Love is something more stern and splendid than mere
kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, "a lord of
terrible aspect". There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not
coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the
other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its
object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily
to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals
is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer.
Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object
becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points
out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on
the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about
that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our
children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy
in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition,
something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that
though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with
contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the
deepest, most tragic, most memorable sense.
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine
work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which
He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come
up against what I have called the "intolerable compliment". Over a
sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may
be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But
over the great picture of his life - the work which he loves, though in a
different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child - he
will take endless trouble - and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble
to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after
being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were
only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it
is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less
arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
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