“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
”
The two truths by which man lives are Love to God and Love to Man. And the whole system of divine education as regards the relation of man and man has for its end that a man should love his neighbor as himself. It is not a lesson that he can learn by itself, or a duty the obligation of which can be shown by argument, any more than the difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms than their own. “But that difference,” it may be objected, “is self-evident to everyone, whereas the loving of one’s neighbor is not seen to be a primary truth; so far from it, that far the greater number of those who hope for an eternity of blessedness through him who taught it, do not really believe it to be a truth; believe, on the contrary, that the paramount obligation is to take care of one’s self at much risk of forgetting one’s neighbor.”
The human race generally has got as far as the recognition of right and wrong, and most men are born capable of making the distinction. But the race has not yet lived long enough for its latest offspring to be born with the perception of the truth of love to the neighbor. It is to be seen by the present individual only after a long reception of, and submission to, the education of life. And once seen, it is believed.
Commentary
by Leah Morency
"It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and and by whom he is who alone can of himself love his neighbor who came from God too as is by God too.
When the mind of Christ, the life of the head, courses through the atom which the man is of the slowly reviving body, when he is alive too, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life.
From Christ through the neighbors comes the life that makes him a part of the body."
This is the life giving brotherly love, the backdrop is the landscape, the perilous road, of life, the sun rising and divine vision being born.