C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Brotherhood
Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
Nature has inclined us to love men.
Man, man, is thy brother, and thy father is God.
We must love men, ere to us they will seem worthy of our love.
To live is not to live for one’s self alone; let us help one another.
Kings and their subjects, masters and slaves find a common level in two places—at the foot of the cross and in the grave.
However wretched a fellow-mortal may be, he is still a member of our common species.
The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.
If we love one another, nothing, in truth, can harm us, whatever mischances may happen.
Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.
Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honor preferring one another.
The era of Christianity—peace, brotherhood, the Golden Rule as applied to governmental matters—is yet to come, and when it comes, then, and then only, will the future of nations be sure.
We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.
Enough of good there is in the lowest estate to sweeten life; enough of evil in the highest to check presumption; enough there is of both in all estates, to bind up in compassionate brotherhood, to teach us impressively that we are of one dying and one immortal family.
The race of mankind would perish, did they cease to aid each other. From the time that the mother binds the child’s head till the moment that some kind assistant wipes the death-damp from the brow of the dying, we cannot exist without mutual help. All, therefore, that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-mortals; no one who holds the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.
My friends, let us try to follow the Saviour’s steps; let us remember all day long what it is to be men; that it is to have every one whom we meet for our brother in the sight of God; that it is this, never to meet anyone, however bad he may be, for whom we cannot say: “Christ died for that man, and Christ cares for him still. He is precious in God’s eyes, and he shall be precious in mine also.”
God has taught in the Scriptures the lesson of a universal brotherhood, and man must not gainsay the teaching. Shivering in the ice-bound or scorching in the tropical regions; in the lap of luxury or in the wild hardihood of the primeval forest; belting the globe in a tired search for rest, or quieting through life in the heart of ancestral woods; gathering all the decencies around him like a garment, or battling in fierce raid of crime against a world which has disowned him, there is an inner humanness which binds me to that man by a primitive and indissoluble bond. He is my brother, and I cannot dissever the relationship. He is my brother, and I cannot release myself from the obligation to do him good.
Jesus throws down the dividing prejudices of nationality, and teaches universal love without distinction of race, merit or rank. A man’s neighbor, henceforth, was every one who needed help, even an enemy. All men, from the slave to the highest, were sons of one Father in heaven, and should feel and act toward each other, as brethren. No human standard of virtue would suffice; no imitations of the loftiest examples among men. Moral perfection had been recognized alike by heathen and Jews, as found only in likeness to the Divine, and that Jesus proclaims as, henceforth, the one ideal for all humanity. With a sublime enthusiasm and brotherly love for the race, He rises above his age, and announces a common Father of all mankind, and one grand spiritual ideal in resemblance to Him.