as thyself.” This command, thought of in the abstract and more extended sense as embracing the love of men in general, is a command to love all men. Taken in this sense, however, it is turned into an abstraction. The people whom one can love, and for whom our love is real, are a few particular individuals; the heart which seeks to embrace the whole of humanity within itself indulges in a vain attempt to spread out its love until it becomes a mere idea, the opposite of real love.
Love, in the sense in which Christ understood it, is primarily moral love of our neighbour in those particular relations in which we stand to him; but, above all, it is meant to express the relation existing between His disciples and followers, the bond which makes them one. And here it is not to be understood as meaning that each is to have his particular occupation, interests, and relations in life, and is further to love in addition to all this, but that this love, as something apart which abstracts from all else, is to be the central point in which they live, and is to constitute their business.
They are to love one another, nothing more or less, and consequently are not to have any particular end in view whatever, ends connected with the family, political ends, nor are they to love because of these particular ends. Love, on the contrary, is abstract personality, and the identity of this in one consciousness in which it is not any longer possible for special ends to exist. Here, therefore, no other objective end exists unless this love. This love, which is independent, and which is thus made a centre, finally becomes the higher divine love itself.
At first, however, this love, as a love which as yet has no objective end, also takes up a polemical attitude to the existing order of things, especially to the Jewish existing order. All those actions commanded by the Law by the doing of which apart from love, men formerly estimated their moral worth, are declared to be dead works, and Christ Himself heals on the Sabbath.
