SchererWhenGodHides

WHEN GOD HIDES

PAUL SCHERER
Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
of the Holy Trinity
Central Park West at Sixty-fifth Street
New York City

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
New York and London 1934

CONTENTS

I. When God Hides

II. A Visitor from Nazareth

III. Why Are We Here?

IV. The Self That's Out of Focus

V. The Harm Jesus Risked Doing

VI. Jesus Christ and the Middle-Class Mind

VII. Jesus Christ in a World of Cults

VIII. One Man Against Himself

IX. God, His Mark

X. A Tomb for Lazarus

I
WHEN GOD HIDES

"Jesus hid himself" — John 8:59

There is a hint of the miraculous about it as the author of the Fourth Gospel tells the story: in some strange fashion, when they got themselves stones and began looking for him, he was nowhere to be found. But you feel, as you read it, that underneath the bare record of his having gone that day through the midst of them and so passed by, there lies a deeper moral significance. It's like the tolling of a bell that marks the death of an ancient hope long cherished. Or like the shutting of a door on a world of dreams. The really tragic fact is, and little by little you grow conscious of it, that Jesus simply had not been at any time in the place where these Pharisees had been looking for him. It was as though he were living on a different planet, whole lightyears away. They had seen him, and heard him, and could have touched him, so close was he; yet all their lives through, and into Eternity it may be, their spirit and his would circle ever farther and farther apart, like stars around dark and silent orbits.

So I find nothing sly or cunning about it, nothing to remind me of the pagan gods whose impish faces peered out at you from behind columns and fountains and trees and were gone the moment you glanced toward them. It was said they were tantalizingly clever to keep out of sight so surely—Echo stealing softly through the forest ahead of you, and Mercury, whose winged sandals you could hear in the tops of the trees. Those were days when men were lonely because it seemed that whatever divinities there might be had whimsically withdrawn themselves from human experience. Here in the gospel was the dawn of other days, when men should be lonely through no fault of God's: in Jesus of Nazareth He had done what He could. From now on His hiding should be by nothing save by the wilful distance they could still set between their world and Him.

And we do set it; surely we do. There are times in the average Christian's life when God seems like a present and vivid reality. But other moods come and take the place of these, moods of alienation and homelessness, until the whole universe seems strangely forsaken. So, too, in the life-history of the race there have been periods of great awareness, followed by cycles in which the only sense of the divine that men seemed to have at all was a sense of its dismal remoteness. Now close enough to startle and command, now far enough away to be only dimly recalled, comes and goes this vision, this "tingling silence" that folk have called God: breaking across the horizon of hopeless, helpless days with the quick glory of a morning that hurries to be noon; and then flickering out in a twilight that leaves behind it on the bare earth little but the solitary bleating of sheep in the Temple, and frail wisps of smoke curling upward from some immemorial altar toward the distant shutters of the sky.

Sometimes I question if He was ever farther away from the daily human consciousness than He is just now. There are people who shrug their shoulders when they tell you of it, and there are people who tell you of it with tears. The blue vault yonder is brass to their prayers. The kingdom of heaven is an abandoned farm to them. One crisis after another comes in their lives, and they stalk through it alone. There they stand, desolately themselves, as the waves go over them, because there is no God in the place, nothing but an unread Book, a haunting memory, and a great loneliness.

It's an experience which in the story before us is rooted deeply enough in a brutal fact: "Then took they up stones to cast at him." With us the facts are not so brutal, perhaps, but they are none the less effective. Whenever life takes to groping around dazed and uncertain as though God had gone away, you may be sure it has itself been getting its things together and deliberately or absent-mindedly moving over out of His world.

Moving back into yesterday, for example; and He stands there forever beckoning toward tomorrow, where He lives! What if that were one of the secrets of this desolation we feel when we seem to be traveling so God-forsakenly alone? Simply that we have been following the right path, but following it in the wrong direction? It's what these Pharisees had been doing. Listen to them, poor tragic souls, thinking, looking, marching steadily into the past: "We be Abraham's seed." "Abraham is our father." "Thou art a Samaritan," harking back to that old heresy! "Art thou greater than our father Abraham?" And they kept on brushing by him into the things that were gone, that used to be, and thrust him off, and took up stones. It was not that they doubted anything that had been handed down to them, or disbelieved anything. They were on the road right enough. But you see how they were headed : the only progress they were making was backward!

It staggers you to stop and think how much of our own religion is like that, delving into musty records for some glimpse of a gallant Nazarene who knew how to handle life. On the 25th of December we commemorate his coming. Leaving our packages at home tied with red ribbon, we make our way to the church and listen with a certain wistfulness to the song that fell across the hills around Bethlehem. And then we go out into the queerly deserted streets with a memory! It isn't long until Easter comes, with its flowers and brilliant anthems. The hymns keep quick step, and the best some of us can manage is a pleasant historical sensation! It is so much easier to celebrate anniversaries than it is seriously to look for repetitions.

Then, too, there was the old order of things we knew in our youth, and it was far better than this, when life was tranquil and not chaotic: the day we gave ourselves to Christ, here and there perhaps some shining hour when we stood with bated breath in the very presence of God. We wish we could recover it, the peace that was in men's hearts. There were such tight little answers for such neat little questions, and a score of principles and ideals in economics and in government, in religion and in literature, that none but the damned ever thought of challenging. We knew what to think and where to stand. And it's gone, irrevocably gone! Nothing now but this ceaseless pressure, lean back against it as we will, forever pushing us on with reluctance in our steps and Egypt in our hearts!

Oh yes, there is a deal of getting into the past tense still. In the town where I was reared nothing was more apparent than that whole families lived in it together! Those that were grateful were grateful for it, and bore themselves quite proudly for the somehow more ancient blood that ran in their veins; while religious people, oftener than not it seemed to me, were sorry for it, remembering old sins that God must have forgotten, and forever hashing over mistakes they had made long since.

Will nothing bring these moods of ours into the present, lay violent hands on them and force them to face about? Many a backward, longing gesture has been hardened, writes Dr. Gossip, into a spectral figure, like Lot's wife on the plains of Sodom, ghastly reminders for men to point at! "Look not behind thee, neither stay thou!" It matters where you look.

There was once a band of Christian Jews in Rome. So desperate was their condition, hounded by Jew and Gentile alike, that it needed only a little to make them renounce their faith utterly and fall back heavily into the ancient ruts of Judaism. It is not easy for us to appreciate the full extent of their bewilderment. They had broken with a thousand dear traditions, and it made them aliens among an alien people in a foreign land: no Sabbath any more, no Passover, no Day of Atonement, no Feast of Tabernacles, no Temple, no synagogue. Instead, these strange new rites, this widening gulf between them and their own heroic, God-filled past, these meetings in deep subterranean tombs: and all for the sake of a crucified Galilean! Little wonder some of them shook their heads and whispered wistfully of how it used to be. Then one night in the dampness of a dark chamber underground, with the niches in the dripping wall where their dead lay, a letter from an apostle at Alexandria was read in the solemn tones of an elder, whose hands trembled in the flickering light of a dozen lamps. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His son. . . ." Up and down rose and fell the pleading of that Epistle to the Hebrews, and nothing carried the throbbing heart of its gospel so well as this one resonant and oft-repeated phrase—"the living God," "the living God." The reading ceased, and one by one up the narrow steps the silent company made its way out into the dawn. But there in front of them now moved a Figure Whose white garments seemed to flutter in the wind like the great plume of Navarre! "Ye are come unto Mount Sion, unto the city of the living God." There are times when going back means losing touch with Him completely.

If Job had borne that in mind, I wonder if we should ever have had that lamentation of his. Certainly we should have been poorer without it; for in it is all the pathos of humanity's search: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat! I would know the words which He would answer me, and understand what He would say. He would put strength in me. Behold, I go forward"—ah, but look here! This is the poetry of despair; that is precisely what Job has not done yet, except in the darkness of his own foreboding!—"I go forward, but He is not there; and backward"—yes, that is the trouble—"but I cannot perceive Him. On the left hand, where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him." Who ever could, with jaundiced eyes? "He hideth Himself on the right hand, so that I cannot see Him." . . . "Then the Lord answered Job." He had been there ahead all the time! It may be, if ever you lose Him, that He just isn't in the place where you've been looking!

We must not think, however, that this is the only reason why we miss Him, because we keep forever looking over our shoulders: sometimes it's because we let ourselves run off at a tangent, facing forward all right, but fooling around with what we can see, and handle, and spread out before you for proof, like answers to prayer, as we are pleased to describe some of the things that happen to us. And they may be just that, surely; yet I know people who had found Him that way and no other so long that one dull morning they lost Him entirely because He didn't do their bidding! Or we like to discover Him in some Providential event, like the Reformation, and wrap our cloaks about us in the sweet conviction that undoubtedly He takes care of His own, until the World War comes along; whereupon a few of us grow strangely silent! Or it may be we hold one ear close to the steady tramp of mounting statistics, and nod contentedly as we read the history of the Christian Church, and see her reaping a harvest that goes on increasing through the centuries; it's like watching God at work, so clear is it, until perhaps the numbers begin to dwindle and there are fewer professing Christians in Who's Who than there used to be! Then the smile fades, and it's desperate business for some people.

That happened to Jesus, you remember. I have always thought his courageous parable of the soil, by which he fearlessly explained it, was a kind of throwing up of the head, and a sticking to God, and a not minding it much, only that he was sorry for the folk who were like the beaten path, and the shallow ground, and the weed-infested garden. But they kept on dwindling, and on, and everybody ran away and left him on his cross. There for one weird instant the waves went over him: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Then he was back, as though he were a great ship you thought was foundering, and held your breath, until she lifted out of it steadily and shed the water from her decks. When all of them were gone, and both the statistics and Providence had apparently quite marched away, he was alone—with God! "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." That should keep you, if nothing else can, from thinking too desolately of yourself when the times are out of joint and no one stands with you. It may be then, and only then, that you'll find Him!

