CHAPTER XIX THE UNCHASTE We have already seen that, throughout the life of Jesus nothing is more evident than the sympathy which He felt for persons who cowered under the stigma of social dishonour, and in the closing period of His ministry this sympathy becomes increasingly intense. But it was more than sympathy, as a vague emotion of pity; it was sympathy with a moral basis. If Jesus showed a special and consistent tenderness toward persons whose faults of life were manifest, it was because He drew a sharp distinction between sins of frailty and sins of temper. Moreover, the distinction which He drew was always to the disadvantage of the latter. The Pharisees were certainly more odious to Him than the publicans and harlots. His dislike of the elder brother is as plain as His lenience of feeling toward the prodigal. His most terrible denunciations were addressed not to bad people of notorious laxity of life, but to conventionally good people whose morality was irreproachable. The commonplace distinctions between virtue and vice did not exist for Him; or, if they did, they were so modified by His acute perception of the vices of the virtuous and the corresponding virtues of the vicious, that they were no longer recognisable. Hardly anything in Christ's public ministry wrought Him such harm as this peculiar and unpalatable view of sin. Men saw Him constantly surrounded by persons of evil reputation, and they drew their own conclusions. They expected, at least, from a teacher of religion an active support of conventional morality; Christ often spoke as the enemy of that morality. The distinction between venial and mortal sin is a convenient invention, with a good deal of sound reason to support it. Average society is certainly not prepared to treat the covetous or ill-tempered man on the same terms as the thief or the murderer, although it is perfectly plain that without covetousness the thief would not exist, without explosions of angry and revengeful feeling crimes of violence would not occur. Nor would society account it just to treat an imagined act of impurity as a real one. It is one thing to defile the theatre of the mind with an obscene drama; quite another to guide the life upon vicious principles. So, again, a great deal of callous cruelty and greed may coexist with an outwardly correct moral life; but who would contend that a man of harsh or avaricious temper deserved that kind of reprehension which society visits upon the person of profligate behaviour? But that was precisely the contention of Christ. Sins of temper appeared to Him far more disastrous than sins of frailty. In His alarming system of spiritual pathology, the first resembled a paralysis of vital organs, the second an attack of fever. Any man may contract a fever, and after dreadful wanderings in the realms of delirious imagination may emerge again into the light of sanity. He may lie blind and helpless at the mercy of the flame that consumes him, but he may still retain his goodness of heart, his sense of right, and even his real passion for integrity. But in the growth of evil tempers there is no crisis and no cure. They involve not a temporary obscuration of moral faculties, but their destruction. They are like paralysis, a decay of |