ABSTRACT
The duty of love is impressed upon the Israelite again and again. Social duties may conveniently be grouped under four heads: The Family; Society; The State; The Religious Community. Love is the corner-stone of the rabbinical ethics also. Vengeance can be thought of in connection only with an enemy; so that the command to love our neighbour becomes a command to love our enemy. A distinction is sometimes drawn between justice and love, and the Pentateuch, which insists so strongly upon the grandeur of justice, is declared to have been properly superseded by the teaching of the Christian Scriptures which make the gentler virtue the exclusive ideal. Philanthropy and self-love are identical. For true self-love means self-realisation in the higher sense; it means the development of our best capacities. All men are members of one great family, and all social obligations are summed up in the command to love them as one.