Sometimes, too, we miss Him because, being very practical people, with few if any traces of idealism now, and having bravely rid ourselves of everything that might seem visionary, we have set about looking for Him within the realm of what we choose to call the possible. If we are to have any experience of Him at all it must come to us within the limits we set for it. Most miracles are blue-penciled, and all the other things we can't understand. We shall not look there, or expect very much that is out of the ordinary. There are laws, you see, that govern so much of life. Like that coterie of friends in the Book of Acts praying that Peter might be released from prison; and when he stood at the door, and the maid came running in to tell them, they said to one another that she had quite taken leave of her senses. And Peter had to go on knocking! No, we are clear on that point. We shall not anticipate anything unusual. If we should happen to stumble upon it anywhere, we'd wish to reserve judgment; it must have some normal explanation. We have arranged so that it is very difficult for God to get at us, you know; we see through the common things, like birth, and yesterday's happiness, and the spring. He isn't there; and the uncommon things we rule out.

That's why we have so little of the spirit of pioneers, pushing on into undiscovered country; we are too much under the tyranny of the possible. If we are called on to undertake this or that by way of our Christian faith, we'll do it "if we can"; and then we hope to have some fellowship along the way of it with this Jesus of Nazareth, who, when a thing is possible, loses interest in it almost at once, if he's still the Jesus that he was, and looks at you breathlessly, with his eyes all kindling, to see whether you are going to stop with what you can and sit down there by yourself, or come over where he is and start what's beyond you!

There were two men once that faced together for a while their difficulties. One of them made up his mind that he couldn't go on, and left. His name was Demas. From that day forth he led a quiet and orderly life, only, as some one has suggested, you wouldn't wish to lift the veil at the end and see the angel thrust him out, or hear him screaming that he wasn't Judas. "Demas, not Judas!" But it seemed to sound much the same! The other man knew very well that he couldn't go on, but he did! He broke through into what he couldn't and found God. His name was Paul!

"Jesus hid himself." I wonder where you and I have been looking?

Let me do a bold thing now. Do you remember the old story of the half-witted village boy who found the stray horse the whole village had been hunting? And when they asked him how he had done it he said he just sat down and tried to figure out where he would go if he were a horse, and then went there! The bold thing I am going to do is to ask a question. You know what it is already. Let me do it as reverently as I can. Where would you hide if you were God? It may help to answer that!

Surely not in yesterday alone, but in today, and in tomorrow, if you wanted to keep men traveling. That certainly. Then I think in things unseen—in the courage it took one day to put aside a glittering wrong and reach out for a dull-looking right; in the old intolerable dream I saw a woman pick up once, after she had laid it away for years; in the love with which a man set about atoning, a year or two ago now, for the harm he had done; and in the kind of love which has little atoning to do, but goes about spending itself in its home and on the streets; in the clean, hard choice of a pure life, and a kind spirit, and a bearing that disappointment serves only to make gentle. Yes, there I should hide if I were God, and in that brave hour when any soul of man spreads some sail of faith and slips away from the low and level shore-lines of common sense, "toward the great deeps, and the things that ought to be"!

"Jesus hid himself." It may just be that he wants to beckon us by hiding! Where, in your case, do you think it most likely he'll be?

II
A VISITOR FROM NAZARETH

"They drew nigh unto Jerusalem" — Matthew 21:1

THERE are times in life when we feel the need of some perspective. We want to know how matters would stand if viewed in a measure impersonally. We should like to call in an outsider if you please, and so for a moment get rid of as many of our prejudices as we can, together with heredity and environment and one's very self. We are nothing if not ambitious. And so, one bright morning, a novelist writes a story, or a moralist pens an essay, and we are introduced to our old friend, the visitor from Mars! He has been pathetically overworked. He has looked so hard, and seen so much, and laughed so long, that we have grown weary of him. He never seemed to me to be particularly high-minded, anyway! He was different without being distinguished! I can't understand why it should be necessary to go so far afield, with such meager profit. There is a visitor from Nazareth by all odds more real.

Riding there into Jerusalem with the crowd milling about him, shouting and singing, he seems far enough away to be comfortable. His world hardly touches our own. A homeless Jew on a soap-box in a public square, that might be better, and nearer! I am not sure that all of us would listen long; a few minutes perhaps, and we should walk away indifferently, or interrupt him angrily. Besides, it would all be quite impossible. They would never let him in at Ellis Island; they would catch him up on the clause about his willingness to bear arms. So that everything I have to say in this sermon is beside the point: it's thoroughly ruled out from the start. And yet, I wonder what his coming would be like, if it were not so utterly out of the question—where he would live, who his friends would be, how he would set about making the same deathless name for himself he made two thousand years ago; and this perhaps most of all, what there is about our modern life, if anything, that he would approve, and what there is about it that would sadden him. One hardly dares to suppose at all; but that is where I should like, bravely enough, to make a beginning.

I think most certainly he would approve the knowledge we have acquired. This clear-eyed son of Mary, if you and I may know his mind at all, would not be afraid of any of it, not even of the boasting, cock-sure kind that in the end defeats itself. That long search through the musty records of the past, building up for us bit by bit the life of hidden ages; that patient delving in the earth, the laborious deciphering of strange inscriptions; the study of the rocks and the stars, of matter and life and man himself, of philosophy and mathematics—until he would be a bold Aristotle indeed who would attempt a summary and synthesis of human knowledge! And with all of it Jesus of Nazareth would find himself in deepest sympathy. No doubt that is putting it mildly. I dare say it would kindle a light in his eyes, and something like the movement and rhythm of a great symphony in his soul. There is a godly height and drama about it, humanity upright on its feet, courageously beating its way across the borders of the Infinite, with the shadows on its face, blazing new trails, pushing back old horizons, hopefully, passionately. You and I may look on it unmoved if we like; but not this, so Peter called him, this "pioneer of life"!

Only the issue of it would sadden him: the cynical, disillusioned lives that seem unable to bear the weight of much knowledge, and turn back from the quest as though they had found some sad emptiness where they thought God was; others keep on, dispirited, plodding, and the shadows grow black as night because they have missed their way. I have talked with them. They told me to a man that losing their faith was like getting rid of a "heavy portmanteau full of old rags and brickbats." But they could not gaze into their own faces as I gazed into them, to see the weariness of all that fine new freedom they had won, and how loose the fibers seemed that were so taut before. They thought they were better for it, standing there staring at nothing within and without.

Here is Mr. Walter Lippmann's classic description of them in his Preface to Morals: "At the heart of the modern man's discontent there are likely to be moments of blank misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure that they are worth doing. He has been much preoccupied, but he is no longer sure he knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of pleasures, and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing, or in fact that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, . . . and surveying the flux of events and the giddiness of his own soul, he comes to feel that Aristophanes must have been thinking of him when he declared that 'Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus.'"

And here is Henry Adams writing of his own experience: "I could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, my eyes rather dim with tears, to my vague trail across the darkening prairie, without a motive big or small, except curiosity to reach, before I too should drop, some point that would give me a far look ahead. I was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the passage. I watched mankind march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but temper, falling to butchery like Cain. Humanity seemed to be like an acrobat with a dwarf on its back crossing a chasm on a slack rope and commonly breaking its neck."

It's ugly and weird what knowledge can do to a soul that isn't ready yet for the burden of it. Even knowing another life may take the beauty out of yours, unless this Christ is somewhere near enough to have him clutch you back desperately from the edge of an abyss like that, and change the hurt in your wide-open eyes to love again! Knowledge? Thank God for the hue and the cry and the broadening road; but the issue of it in a thousand lives, Jesus of Nazareth, pity that!

Or take our skill. I know it would stir him. There is no romance, except the miracle of God in a man's soul, which can compare with the impossible magic of human ingenuity. We have been hearing a good deal recently about the Age of the Machine, and people sometimes talk of it as though it were a curse. Gandhi sits over there in his loin cloth, protesting against it, preaching a retreat to the sort of life that is safer because there is less in it that calls for control. What we need is a way out, not a way back; and that really is part of the difference between Gandhi and Jesus Christ, one holding back, and the other striding on, thrilled at the triumph of wheels roaring, the doubling and tripling of God's bounty; delicate fabrics pouring in glossy waves from swift, pointed fingers of steel; great towers rising; lights springing on; planes soaring; voices whispering through the air to the ends of the earth and back again; sight in the dark reaching out across the sea; the whole rolling world busy with its traffic, everywhere man conquering, and nature tamed now flashing about to do his bidding!

Perhaps one might be allowed to stop long enough for the registering of a little unqualified awe at this story which has been unraveled down here on our whirling dervish of a planet during the last fifty years or so of its history. Those fifty years are like the last third of an inch in a time-table two hundred and sixty miles long! About twenty inches back along that time-table the Psalmist was writing, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou halt put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen"—one almost smiles!—"the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea." He was like an infant in the nursery gurgling over his toys! In two generations we have come away from sheep-raising to germ culture, from the care of oxen to the study of vitamins, from fowl to zeppelins, and from fish to submarines! Life has come to move with a swiftness that outstrips the dawn, like Kipling's triumphant airman sailing high from east to west in front of the morning.

No curse yet, until you think of the use some of us have made of it all. That's Christ's Calvary now. We have built a world with it so deliberately and so damnably unjust that it is even sick of itself and refuses every now and then to run any more! It isn't the machine. You can't alibi this tragedy. It's the man, playing his sordid game, bent on getting what he can out of his cunning devices, pulling the petals one by one off of a little blue flower called happiness, mumbling as he does it,

Me and my,
Not you, but I!

