Every Temper Contrary to Love

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. 1 JOHN 4:18

The word perfection frightens people, and not without reason. It sounds like a claim to be beyond improvement, above correction, free of fault. Julia Foote knew how it sounded, and in the second-to-last chapter of her book she stopped to say plainly what she did and did not mean. It is the most important paragraph she wrote about holiness, and it is short enough to learn by heart.

She was not, she said, teaching absolute perfection, “for that belongs to God alone.” Nor did she mean the perfection of angels, or of Adam before the fall. She meant Christian perfection, and she defined it in one phrase: “an extinction of every temper contrary to love.”

Holiness is love

That definition changes the whole conversation. Holiness, for Julia Foote, was not first a list of things avoided, though she had such a list and we shall come to it. It was a heart so filled with the love of God that there was no room left in it for spite, envy, resentment or contempt. Perfection meant perfect love: not a love that never makes mistakes, but a love with no rival.

And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. COLOSSIANS 3:14

This was the old Methodist teaching. What makes her testimony worth hearing is where she tested it: as a woman whose minister, she believed, had lied about her, whose church had thrown her out, and who could not ride a stagecoach or sleep in a cabin because of her colour.

Love tested

The clearest example comes just after her expulsion. She had taken her case to the Conference of ministers, asking only for a fair hearing, and her letter had been set aside. It would have been natural to leave the Conference bitter. Instead, she says, God filled her heart with His love, so that as she passed one minister after another, her heart went out to each of them “as though he had been my father.” She thought of the words of Peter about the trial of faith being more precious than gold.

That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. 1 PETER 1:7

She did not pretend that the wound did not hurt. If the opposition had come from the world, she wrote, it would have seemed as nothing; but coming from those who had once been blessed with her, it touched a tender spot. That is the honest voice of perfect love. It does not mean feeling no pain. It means that the pain does not turn into hatred.

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. MATTHEW 5:44

The same principle ran into her preaching. When she preached her sermon on threshing from Micah, a stern text about beating the nations like corn, she was careful to say that the Gospel flail “should be lifted up in a kind and loving spirit.”

The counterfeit

Julia Foote knew the counterfeit of holiness as well as she knew the real thing, because she had been on the receiving end of it all her life. Her memoir opens with her mother in the Methodist Episcopal church, waiting for the last white communicant to leave the Lord’s table, and being pulled back by a white woman when she moved too soon. Julia drew the lesson at once. How many, she asked, profess great spirituality and even holiness, and yet say to the poor and the coloured among them, “Stand back a little — I am holier than thou.”

Which say, Stand by thyself, come not near to me; for I am holier than thou. These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the day. ISAIAH 65:5

This is why her definition matters so much. A holiness that consists chiefly of separation — from sinners, from the poor, from those of another colour — is not the holiness of Christ. It is the holiness of the Pharisee, and Scripture calls it smoke in God’s nose. She had also seen the opposite failure: the professing Christians who, as she put it, fought holiness with more zeal and vigour than they did sin. Neither the proud saint nor the scoffer at holiness knew anything of perfect love.

An honest word

It must be said, since she would want it said, that Julia Foote did not always live up to her own definition, and her book shows it. In Boston she admits that she had spoken to and about some people in rather an incautious manner, and she resolved to order all her words as in the immediate presence of God. Later in the book she calls one opponent, in the heat of the telling, almost a fiend in human shape, and when her minister’s committee dismissed her she turned at the door and shook off the dust of her feet as a witness against them. There may be a place for such words; Jesus Himself told His disciples to shake off the dust. But they sit uneasily beside a heart that went out to her opponents as to fathers.

That tension is not a reason to dismiss her. It is a reason to hold her definition more firmly than her claims. If Christian perfection means the extinction of every temper contrary to love, then any Christian, however advanced, can test herself by it every day, and every day find cause for humility. The definition does not make the saint proud. It keeps her on her knees.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:4

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. JOHN 13:35

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write out her definition — an extinction of every temper contrary to love — and keep it where you will see it. Use it this week as a test for your words and reactions.

2. Name one person who has wronged you in the name of God or the church. Pray for them by name, as a daughter would pray for a father.

3. Ask whether your holiness keeps anyone at a distance: the poor, the unfashionable, those of another race or class. Go and sit beside one of them this week.

4. Before any hard word you must speak, ask whether it is being lifted up in a kind and loving spirit. If not, wait.

5. Read 1 Corinthians 13 slowly, putting your own name in place of charity. Stop where it becomes untrue, and pray there.

A PRAYER

Lord, I do not ask to be perfect as You are perfect. I ask that every temper in me contrary to love be put out.

Where I have been hurt, keep the pain from turning into hatred. Where I have hurt others, even in Your name, forgive me and make me put it right.

Save me from the holiness that says, Stand back, I am holier than thou. Give me the holiness of Jesus, who sat with sinners and was not ashamed to call them brethren.

Fill my heart with Your love, until there is no room left for anything else. Amen.