Hate--and Happiness

Among the long list of things that make men unhappy, none is more devoutly to be avoided than hate in the human heart. And among all the elements and ingredients of which human happiness is made, none of them, nor all of them together, will produce the desired product without love.

The physical factors of unhappiness: ill health and hurts and hardships, and the passing jealousies, the passing anger, the passing envy, failure, discouragement, uncertainty, resentment against injustice all these may be difficult at times to bear, and may at times seem all but unbearable. But in all of them together there is not so much of malignancy as there is in the unhappiness that comes with hate. Even some deeply serious sorrows may have in them an element of sweetness. At least there are sorrows that mellow men. But there is no sweetness in hate. In hate there is only a hard and an ever yet harder hardness.

Even punishment in hate misses its purpose. With hate we can hurt or harden a person or crush him completely. But the punishment that more likely leads to repentance and improvement is “by persuasion, by long-suffering…and by love unfeigned; …reproving betimes with sharpness…and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou has reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy.”

There may be some who seem to be deserving of hate, but there is no one who can afford to pay the price of hating, because of what hating does to the hater inside himself. It is a poison that compounds other poisons in a literal, physical sense. Besides its mental, emotional and spiritual ravages it does damage to the very physical make-up of a m an.

Hate voids the other virtues. With it there is no peace, no happiness. With it there is meanness from man to man.

These are written as being foremost among the commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, …and thy neighbor as thyself.” We may give alms and admonitions; we may keep other commandments; but without love there is sterility in the letter of the law; without love the hearts of men are hollow; but with it all things may be made bearable. But he who lets hate have hold of him will be destroyed by it, if he doesn’t control and conquer it.