And the flower is nearly gone now! The wheels are silent and men are cold; plows are being used to destroy while children go without food; and the rest of us grow profane on the subject of the Administration, because every time we hold up a precious dollar it seems to have sweated away a few more pennies! The curse is in ourselves and in what we have done with the clean glory of our genius, seeing to it that German soldiers should be bayoneted on barbed wire sold to the French by German firms, and American troops mowed down with armaments constructed of nickel bought by the Germans from an American business concern! There is not much doubt as to who won the war: it was the people who made the gunpowder! Skill? Magnificent skill! The only thing for God to pity is our use of it!

Finally, there is our energy. Back of all the knowledge and the skill, the ceaseless, pulsing drive of the human spirit. I don't know, but somehow it seems to me like a captive beast in a narrow cage, with the scent of the forest in its nostrils, and in its eyes the lure of a great distance, pacing, pacing. Without that hint of Eternity in his soul, I think man would long since have grown tired; but the pacing goes on. Those feet, marching—just to hear the deathless sound of it might well drive you mad. Dickens makes something of it, you remember, in his Tale of Two Cities: the steps there outside the window, dying away in the west and being born again in the east, for every lessening footfall another growing louder, until all of them seem to mingle into an indistinguishable, steady tramping that beats against your brain! God must look on men proudly, they are so much like Him: pushing, striving, hurled back, and coming on again! Energy is just history in a word. I wish we could get some idea of the sweep and tide of it, never tired and never appeased, driving up out of savagery into civilization, out of huts into the grandeur of a great city's sky-line rising like "diamond-studded granite in the night," out of dirt and filth into medicine and art and universities and "the second movement of the Seventh Symphony dropping down into your room out of the clouds the mystic, healing beauty" of a noble spirit gone from this earth long since.

And here, in front of it all, a little man seeing nothing but little tasks to match his awful force. Will Durant has satirized him for us. "He breakfasts between headlines; rushes to the station; exchanges meteorological platitudes with his duplicates along the platform; reads his repetitious paper, which scours the planet for crimes and scandals to console him for stenography and monogamy; walks precariously through fruitstands, and clings like a drowning man to a subterranean strap while he is whirled with seismic discomfort to his toil. Arrived, his importance subsides. He becomes a superfluous incumbrance to his secretary and looks longingly at the clock. At five he rides again in suspended animation to his train, and there contemplates the daily tragedies of the national game. At six he is at home, and at eight he wonders why he hurried so!" I wonder, too, and more.

I wonder if a man has to be tied down like that, forever spending his terrific, driving power on the details of a life that's hardly worth the living! I wonder if there aren't huge, stalwart, worthy tasks for anybody who will see them, tasks that will take all the knowledge and the skill and the energy you have without ever leaving a dusty taste in your mouth! I wonder what this visitor from Nazareth would have to say in our noisy, thrusting world about the moral lassitude of the human soul, looking on at a thousand wrongs and throwing up its puissant hands as though it were quite impotent! Don't tell me that we can do nothing about the Kingdom of God; we have done too much about everything else! We don't have to sit down in this welter of futility. We who have built so much alone can build with Him if we will. Appalling tides of energy, on the one hand, and abysmal spiritual lethargy on the other, that's the paradox you and I have to thank for our present bewilderment: tense, quick muscles, and inertia in the soul! I think nothing describes us better, as we sit, so many of us, and gaze at the world withering beyond these adventureless doors of ours, where no quest mounts its stirrups any more and doffs its hat and rides off for a Holy Grail!We here, peering out of dull windows, where "we press flattened noses against the glass and are afraid, and turn back into the old shaken house again, and sing to drown the terror in our throats, sing to a Christ out there breasting the wind,

Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,
Till the storm of life be past;
Safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last.

We, who have gone towering about in his world, to slink that way into Paradise! And to have him meet us, and for all that throw his mercy around us, with nothing but love in his eyes still, all above and underneath the sorrow that must be in his heart!

III
WHY ARE WE HERE?

"Jesus knowing that he was come from God and went to God took a towel and girded himself"
— John 13:3-4

It's an old riddle, this business of living. Men have been trying to solve it for a long while without any notable success. As far back as Luther's day, over in France, Rabelais died in a fit of laughter, calling to those around him, "Draw the curtain; the farce is played out." It struck him somehow that living was funny. Abraham Cowley, the seventeenth-century British poet, insisted that it was an incurable disease. About the same time Dryden was calling it a cheat, and Sir William Temple, in his Essay on Poetry, assured the listening world that "when all is done, at its greatest and best, it's like a forward child that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." During the next hundred years, apparently, things didn't change very much. Cowper took up his pen to describe it, and got as dismal a result as any of them. Said he, it's

A painful passage o'er a restless flood,
A vain pursuit of fugitive false good,
A sense of fancied bliss and heartfelt care,
Closing at last in darkness and despair.

Another half-century, and Disraeli pronounced "Youth a blunder, Manhood a struggle, and Old Age a regret." And of course there is Shakespeare, the dean of them all! The testimony isn't in until we've turned round to hear him. What does he make of it?

A shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I have simply wanted you to have some of the best thought of humanity's past on the subject!

To be sure, I did come across one recent advertisement that had a suggestion to offer. "To men like Darwin, Haeckel, Lecky, Draper," it ran, "this world is no puzzle at all. Most of its real problems have been solved by their genius, proved by their science. To read them once is to eliminate a thousand guesses." And it seemed we could have all this for two dollars and forty-five cents! I feel quite confident that not one of the four would have entered any such claim for himself. Rather would they all have agreed with Mr. Bertrand Russell: "Brief and powerless is man's life. On him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. For man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty hopes that ennoble his little day."

And there are more than one cares to think who in this present generation of ours share his bewilderment. Some of them just give up the "problem of their being here," and suppose with a shrug that they are on hand to make a living. For the most part, they understand as well as you and I that that isn't enough. They know there is a deeper question—Why in the name of everything that makes our going on intelligible do we live at all? And ever and again, though frequently they will not confess it, they feel themselves weighed down under a haunting sense of defeat and utter pointlessness because they have no answer to it. There is no other journey on earth they would even think of undertaking without some knowledge of what they are headed for and why; but this whole journey of Life, they go at that haphazardly. The result of it is, and you may see it all around you, that the quality of their lives reflects their uncertainty.

A few years ago there appeared in the New York Times an Associated Press dispatch which read like a very parable of much of our post-war futility. Perhaps I can do no better than to transcribe it.

I remember culling, at about the same time, a number of articles "of lasting interest" from a half-dozen current periodicals. The first told of The Purest of Pleasures—Contract. Another described the Culture Racket, which began, it said, with the gate receipts from the lectures of Beautiful Ann Eliza Young, ninth wife of one Brigham, who for two years fascinated America with her story of the private life of Mormon elders. A third attempted to coach the public in the fine art of sitting down and going up stairs. A fourth charmed its readers with the technique of eating pumpkin pie with all five senses. A fifth went off into ecstasies "In Praise of Idleness." And a sixth was headed "Why Suicide?" With such musings around the horizon one might conceivably be forgiven for asking, Why not suicide? There are, indeed, statistics which indicate that the rate has doubled since 1918, especially among the literate and leisured classes; presumably because those who think they know most about it have got so that they want to spit at life.

And Jesus took it up in his hands and made men want an eternity of it. It seemed unspeakably great to him. You couldn't see it as he saw it and flick it off as though it were a speck of dirt. Hendrik van Loon in his New Geography says that the whole of humanity in any given generation could be packed into a box a half-mile high, a half-mile wide, and a half-mile long. I figured it out for myself once, and he's quite right! But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to remark that if we then balanced the box neatly on the edge of the Grand Canyon and gave it a gentle shove there would be a sudden splash, followed by silence and oblivion; "the human sardines in their mortuary chest would soon be forgotten. A mound densely covered with vegetable matter would prehaps indicate where they lay buried. And that would be all." But Jesus of Nazareth dabbled in figures, too, and somehow his leave an altogether different impression! He said once that the angels of God would stop what they were doing to celebrate the return of a lone straggler worse off than the swine he had been feeding. He said that a man could set the whole world down on the credit side of his books and not be able to balance the account if his own soul were over there in the debit column. And so you have it: the human race, a big ditch, and a gentle shove; or a publican wavering on the brink of eternity, without lifting up so much as his eyes unto heaven, and Jesus Christ all a-tremble about it! Take it or leave it; it's just the way he looked at it, this poor uneducated carpenter who never has seemed to some people to know what he was talking about.

Nor did life seem like a senseless round to him, with nothing much to be made out of any of it. There used to be a song called "Manhattan Madness" in which the same words and the same notes were deliberately accented over and over, pounding against your brain with such dreadful monotony as almost to drive you insane. And everybody understood what the writer was aiming at. For all their gaiety and the glare of their bright lights these towns of ours are just dull towns full of circles with people walking around in them. That's the mood which often comes over us at any rate. And Jesus seemed to think that even if your feet were going round and round, you yourself meanwhile might be getting on. You might be forever flying off at a tangent toward God, as he was! Chart his journeys on a map sometime. From Galilee to Jerusalem and home again, across the lake and back, every one of them doubles on itself. How could a man ever get anywhere to and fro like that, going round and round? And he got all the way, in as straight a line as one could draw, from a stable to a cross! He could come in and go out at the same door endlessly, and yet be farther along on his road!

I wonder if we can come at the secret of it? What was it about one's being here that made it so purposeful and so great?

