water runs downhill. They grant that under some strange influence men’s ordinary feelings can for a time be reversed, but say only a fanatic would try to make such reversal normal. Perhaps on some other planet, inhabited by a different kind of being, a better principle than universal rivalry might hold — but here, they say, all the energy of life would collapse without this stimulus. If Mammon demands human sacrifices, his benefits compensate for them.

That this tendency exists in every man, that it is strongest in the most active and socially capable men, that no circumstance can extinguish it — this I believe is true. We owe something to those who remind us of it, who tell us: this desire to be first, to trip up your neighbor, is in you now and will remain, however you change your place or your habits; when you think it dead you will find it starting up fresh. Social arrangements will not end it — if they try, they will only weaken individual energy, becoming, as an old sage said of clever social schemes, spider-webs that catch the weak while the strong break through. Education will not end it either — the more it frees and sharpens the faculties, the more it awakens this same drive to outrun and master others. Disagreeable as these observations are, I think them true, and not to be hidden from ourselves or others.

But to boast, having made them, that we have thereby proclaimed the law binding men together as a commonwealth is a monstrous claim. We have only noticed something that hinders men from living and working together — a secret of hostility, threatening to become permanent. But if you have found so strange a fact in the world’s order, you are bound to explain how society has managed to go on despite it. The more power and range you grant this selfish rivalry, the more you must explain how human beings have managed to exist together under it at all. You must look for some principle of cohesion strong enough to withstand this principle of repulsion — and if you are reasonable, you must admit that this cohesive principle, however violated or poorly acknowledged, is the true law of the universe, the law every human law and government tacitly confesses even while seeming to defy it.

You may think I am arguing that “Religion,” or vaguely “the Religious Principle,” has been and still is necessary to hold society together. But there is confusion in that language. It may mean that Religion keeps from collapsing a society rooted in selfishness, propping it up with some supernatural power, or the dream of one — a religion statesmen have wanted and priests have supplied. But if by Religion we mean the Gospel of Christ in a living, practical sense, it refuses that office. It does not exist to make men comfortable in their contradictions or shield them from the consequences; it exists to witness against those contradictions and to prophesy the outcome they must produce. A society that has come to confess no principle but rivalry, no maxim but “every man for himself,” may in its death-agony call on the Gospel — too late. What can save a community that has systematically set aside the Gospel’s first precepts, treating my text’s principle as no foundation for life at all but merely fodder for pretty Sunday sermons about charity? No: Religion, unless it is only another name for worshipping the god of this world, cannot delay the destruction the righteous and true God has pronounced on all unrighteousness.

Either the Gospel declares what Society is and is not — what binds men, what separates them — or it has no meaning at all. Either it shows how a uniting principle can be a living, effectual one, overcoming the tendencies to separation, or it fails at what it professes. The Bible does not accept the modest role men politely assign it, offering rules and comforts to individuals while ignoring their condition as members of a Community. It speaks throughout of a Kingdom. It proclaims a social Law. It tells all men this is the law that makes communion among men possible at all, and that there is no other.

St. Paul bids the Galatians fulfil the law of Christ. Does he mean the law Christ spoke — “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Certainly. But what did that mean? Was our Lord announcing excellent precepts he, as a wise teacher, had perceived to be desirable? Was he issuing a new Decalogue backed by fiercer penalties? Or was it the law his Father had formed all rational, voluntary creatures to obey, as surely as he formed natural things to obey gravitation — the law in the heart of the Son of God, which he actually fulfilled, and declared to be his disciples’ law because they are related to him as branches to the vine, given his Spirit so as to feel what he felt and be what he was? If this last is the true account — if the Ten Commandments were only the formal, external expression of this deeper, original law — then Paul is right to say “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ,” rather than the weaker phrase “fulfil the law of your being,” though that too would be closer to the truth than treating Christ merely as an external lawgiver. Paul supposes Christ to be the Man, the Lord of Man, showing what man truly is, the true head of all human fellowship, the source of all human life. If Christ bore all men’s burdens, did not seek his own glory, took the form of a servant, made the chief the minister of all — then this, Paul says, is the law under which we stand, the law we conform to whenever our acts are consistent, and break whenever we yield to any selfish, separating impulse, however deeply rooted in our nature, however universal, however bound up with things good, precious, even sacred. To bear one another’s burdens is not to obey some heroic maxim removed from daily business; it is simply to fulfil a law, to stay within the order our hearts are actually made for, to yield to the true Lord of our spirits rather than serve the Spirit of Division and Selfishness.

