The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause.  To this type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international hatreds.  Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action, and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted above.  But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer.  Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle.  It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim.  “Hatred,” said George Eliot, “is like fire—­it makes even light rubbish deadly.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred “steels the mind and sets the resolution.”  If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory.  Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and “steeled” into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury.  It is in his superlative that Sir Arthur goes astray.  When he affirms that hatred “steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do,” his psychology is curiously at fault.  There is another emotion quite as powerful as hatred to “steel the mind and set the resolution”—­and the name of this other emotion is love.  It required some resolution and a “steeled” mind for Father Damien to give himself in early manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend.  It was love that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the hands of “savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.”  There was “steel” in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude of Tokat; and “steel” in an earlier and even more memorable decision when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit, fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing India.

But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on the human will is manifested.  John Howard devoted the comforts and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing boys and factory