It seems to me that a good deal of our bewilderment, ancient and modern, much of this haunting sense of futility that plagues human life, is merely the result of not knowing where we come from and not being very sure where we're going. You can't expect anybody to be clear as to just why he's on the road if he has no convictions at all about the point of departure and no certainty at all as to his destination. He's like a child away from home that wakes to sudden consciousness during the night and calls out through the darkness to know where it is and why it's there. Tell it of how yesterday it left its father's house and tomorrow will go back; and in that quiet revelation the present fills up with meaning again. It's only a question of getting one's bearings; that's all.

Well, then, where did we come from? The trouble is that what we call our knowledge—and sometimes we pride ourselves on it—doesn't help us much. We know very little about the origin of human life. They tell us it came out of very humble beginnings. Genesis talks about a bit of clay, and biologists talk about an ape, and a reptile, and a fish, and a bit of protoplasm. There isn't much choice between them. Somebody has said that the alternative is mud or monkey. Neither lineage is very proud. This family tree of ours has lowly roots whichever way you take it. That is nothing to be ashamed of, certainly. Nobody judges a thing by its beginnings. As another has pointed out, we do not despise Handel's Messiah because music began with the blowing of conch shells and the beating of tom-toms, nor the Mayo brothers because medicine got its start in the powwowing of witch doctors. But none of this information they give us seems to have any important bearing for our purpose. We aren't especially interested in knowing who our ancestors were, except in certain sections of the country! What we want to know is how it all got going, and why. And I am unable to get any satisfaction on that point from the textbooks. We need not expect any assistance at all in the solution of our problem from what men assert they have discovered about the past. The only thing they say with any assurance is that we have been coming along slowly for a million years or so—Mr. Wells in his History leaves plenty of margin for error—and seem to be here chiefly for the purpose of keeping up the process. And that's no very great illumination.

But what about the future? If modern knowledge will not help us to read our riddle by telling us where we come from, will it help us by telling us where we're going? Again the answer is, "No,—not much." You hear now and then such pronouncements made as this, of Mr. Darrow: "There is no goal in living. If we knew where we were going we could pick out the road. But so far as science, philosophy, or history can throw any light on the subject, we are not going anywhere." That's about the sum of it, I suppose. It may be a little extreme. There are scholars who come in after studying the whole situation and report progress. They say that as a race we are getting on a bit "spiritually." Physically, we may lose a few of our features. Chins and lower jaws seem to be on the run, and perhaps our ears. But otherwise we are doing fairly well. Apparently we are in the way of adapting ourselves better to the so-called spiritual demands that life makes on us. But farther than that no one will say. What the end will be who can tell?

And so we come back pretty much empty-handed to this puzzle of ours: Why are we here? The knowledge of what is behind us is of little use, and there is no knowledge of what is in front of us. And that is the equipment with which the man of the twentieth century who has no religion sets out to solve his problem. I am not surprised that thousands give it up and ask, "What's the answer?" The best they can do is just to go about their business and make what they can out of an unintelligible situation. All they can insist on is that none of it matters, where they come from or where they are going. While they are here they must try to build up some worthy standard and live by it. They must strive to be socially-minded and pure-minded; these things are biologically necessary. They owe it to themselves to give expression to the best that's in them. Beyond that there is nothing.

I leave you to be the judge of whether or not this solution is strong enough to bear the weight of human life. Is there enough here to keep it up and keep it going? How much of permanence can there be in the life either of a civilization or of an individual where no more meaning than that is attached to living? I should like to go on record to the effect that the fundamental weakness of that whole huge structure which humanity is building up and calling modern-day society lies just at this point; of itself it knows nothing of its origin, it knows nothing of its destiny, and it knows nothing of the purpose it is intended to serve. You cannot rear anything on such a foundation. You may as well try to construct a bridge without ends, and with no idea of what it's for, as to try setting up a life that's worth the name with nowhere to start, and nowhere to go, and nothing definite to do on the way.

The only adequate light that is thrown at all is the light that is thrown by the religion of Jesus Christ. It is not that I demand an explanation from Christianity. Christianity is not supposed primarily to furnish us with explanations. But it does have a distinct message that it puts before you for you to accept or reject. It is a message that is not only lovely enough to be becoming from the lips of One Who is Eternal, and Worshipful, and Lifted Up: it's a message that is reasonable enough for anybody to proceed on, and practical enough to transfigure the life that starts out with it for a fact. "Jesus knowing that he was come from God and went to God took a towel and girded himself, and began to wash the disciples' feet." What if that were the meaning of all this mysterious world of human life? What if God were the source of its strange pilgrimage and the white, assured goal of its on-going, with only space enough between for some towel-girded ministry to feet that are weary and journey-worn? You will have to decide for yourself what your solution is going to be. I can only commend this to you as the most radiant of them all. You may not believe it; but at least you must have the grace to uncover your head before the beauty of it!

"Knowing that he was come from God." There is the place to begin. I wish that men would spend a little more time exploring the capacities which establish their kinship with the Infinite, and a little less groveling around in sandpits for some evidence that will link their strain with the beast. It is all very well to be related on one side to my Mother Earth; I am considerably more concerned about my relation on the other side, whether or not it's to my Father God! That is the important relation, and I can draw infinitely more useful conclusions from it. Let's spend our energy on that for a while. It isn't professors we need for our complaint, to tell us "why we behave like human beings"; it's seers, to tell us why so many of us behave like anything but human beings, and how to put an end to it: it's people who will begin laying some stress on the higher and Godward phases of our inheritance; it's folk who will persuade us again somehow, by their lives and bearing, if you please, that

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God,
Who is our home.

That's the consciousness you and I need to have. We need to set about winning it if we have lost it. And no one can say us nay to it. There is something filial in human nature which, if given its chance, will answer to God as an echo answers to a shout. Humanity at its best has always lifted up its head with a strange sense of its high heritage. All that is best in its achievement it has wrought with that conviction upon it. And whenever and wherever that conviction has lost its hold, there has passed away a glory from the earth.

"Knowing that he was come from God and went to God." Will you let that too be true for lesser lives? I have fallen out of love with all our curious questioning about the form and circumstance of that life which is to come. Most modern disbelief owes its origin to some attempt at picturing the modes and conditions of existence on the other side of death. By the very nature of human experience the terms of that existence are unintelligible to us. Nobody knows anything about them or can know. Only, as some one else has written, because I believe in man and am not ashamed of my faith; and because I believe in God; because I believe in the value of my neighbour's life as in my best moments I believe in the preciousness of my own; and because I believe that there is a dependable Factor in the Universe, revealed to me as my Father in Jesus Christ, whose power I can rely on to take care of this that He has done—because I believe these things, I believe that nothing shall pluck my life out of His hands forever! "Knowing that he went to God." We are not going anywhere? Before the face of Christ I will not put my hand to that. We are going home to God, every step, today, tomorrow, sleeping, waking, resting, toiling—all the way home to God; and God is here! We are under "sentence of life," and we will not "petition that it be commuted to death"—life running Godward through Eternity!

And now I wonder if you will believe in the sheer loveliness of this conclusion? "Jesus knowing that he was come from God and went to God took a towel,"—what a sequence it is!—such knowledge followed by such a ministry!

With such knowledge what would you do? "Took a towel and girded himself and began to wash the disciples' feet." The next time you are inclined to ask what it's all about, just try supposing that it's all about us, and the tender mercy we can show to weary lives, dusty from the road, and with the stain of travel on them. It would be a high mission, would it not? Men who have served in it have had greatness thrust upon them. Do you suppose the day will ever come when the world shall find in that Spirit the solution of all its difficulties and the way out of all its anguish? It is so utterly clear, so simple a remedy for the troubled wrongs of living. Here we are in the midst of a life that is sick for love, where everything that's awry is awry because there isn't enough love; in an order where love is the only discoverable way of salvation, as God knows it's the only hope of our own. Well, what if that were the answer? Love willing to gird itself in the service of humanity; Love willing to stoop because it comes from a Throne to its task, and when the task is done goes to a Throne again; Love that can afford to be lowly because it's great; Love that a soul can grow by, and it cloth not yet appear what it shall be? I say, what if that were the answer? And Christ were real? And Eternity itself nothing but an adventure with God in Love, which is the only thing that can make even Eternity worth while!

"If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself."— Galatians 6:3

PAUL was very much concerned about such people. He must have known a multitude of them. His letters are full of signboards and notices. "If any man think that he knoweth anything," he writes to the Corinthians, "he knoweth nothing yet." And to the Romans, "I say to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think." It's apparent what trouble they were making in more than one community. He was in no position, of course, to give their ailment a scientific name; but it was just as bad as the same ailment is now, correctly labeled. The fact is, they had a superiority complex; although to say they were "puffed up" might serve almost as well, or that they were suffering from a very particular sort of "inflation." They were giving themselves airs and putting themselves forward. They had what Dr. Luccock of Yale calls the "itch for honors."

It's well now and then to snicker at it: there would be less use in Paul's writing about it, and certainly no use at all in my doing it, if more of us had some saving sense of humor. But for the most part it's serious business with us, full of heartaches. "Can you suggest a book," read a letter I received not long ago, "which will bring me to realize the majesty of God and my own insignificance?" And there followed the brief story of a self that had grown monstrous and grotesque, until it seemed like the biggest thing in the world. "If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself." That may be comedy where it begins; but frequently enough it's tragedy where it ends!—the tragedy of a self that's out of focus. It's the blur on many a man's picture of life.

Now there are two methods of blurring a picture. Either you get too near, and everything becomes Gargantuan and shadowy, or else you get too far away and the whole scene fades into an indistinguishable distance. Precisely the same kind of distortion is likely to occur in the realm of personality. There is a self that's entirely too large, and there is a self that's entirely too small. Let us look at them both.

First are these people who have fallen into the habit of living quite too near themselves, so close, in fact, that even when they are alone they feel crowded! They sit up with themselves, and consult with themselves; they think of themselves and talk of themselves. When they go abroad it's a parade, and when they stay at home it's a gathering! They stick out like a band-major in a hall of mirrors!