This view is quite unlike what most Christians commonly hold, even those proudest of the name. There is a general notion that benevolence is a graceful, sometimes necessary, quality — but it is treated as an ornamental capital resting on an earthly base, a habit that mitigates the world’s evils without denying they are radical. Or religious people say that bearing one another’s burdens is the law of the regenerate man, while the world at large can only follow a selfish rule, which governments must merely make as orderly as possible. No more hateful inference from a great truth was ever suggested by the Spirit of Lies, undermining a maxim he dares not openly deny. There is indeed an eternal distinction between the new man and the old: but the new man is one who follows the true law of humanity in Christ Jesus and so is at one with his fellows; the old man follows his own inclinations and is at war with them. The law of Christ is not a law for a select few, but for man — true even if all men disobeyed it, true even when those meant to proclaim it prefer to wrap themselves in a sense of privilege and boast of standing outside common humanity. Whoever believes there is one law for one class and another for another will infallibly obey, in his own practice, the lower and easier law. For his very distinction rests on believing two principles contend within him, and once he assumes the good one is simply his own possession, he falls under the dominion of the evil one — dealing with others by the low notions he assumes are all they can understand, proving himself “regenerate” not by bearing their burdens but by contempt and harsh judgment of them. A Christian must believe the law of Christ applies to all persons and all cases, or he will soon apply it to none; must acknowledge it as the human law, or it will not even be the law of his own church or circle; must believe it underlies all politics and all business, or it will not even guide his private, most solemn conduct.

Good men evade this general application another way — supposing Christ will someday come to set the world right, but that meanwhile Society may follow whatever evil maxims it likes. That Christ will one day be acknowledged Ruler of earth, no one who calls him Lord can doubt. “I should utterly have fainted,” says the Psalmist, “if I had not verily believed to see the goodness of God in the land of the living” — and no one bearing the world’s oppressions can help fainting unless he truly believes this earth will be purged and restored by its true Saviour. But the men of old believed this future truth because they believed, in their own day, that the universe belonged to God and not the Devil, and fought accordingly against those who claimed and worked to make it otherwise; we must do the same. If the law of bearing one another’s burdens does not govern all things and all men now, it never will. Our faith in its future rests entirely on our belief in its present truth — and if it is true, we must desire him who has fulfilled it in his own life to fulfil it in all the members of his body.

This, then, is our position. We see Society driven by that mighty competitive power which wise men praise as sovereign in the universe. Some who obey it show admirable zeal and energy in conquering circumstances, worthy of imitation. Yet they do not wholly obey this selfish impulse — they belong to families and social circles where, to a considerable extent, they already act on the rule “bear ye one another’s burdens.”

We see something more appalling: their sons often show little of that strength or those domestic feelings, yet are thoroughly possessed by the doctrine itself. Wanting to get ahead does not make them thrifty, painstaking pursuers of fortune — it makes them gamblers, taking the shortest road to riches, heedless of the pits along it where thousands are lost for the one who wins his wretched reward. Competition is not really producing the enterprise and hope you rightly call essential to a nation’s strength; it is producing men restless today, listless tomorrow — chasers of ugly phantoms for a while, then indifferent, disappointed, heartless when the prize is missed. Must you not then try to recover what competition cannot give, to strengthen the bonds of sympathy it threatens, to awaken thought for others and for those who will live after us? That thought is grounded in the law that binds men together, not the law that sets them against each other — a lower expression of the very law expounded in the text, the law Jesus Christ fulfilled.

I have granted that we have no right to reproach merchants, shopkeepers, or lawyers for thinking the world’s law mightier and more applicable than the divine law. We, the ministers of the Gospel, have most to answer for. We have sanctioned this unbelief and acted on it. The Church should uphold the nation’s life, the family of England, through its prayers, confessions, Sacraments — yet we have spoken of these as though they served the selfish law, as if they held no power to enable obedience to the other. Let us this Lent repent wholly of that unfaithfulness — each knowing the plague of his own heart, and together confessing that we have not borne one another’s burdens and so fulfilled the law of Christ. Let us feel that his yoke is the easy one, and that we have chosen the heavy one instead. Let us come to Christ’s Holy Sacrament believing he can feed us with the flesh and blood he gave for the world when he bore all our burdens, and quicken us by his Spirit to bear each other’s.