Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who
loves another has fulfilled the law. Romans
13:8
Though Christian charity sounds a very cold
thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite
distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a
Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or
'likings' and the Christian has only 'charity'. The worldly man treats certain
people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one
kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people
he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
This same spiritual law works terribly in the
opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because
they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had
ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more
you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for
ever.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why
the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a
few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.
An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge
or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack
otherwise impossible.
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