Give the thing its racial significance, and you have what used to be called the theory of "Nordic supremacy." We spoke of Southern Europe with condescension, and of Asia with contempt. We wrote immigration laws about it, and exported as much of our superior civilization to the more benighted parts as we found profitable. No longer did we think that a dark-skinned Abraham could be the father of the faithful: we were sure that there was a preference for blondes in the very nature and scheme of things! "The one imperceptible but decisive difference," writes Elmer Barnes in an article On the Gentility of the Gentiles, "is that Jews are Jews, whatever that means, and we are Aryan Protestants, even though our Aryanism is quite theoretical and our Protestantism somewhat vestigial. Ask any of us and we would admit that Aryan Protestants are the salt of the earth, though we should not say so without being asked. That would be vulgar boasting; and, anyhow, we feel that the fact is self-evident."

Give this same malady its national significance, and you have the too-per-cent American, a big-navy man, and strong for the intrenched wrongs of any system under which he is free to be a "go-getter." I remember one of them in Rome, with his own hometown newspaper under his arm, looking out over the Forum and complaining of his hotel accommodations! I traveled with him through Italy and Switzerland, saw him later in France and England. When we got back to the States he wrote to me, signing his letter, "Yours for Europe in 1987, or thereafter!"

"If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself." Coming on down from racial and national pathologies, you have the distressing case of all the spoiled children who with a fistful of real estate or a talent or two go about through life saying their pieces, and expecting the whole world to hang on their lips. Such a one came to Jesus by night under the falling shadows in the ancient city of Jerusalem. And Jesus, seeing how it was with him, spoke softly of the wind stirring in the tree-tops, how it blows where it will, and one hears the sound of it, but cannot tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. Since then, among other things, we have made a study of the wind. No sooner does it begin to tiptoe through the forest, setting all the leaves of the poplar agog with the witchery of its whispered confidence, than somebody from the Weather Bureau shatters our dreams by calling for an anemometer to measure its velocity. Then, what with geodetics and barometrics, he tells us exactly where it comes from and exactly where it's going—maybe! It's very distressing how much we know about everything!

And Nicodemus. Nicodemus knew too much. That's apparent to anybody who reads the story there in the third chapter of St. John. He was an expert. His specialty was religion and he thought he knew all there was to know about it. He knew just what kind of person he was supposed to be. He had read about it in the books. As regards the technique of getting there, on that he was exceedingly well posted. The very first words he uttered were "Rabbi, we know . . ." If you will follow it through after that you will find how necessary Jesus thought it was to shatter that false sense of security, that illusion of certainty, that self-complacent smugness into which this "ruler of the Jews" had fallen with his knapsack of knowledge. One bewilderment succeeds another, until the climax of them all is reached in that gentle bit of irony: "Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things?" From that day on Nicodemus knew less and wondered more, while the mastery of a radiant life resolved itself before his eyes into the mystery of a cross and an empty tomb.

But there is the other side of the picture; one must not forget that: the self that's out of focus because it has got away to such a distance that it seems even to itself microscopic and indistinct. The psychologists tell us that the most offensive arrogance, strange as it may seem, is frequently due to this hidden, often unconscious sense—if I may use those two words together!—of inferiority. There is such a thing as a self which feels so small that it has to strut and push out its chest, or it's quite sure nobody would pay any attention to it at all! The next time some one lords it over you, or snubs you, try remembering that; and instead of pique, see if you can't manage a bit of sympathy. Nine times out of ten that's what it calls for, believe it or not! It's such a pathetic world, this world of human life, that people with only a little understanding hardly have the leisure to be angry!

Just think of the bare physical hazards a soul has to overleap if it wants to see itself in some proper perspective. Let me put it in the words of Sir James jeans: "Standing on our fragment of a grain of sand, our first impression is akin to terror. . . . Vast meaningless distance. . . . Inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye. . . . Extreme loneliness. . . . Indifference. . . . Hot, burning stars. . . . Cold, frozen space... . To strut one tiny hour on such a tiny stage, and leave it as though we had never been!"—leave it to the

Little wonder that life has come to think of itself now and then as hardly more than an incident in the long process of the years, and an almost unspeakably insignificant incident at that—"not only a complete illusion or mirage," writes Theodore Dreiser, "which changes and so eludes one at every point, but the most amazing fanfare of purely temporary and in the main clownish and ever ridiculous interests that it has ever been my lot to witness—interests which concern at best the maintenance here of innumerable self-centered and cruel organisms whose single and especial business it is to exist each at the expense of the other—if it were only by cutting each other's hair, and no more!"

Then take the social hazards: not only this thought of the ceaseless crowd that streams past through the dust of our pigmy planet and jostles us day and night into nameless obscurity; but Organization, that greatest of all monsters in an Age of Dinosaurs—that modern Caesar which

doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves!

We feel ourselves to be helpless in politics, helpless in economics, helpless in industry, helpless even in religion, with its committees and its boards, its headquarters and its secretaries!

And there are the spiritual hazards; for we are not much better off when it comes to managing our own internal affairs! We are the veterans of many defeats. There are times when we have very little confidence left, and not much self-respect. Then they tell us that the weak faith we do cherish is nothing but a way of escape for our own helplessness—we here with our frustrations, our inabilities and inhibitions, and the bitterness of all our harsh lot in the world.

I am not surprised that such folk, longing forever to be great, try to smoothe it over for themselves sometimes by marching about with a strip of tinsel—any tinsel will do—and a blessed bit of gold braid! One hardly has the leisure to be angry. Poor apostles, quarreling over who should be greatest in the kingdom of heaven! Jesus wasn't angry: He was nearer to tears, I think, than to anger when he took a towel and girded himself. And Paul didn't have his blood up. It was just the heartache he wanted to save them: "If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself."

And so this New Testament, to keep you from seeming too large, stands you up—not by the side of immensity; after all, what does that matter ?—but by the side of Love. And you can't see how long it is, or how broad; you can't see how high it is, or how deep! It goes trailing its gigantic shadow down little lanes in Palestine, and across the threshold of a widow's home. With its hand it touches everything it sees, making no parade, eager to believe the best, never mindful of a wrong, knowing how to be silent. And at last it lays out its young arms on a beam of wood, and answers the first stroke of the hammer with a prayer under which this eavesdropping humanity of ours has been peeping about ever since—God whispering something to make every man's grave dishonorable: "Father, forgive them!" I for one can stare lightyears and interstellar space between the eyes without being very much upset; but I can't stand in front of that and put my thumbs in my armholes! I have overheard God once, and lost a good deal of my stride!

But this Book is not yet content. It knows a Love like that can hurt a man more than anything else in the world; until he begins to look furtively around, then tries to slink away and get his poverty out of sight. Judas must have felt it, only to tear his desperate way out of that obscurity at last by lifting his hand against

Let Love look to itself when by its very infinities it dwarfs and shrivels a soul out of its self-respect! Not content, this Book catches me up, lest I seem too small from gazing that way into the eyes of God, and on every page it does me honor. It weighs my life in the hollow of its hand and from cover to cover bows its head. It takes up here the glory of the fields, and the flair Whoever is back of this world has for birds and flowers; it takes the heavens, the work of His fingers, the moon and the stars which He has ordained; it takes 99 per cent of all the human life this God has carefully got together—"Which of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, will not straightway leave the ninety-and-nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost until he find it?"—and my one homeless soul outweighs them all, by a cross, as some one stoops down under a stable door and lights a fire on the hearth of the world, and making as if to go away but forever lingering murmurs, "I have called you friends!"

Hand in hand run these balanced moods: this beating on the breast which breaks through the dull and lever years of Jacob's middle life, "Not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which Thou hast shewed Thy servant"; then the soft wonder of a shepherd lad's song as he lies dreaming there under the stars: "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor." Across the years the plaintive minor is caught up again by a greater than Jacob: "Not worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes—not worthy." And like a shout from Isaiah, "I, have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. . . . I gave Egypt for thy ransom. . . . Thou wast precious in my sight." Away in a far country something falls whisperingly from the lips of a prodigal, keeping time with the plodding steps that have turned homeward : "Not worthy to be called thy son—not worthy." When suddenly a fisherman waves his hand out of a ruined world: "Blessed be God, who hath begotten us again to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away." And Paul, brooding bitterly over the past—"least of all the apostles, not meet"—dashing the tears from his eyes —"not meet to be called an apostle"; but in an instant all girded again: "The life that I now live I live by the faith of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." "Wherefore," he adds, with a quiet presumption nobody shall ever restrain—"Wherefore be ye imitators of God, as dear children, and walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing."

"The self that's out of focus." Surely there is One Who has done what He could to make the picture clear! And now that the lines are a little less blurred perhaps than they were, to keep us from sitting here longer, interesting as we are to ourselves, He dismisses the whole thing with a gesture quite Galilean: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." What if that, after all, were the secret of it?

JOHN the Baptist, down there is his prison-house, had his doubts about this mild-mannered Christ. He couldn't seem to fit such a Messiah into his scheme of things; with Jehovah at the top, and human rebellion at the bottom, and judgment like flashes of lightning all the way between. He expected an earthquake and a tempest and a fire; and all he got was a still small voice. It was not easy to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with this carpenter of the New.

And Jesus understood. There was hardly even a trace of disappointment in his bearing. He knew what risks he ran against the background of that long past by being the kind of Christ he was; how quite the best of men could readily enough, perhaps inevitably would, mistake his tenderness for impotence and his unresisting humility for a certain poverty of spirit. It was not a thought with any comfort in it, and hardly waiting for the messengers to leave with his answer he turned to wipe the sneers off the faces of the crowd by springing gallantly to John's defense, letting fall in the interval only this wistful benediction, "Blessed is he, whosoever is not offended in me."

One does not fully get the sense of it without going back of these English words. It is Jesus' sad glimpse of himself down the years. For one prophetic moment he sees the words which he has spoken become a kind of scandal, with people floundering about through them miles away from the truth that he meant. He sees the love that he bore, and it is no longer a broad highway running straight up to God; but for many a tragic soul, taking left turns from his purpose, beating around wrong corners, is become a block to stumble over. He may well have drawn his hand across his forehead, trying to rub the pain of it out of his mind; folk snatching up some poor half of a promise, with eyes all aglow, hugging it close, and staggering off so far from God with it that at last there is nothing to do but to drag out the dry meaningless thing and snap it and throw it away. He, the Light of the World, and perhaps you there gumbling at it, and then suddenly reeling down into the windy dark with only a tiny bit of the flame, that pulls and holds and pulls again and breaks free; because it never was enough, your little orphaned fire, to last out a stormy night! And he had to run that risk! "Not offended in me."

Look at this for a moment. He had to run the risk of taking the majesty away from God, leaving Him forever in the eyes of men like a young Galilean, trailing a mystic, alien glory around through life and death, yet friendly and close, with common sandals on his feet, and a garment's hem that a shy woman could touch, and hands for anybody to nail on wood. I wonder if it has ever occurred to you how great a hazard that was. It was necessary enough. Humanity could not go on till doomsday picturing its God in distant and Oriental splendor, doing all its whispering in the ear of a priest, and all its listening at the mouth of a prophet, dodging its far-away Sovereign under clouds of incense, and spreading over its sins the smoke of sacrifice. For four hundred years there had been few voices like the great voices, and the gulf of that frequent silence seemed to be growing wider and wider. Until a child was born. They had to flee with him into Egypt. His boyhood he spent at Nazareth, learning a trade. He became a carpenter, and then for a few short months a teacher. He insulted a thousand traditions, and died quite harmlessly on a gallows. Some said they saw him after, and little groups here and there over the Empire began to worship him. They began to breathe his name as though it were God's own. Gratefully we do it still. We always shall. But don't you see? Hiding somewhere behind the garments of Jesus of Nazareth, ever and again peeping out at us, is the peril of thinking too cosily of God!

All we have left of His unthinkable state is a set of adjectives—the Ever-Present, the All-Powerful, the All-Knowing—and we write them with capital letters, and they don't mean anything! They are words, with the idea gone out of them; and in its place is a man by a lake, traveling down dusty lanes, standing in the temple baited about by angry eyes. And because he had to bring the Eternal near like that we have grown familiar with God, being by birth democratic and American! We have subjected Him to what we are pleased to call our intellectual processes, as though He were one of us. We come to Him with the sad little problems of an uncourageous faith. Solemn gentlemen get up in solemn pulpits and tell us not to pray for rain, or for health, or for safety in the midst of danger; not to pray for anything, in fact, except moral courage and a better disposition, though these, too, no doubt depend largely on the state of one's liver! Jesus Christ, poor fellow, talked of God as though He were a Father that knew folk's names and cared about them; but that was the primitive religion of an early day when everything was neat and simple. Now that we have acquired variables and protons and a few more dimensions, we must not be so childish. Let's see: how can a good God allow so much pain and anguish in His world? Or look at this: and we take to puzzling about His purpose when somebody dies that we think should have lived longer. We shake our wise heads, and sometimes we smile, at the thought of His knowing us; we are too many to know! Or we laugh outright at the question of where He will put us all in Eternity. If we can't understand enough of this business we'll throw it over, that's what! And so we come to that last absurdity, a man denying God because the man can't seem to make sense of a number of things! I had a friend once who insisted on classifying the miracles: the raising of the dead he ruled out; the stilling of the tempest and the walking on water he underscored and put a large question-mark at the end; while the healing of the sick he thought we could allow! He was sure the Eternal could be swallowed more comfortably with modern improvements! What seems to me the final word in brain power was arrived at by a minister not long ago. He argued that God could not possibly make a ten-year-old truck in two minutes! Well, Mr. Einstein or Mr. Eddington or Mr. Jeans, any one of them could indicate the method. I know something about it myself, in case God has forgotten! The whole business is unutterably childish.

And we have got ourselves tangled up in it because we have run off with nothing but the nook and chimney-side of God in Jesus Christ. He never meant that we should. He thought we could still see the kingdom and the power and the glory in the carpenter's shop and on the porch in Bethany. He was confident we need not leave our awe behind us and all our humility just because He came among us once so simply, without any islands or any stars on his mind, but only Peter and Mary and you and me.

What a pity it is, when you come to think of it, that humility should be such an unpopular virtue with us! It would seem so necessary, and it ought to be so natural. Not that kind of furtive thing, sheepish and ill-at-ease, that the dramatic critic was thinking of when he wrote of a certain actor that So-and-so played the king in "Lear" last night as though he were momentarily expecting somebody else to play the ace! There is a mood which has nothing to do with hanging your head, or being brow-beaten, or feeling ashamed. It's the inevitable bearing of a great soul before the mystery and the grandeur of life. It's the modesty of all beauty, the quiet unobtrusiveness of the midnight sky. It's the simplicity of art, the delicacy of music, the chastity of marble. It's the wonder of the soul, the dawn of a day, the sound of the wind, the breath of a child, the laughter in the heart of God!

What if He were a greater God than any you and I have ever imagined? What if we hadn't even begun to know anything about Him, or His ways of working, or His plans, except that He loves us undiscourageably, as Jesus said? What if He were to be a mystery to us forever, right through Eternity, except that in so far as we can learn to know Him He is like that carpenter from Nazareth? Once in a while it comes over us with the suddenness of a revelation, and all our largest thought of Him seems infinitesimal. I remember one who spoke to me of suffering. "Why should God permit it?" he asked. And then on the instant his eyes went large. "Surely I know," he answered himself. "I have seen a captain send one of his men, a friend of his, to certain death; and the man spent no time in asking why. He saluted and went. I don't know why, and I'm not asking. I'm just saluting, if that's my post. He knows. This much I understand." And there, I thought, stood Jesus Christ, that gallant, unquestioning guest at a feast where the only bounty was bitterness! One could bow one's head with his! It was like the sweep of some exulting tide, from which I hope I shall never settle down! The majesty of God! Somehow I got home, and read again from the book of Job:

When I founded the earth, where were you then?
Who helped to shut in the sea, when it burst from the womb of chaos?
Have you ever roused the morning, given directions to the dawn?
What path leads to the home of Light, and where does Darkness dwell?

Have you seen the arsenals of the hail?
Have showers a human sire?
Who was the father of the dew?

One day a fisherman trembled and tried to fend off the glory that he saw: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." And he fell down on his knees and covered his face. John, with the waves beating against the rocks on Patmos—John saw, and wrote in poetry; it was the only way he could write it! "In the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about with a golden girdle. His head and his hair were white, and his eyes as a flame of fire. The feet were as brass burned in a furnace, and his voice as the sound of many waters." And John lay at his feet as one dead.

It's a dreary sight this, watching men stroll around before the face of God like a committee on investigation, believing what they choose, saying this and saying that, whistling a tune, making Him pay for being born in a stable. But Jesus had to risk it. And there, I think, was one of the sorrows of God which you will never be able to put into words. I remember stopping behind some workmen one day and staring at them unthinkingly as bit by bit they set a mosaic in its place above the altar of a church. All at once what they were doing seemed to break through into my consciousness, and there was a sudden lump in my throat—slowly they were piecing together around the figure of Jesus an aureole of light! To me for that moment it was the eternal parable of Mary's son, bound to leave the glory until men with seeing eyes should put the glory back!

But there was another risk he ran. He took all the blood and nails out of forgiveness and gathered them into his own body on a cross. He reached out his hand over a woman and said, "Neither do I condemn thee." And over a paralytic, "Son, thy sins be forgiven." He threw his arms wide open with invitation. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." He came quietly to the door of every man's life and knocked; if anybody would unbar it, he said, he would come in. It all seemed so unspeakably easy. The only courtesy he asked was the simple grace of hospitality.

And it was so necessary. Humanity could not be allowed to go on forever trying to win God's pardon by slaying beasts, hoping to earn their way into heaven by washing their hands and making broad their phylacteries and measuring how far a tailor could walk on the Sabbath if he left his needle at home! There were proud, well people, called Pharisees; and hordes of hopeless, sick people, called sinners; and there was never a question in the mind of Jesus about the gospel he had to preach and where he had to preach it. He went with the promise of God's favor and God's power out where the ruins were, and there was no loyalty, and there was no obedience, and there was only a little love left, struggling up through the crevices of a hundred broken commandments; and to that little love he gave himself, bearing its guilt and its grief, asking to be taken in, and saying that nothing was impossible for him. It had to be that way. But don't you see? Hiding somewhere behind the mercy of Jesus of Nazareth, and his utter willingness to do quite all of it if we would let him, ever and again peeping out at us, is the peril of thinking too softly of religion.

Because its terms were so simple, here and there men began to sentimentalize about it. Sin was a thing that could hardly be said to matter any more. Sir Oliver Lodge still insists that intelligent folk never worry their heads about it. During the Middle Ages it turned into a sort of bugbear used to frighten men and women into the arms of the Church. With us it has become a mild sort of psychosis; all we have to do to be free of it is to learn to think correctly. And it goes on, this ghastly "fiction," building its Calvaries, until they stand about like a wilderness of crosses on the fields of Flanders or in your morning news! But humanity keeps tampering with it lightly, instructed by philosophers that faith is just the way we have of settling down in foolish fancies, poor, weak souls that we are, bound to find some compensation for the cruelties of life; and that Christianity is only our particular road out of reality into some imagined peace, when the battle is too hot, and we want to lie down on our arms and rest awhile.

And so stout fellows, shrugging their shoulders at such milk-and-water religion, go about doing what they like to describe as facing the facts, without any God at all; plunging into life with zest, never once fooling themselves into thinking that anybody cares; thrusting at the old order frequently enough with higher minds than some of us, who left it alone so long; calling back over their shrugs, like Naaman, that our Jordan is too sluggish and muddy for them—they know cleaner rivers by far!

But Jesus had to risk it. He was quite sure if he should go to the cross men would see. They couldn't look at that, and go away, and think unmoved that forgiveness is, after all, a little affair that costs nothing. He was sure we wouldn't smile any more at our tempers and our selfishness and our daily cowardices as though they didn't really amount to anything, and we could wipe them out with a gesture. He would show us how desperate it all was, that "the great and holy God should bear with us who have been so deliberate and so impudent and so stubborn with the wrong we have done." And he hung there. It wasn't Maeterlinck's God, writes another, sitting on a sunny mountain, smiling at the naughtiness of puppies playing on the hearth rug! It was Jesus' kind of God, "bowing Himself in agony and darkness; and every bit of it was needed, all God had, wounded and heartbroken and just enough!" Whoever would call that Galilean's religion soft, and settle back in it with a comfortable sigh, or turn up his nose at it, and talk it down, and look around for something else?

And there at the last, with true bounty, he gave them his own cup to drink: "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you"—straightaway yonder into the world's teeth to redeem it. That was faith, the quiet opening of a door, so easy was it; but after—? Ah, then, the traveling of a road that never could grow smoother than God's!

I don't know what you are thinking of that God, or of this religion of yours. I only know it was a brave risk that Jesus ran, bringing them both within your common reach, and hoping, as he drew his hand across his forehead, that you wouldn't let it do you any harm!

IT WAS not just a demonstration or a parade; it was a royal procession. For this one day there should be a Prince again, of the House of David, coming down with pomp into the ancient city of the King. Here in our Western world we have little to do with the kind of thought that made it possible. For two centuries now we have been busy upsetting thrones in a very epidemic of democracy. Scepters and crowns and majesty by the grace of God are only romantic memories for poets and novelists to dream over. In the quaint old Bruton parish church at Williamsburg, Virginia, they still show you a Revolutionary prayerbook in which the Kingdom of Heaven by careful editing has become a republic, and Christ himself, while allowed half of his title, Lord of Lords, is denied the other half by having a neat line drawn through King of Kings!

In that change I have more than an antiquarian's interest. Every thoughtful person who deals much with human life must reckon with it, not as though it were a mere difference in the framework of our religious ideas, but as exerting a profound influence on the very content and character of the ideas themselves. Men used to think of God and destiny against the background of a feudal and aristocratic state. Sovereignty was a word they understood, and they felt themselves at home among all its implications and its disciplines. Today what thinking they do they must do against the background of a government that is of the people and by the people and for the people, where God Himself holds office by a sort of popular consent, and Christ retains, or is forced to relinquish, his position as the result of certain local elections! Christianity, born in an altogether opposite environment, has had to accommodate itself to democratic traditions, what I have called a middle-class psychology; and the issue has not been thoroughly happy. As a matter of fact, among the forces that two thousand years ago compassed the death of Jesus of Nazareth, you will find three at least which in our modern world we have exalted to the rank of cardinal doctrines. In the face of them I should be quite uneasy for him if he were to come again.

The first is the doctrine of equality. As regards the theory, no one could possibly have any complaint to make. Men ought to be born free and equal in the eyes of the Law, though we are practical enough to understand that even this is an ideal which human society has hardly yet begun to approximate. We have very few illusions about it. That men are not born free and equal in any other respect we know without being told. Circumstances and heredity take care of that. But we rarely have the time to be so intelligent about it. What really gets across to the popular mind—the fact that it simply isn't true doesn't seem to matter much—is the notion that everybody is just as good as everybody else, and has just as good a chance to be highly successful and widely envied. If there is a log cabin somewhere in the family tree, that's an asset, more to be desired than an ancestor on the Mayflower, yea, than many fine ancestors. We like your humble beginnings here in this land of opportunity, entered on the east under the Statue of Liberty, and on the west through the Golden Gate, fourteen karats fine! Look at Mr. Rockefeller; he's no better than you are! And Mr. Ford, just an ordinary man who has got ahead! It shows what can be done! Even the President makes it clear over the radio that he is simply one of us. Women are no better than men, and artists are no better than mechanics, and the man with the hoe is a splendid fellow, and we are all one big happy family. Keep your hat on and your chin up. It's magnificent!

And so one day, because some scribes and Pharisees couldn't see anything better than they were, a young carpenter from Galilee died on a cross! "Is this not Joseph's son, whose brothers and sisters we know?" And in a fine spirit of complete equality they drove nails through his hands and feet! That word equality always has been a word to send shivers up my spine. They got it on their lips in the French Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—and all they could think of was cutting off other people's heads to demonstrate their blessed trinity! Odd, isn't it, how freedom and universal brotherhood work themselves out when they really get going? The hut tears down the palace, and the gutter stones the saint, and after a while everybody is on a level with everybody else.

Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with building that kind of world; he lost his life in it! He was not the champion of the under dog who wanted get on top. He was the champion to be, which is an amazingly different thing, and of its inalienable right to grow in the image of God. Artificial distinctions were nothing to him,—wealth and position and social prestige. Genuine distinctions—justice and mercy and love—were everything. His whole kingdom was an aristocracy, an aristocracy of spiritual stature! There were lordships and degrees of nobility, "Thou hast been faithful over a little, I will make thee ruler over much." There were kings and priests. There always would be. Equality was a thing for pygmies to snatch at, until only pygmies were left; then they could all chuckle together, and rub their hands, and call it democracy. But there were realms and "empires great' for human souls to wear their knighthood in! There were principalities and powers and thrones to sit on! "Let him who would be great among you be the servant of all." I don't see why we have to go on forever getting all stirred up over the wrong things, as though Lazarus that day had taken to jabbering excitedly about being just as good as Dives, while all along in reality the only dignity there was lay there at the gate with the dog licking its sores; there wasn't any dignity at the head of the table! You may be sure God has His gentlefolk and His peerage, all the way from the least to the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. And there isn't a life that can't tower up grandly!

Second in the democratic tradition is the worshipful doctrine of "rugged individualism." It goes about saying: "Let me alone. I can stand on my own feet. I'll get there, and everything will be all right, if you will just quit meddling with me." There is a beautiful independence about it, as in the case of the Stock Exchange, or the securities market, and all the folk who do not wish to be controlled in the public interest. Let every man fix his own price, and live his own life, and produce his own goods, and gather his own shekels; something in the nature of things called the economic balance will offset everybody's selfishness if you stop fooling with it.

It's what the author of Anthony Adverse describes as a sort of feline philosophy in that scene where the young hero first climbs the high wall around his little world and gazes out on the wide strange earth, wondering what it means. Suddenly along the eaves from one end of the roof to the other slinks a cat with a pigeon in its mouth. "Ah," whispers the lad in effect, as a light goes out of his eyes, "so that's it!"

And here riding through the gates of Jerusalem is a man who squandered the only "rugged individualism" he had by marching alone to a cross! It was the disciples who made use of theirs to get away, each for himself—let Death take the hindmost! It's just futile, this trying to shape our lives like his, as long as he goes on holding his point of view and we go on holding ours—hoping that if we keep diligently tinkering with the issues of it every day, after a time God Himself won't be able to tell the difference! There is something fundamental inside of us that has to be changed, and no philosophy that fixes its eyes on the main chance six days out of seven is going to be of any great assistance!

Living is done together, not separately: folk have to start with that whether they like it or not, if they mean to preserve any sanity at all. Look at this tragic bundle of debts—a homeless Jew, who has just slept in a borrowed room and rides on a borrowed colt. Around him are a few borrowed fishermen who have lent him their garments, and borrowed hosannas to keep the stones from singing. And these lives of ours are like that for all our declarations of independence, we who dwell here together under the common bounty and in the mercy of God! Surely nothing else matters but the hands we hold out!

Dr. David James Burrell told us once of George Matheson, the author of that hymn "O Love that wilt not let me go." He stood with a few of his friends on the rocky coast of Ireland, his radiant face with its sightless eyes turned toward the sea, the scent of the salt wind in his nostrils, and the feel of all the green and the gray and the blue in his soul. Suddenly he drew a deep breath and circled his arms around the two who were nearest him, whispering to them, "Isn't it beautiful?" "Do you know?" whispered one. "Yes," came the answer, "I know, and much of it through you."

Finally, you will discover here in the story that third doctrine of our democratic psychology, built up out of the workings of the middle-class mind—the doctrine of the majority vote. We think somehow that if we weigh all the pros of popular opinion in one hand and all the cons in the other we can tell at a glance what's best for everybody! Unfortunately for all such ordeals by arithmetic, Jesus of Nazareth died on a majority vote for Barabbas! Absent and no voting: Peter, Andrew, James, and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew. But wait! There is one vote for Jesus! A man named Judas, throwing his thirty coins on the stone floor and crying aloud the anguish that's in his heart, "I have betrayed innocent blood."

I should like sometime to write the story of Judas' life. It doesn't seem to me to be just the sordid tragedy of a covetous soul. That's how it looked to the men that set it down, and the pitying God knows they set it down often enough! He had the bag, they said, and was a thief. And they kept saying it. But motives are not always so simple. Back of the record, in the dark mind of that man from Kerioth, one senses the play of gigantic, shadowy forces swaying back and forth in their silent rivalry. In that moving bit of stage-writing, "The Dark Hours," Don Marquis has him call himself "a city full of spirits, and they riot in the streets. I am bewitched," he cries, "I am a cavern full of ghosts which war with one another, and they cry out and make a windy tumult in my head." There were dreams, too. "I thought he was to be a king, and I should have been his chamberlain. . . . There was a night when I stood upon a hill and saw the world swirl past me. Cities and armies, tribes and senates and navies all melted to a mist and went swirling by beneath the stars. The wind and sound beat upon my ears and I guessed something of the iron delight of power."

Whatever it was, he stands there now, and to watch him is like gazing out over a poor, scarred battlefield with nothing but lifeless, gaping wounds to show for all its once fair promise. "I have sinned." It's like the publican's beating on his breast, not even bold enough to pray! It's his Miserere Nobis, his Litany from the farthest place to which Life can get away from God! It's his worshipful, last hail to the best he has ever seen, those long sea-miles yonder from this desert here!—a sort of Te Deum Laudamus from hell! "We praise Thee, 0 God: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!" And out of his God-lonely kiss the carpenter built that symbol of hope on our altar, and this wistful memorial to a broken heart,—aye, two broken hearts: "They took the thirty pieces of silver, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in." A Love that moves its hand over the sin and leaves nothing behind but its own fragrance—to bury strangers in!

Away yonder in Greece they had said, "The voice of the people is the voice of God." And this is what has come of it!—a silent Figure climbing a hill, and the priests sneering at the one wild vote that was cast for him that bitter day! The polls were already closed. There in the judgment-hall Pilate had long since put the question, "Shall I crucify your king?" And the "Ayes" had it with a roar. I shouldn't know what to say if God three days later hadn't vetoed it—this story of an evil cross that men made one day, and laughed, and went downtown, and left Him to take it up in His hands and splinter it! The fact is, you see, that it's twenty centuries too late now for God to lose, no matter how the majority votes!

Yes, there is little doubt of it, it's an unfriendly world still for Christ to be going about in it so wistfully. I have no sentimental illusions on that score. Some of the deepest prejudices to which we have been born, and in which we have been trained, are set dead against him. We have built a civilization out of them. Much of our thinking we do inside of them. We call it thinking, this rubbing of a few slogans together, "free and equal," "every man for himself," "the ayes have it, and it's so ordered"; then marching around and feeling very democratic. They are the perils of Jesus.

But thank God this day there is a Kingdom beyond them, with shining dignities for a soul to grow in—a life to be found by losing it, and the gallant fellowship of one who has become accustomed to solitary triumphs, whatever crowd it is that tries to shout him down and nail him out of sight!

"But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it"— Luke 11:28

ANY show of sentimentality Jesus was bound to treat with very scant courtesy. He had just finished an excellent sort of sermon, brief but devastatingly effective, when suddenly a dear soul lifted up her voice and said, "How happy your mother must be to have a son like you!" And she no doubt folded her hands and shook her head, with tears in her eyes! Most modern preachers, I think, would very modestly have deprecated such a compliment with a smile, and been secretly pleased no end! Jesus was afraid of it. It was not likely to do him any harm, but it might hurt her. It was the kind of bubbly emotion that was hardly less debauching than immorality itself. Have her keep it up long enough, and "her soul, if she still had one, would wither and die." He could not let it pass. No, he said. I will tell you who it is that is happy: it is the man or the woman who hears the word of God and keeps it! You can't just throw in a few exclamations like yours, with congratulations and best wishes, and expect them to serve instead! "They that hear the word of God and keep it!" Nothing else will do. Nothing!

Which reminds me that we of the modern world run merrily along trying to find something else, anyhow! We spend a good deal of our time suggesting or attempting some kind of substitute—this or that which may prove almost as helpful as being religious. The tears of the story here, for instance, these folded hands, this sweetly heaving bosom, are still with us. A little later I am going to call it the cult of the beautiful, and submit it to you for closer examination—the mood that mistakes for Christianity own stewing about in a welter of sentiment and with pious phrases passes by as much of the Galilean's naked truth as possible. Then when we are through with aesthetics I shall ask you to step over directly opposite and take a look with me for a moment at the cult of fact, which takes up quite a bit of room too, shrugs its shoulders at the sermon on the mount, believes in realism and arithmetic—especially in "uglification and derision," as the mock turtle said to Alice —and much prefers indexes to liturgies and statistics to creeds. But all that is after a while. I mean to begin with the largest and most familiar of the cults that have come to walk so brazenly down the middle of the road, disputing the right of way with the Nazarene; the cult of bigness and size, of length and breadth and thickness, of how much and how many. If a faith is that which elicits response and devotion, then here is one of the major faiths of mankind.

Particularly, I think, is that true of us here in America. It may be by way of compensation, maneuvered away as we have been increasingly from our respect for the individual; from men, turned into "the masses;" flattered and then forgotten by politicians, sent out by the millions every once in a while for cannon-fodder, exploited meantime by money-makers, defined biologically as a bit of decaying matter on the epidermis of a pygmy planet, and psychoanalyzed into creatures of habit fourteen years old mentally! I say it may be by way of compensation that we go scurrying about here in America to pile up one huge concern on top of another. At any rate, that seems to be the method of all others by which we hope to assert the value of our selfhood. What impresses us most, apparently, is size and numbers. One hardly knows whether to call it our national religion or our national disease. We are both its devotees and its victims. Radio City in New York is its temple and mother church, where everything is done with such impressive grandeur that God Himself could hardly have arranged better, for more striking effects! To see the lights go on is like being present at Creation!

It's the same sort of fascination that comes over us when we read of assets that run up into hundreds of millions, and of a universe which has for a diameter in miles an eighteen followed by seventeen zeroes! Not that anybody knows anything about these figures; frankly, they are just plain nonsense. There haven't been enough seconds since the Almighty said, "Let there be light," to get more than a third of the way through counting some of them! But we rattle them off with no little zest. The thrill they give us, says Spengler, is peculiar to Western mankind. "We have a significant passion for gigantic sums," he goes on, "for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements; and in the civilization of today that passion is playing a conspicuous part."

In pursuit of it we give our lives over to mechanical regulation. We have learned, insists Keyserling, to live without a soul, more and more finding full expression for all that we are and mean in the bare external progress we are making. Our shoes, instead of being cobbled by poets like Hans Sachs, are turned out at the hands of a few score men and women who push treadles and pull cranes. Cars are fashioned wholesale by swinging levers and tightening nuts. In some of our cities you can't even get a human being to give you a telephone number any longer: you have to grind it out on a dial now that doesn't know enough to make a mistake intelligently!

So have we come at last to be numerically minded. It's appalling how much of what we mean by success can be set down in columns and run up on the adding-machine. In the church it is usually the ushers that make the count; on the basis of their report and the treasurer's we shall be able later to give you a diagnosis! The quiet lanes where Jesus lived and wrought seem to us unbelievably insignificant; so much so that Mr. Bruce Barton had to write a book to explain to us this strange carpenter, making of him for our better understanding the advance agent and publicity man for the Kingdom of God. He leaned to solitude, and nobody these days can make that out; we lean to mass-meetings, and resolutions, and railroads, and agitation for improved social conditions.

The trouble with all this lies simply in the fact that you can't compensate a man for the indignities which our group-minded civilization has done him by filling his mind full of movements and his hands full of gadgets. You can't go on forever beating him over the head with the sense of his own puny insignificance, and make it up to him by allowing him to belong to the largest church and pay taxes on the biggest apartment house in town. You can't teach him by all the political, social, and philosophical tricks you know to thumb his nose at himself around every corner, and cheer him up by letting him join a crusade for the promotion of birth control and drive the most expensive car on the market over the longest bridge in the world! Somehow, if you want to keep him from the bitter cynicism of your Krutch, your Dreiser, your Lewis, your Anderson, you have to get back into his life the sense and high conviction of its own inherent worth.

It's of this daily experiment that Warden Lawes writes in his book, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. For me the climax of that fascinating story comes as he tells of how the quiet respect he had constantly tried to maintain for the poor broken human stuff he was handling had once got hold of a murderer. And in the morning, as a symbol of their joint and undiscouraged hope, they were together planning a transformation which today is a reality: the barren yard of that desolate citadel on the Hudson has grown now into a garden of flowers and birds! It is the romance of a lone man, routed out of his burrow, daring to stand on his feet again!

I know of no more vital necessity for these days through which we are living. In a recent article which he has headed "The New Burden on Behaviour" Professor Patrick, of the University of Iowa, with clear-sighted emphasis, traces back every agony of modern life to "somebody's mismanagement, incompetence, folly, greed, or misbehavior." There was perhaps never a time, he says, and he gives chapter and verse for every bit of it, when the burden resting upon individual behavior was as great as it is just now. "Conduct, instead of being regulated by custom as formerly, has become reflective." And that means one thing only: it means that there is no short cut out of our difficulties by way of mass-meetings and luncheons; it means that once more the handwriting is on the wall against all the old crowd psychology, with its songs about "Everybody's Doing It"; it means that one man matters, and the quality of his life—and matters tremendously. Perhaps some day in the freedom of being great we shall quit trying to seem so by running around with a briefcase under one arm and a wrist watch on the other in pursuit of bigness and size and chronic dyspepsia. There were fine things on this old earth busy our busy feet began to burn its sidewalks! Sam Johnson and his cronies sitting in "Ye Cheshire Cheese" just off Fleet Street, letting the time pass! Why shouldn't it? They enriched its passing. Not quantity; quality! There is no substitute for quality!

And there is no substitute for truth, for all our modern cult of the beautiful. Sentiment will not do. "How happy your mother must be to have a son like you!" And Jesus turned upon it almost fiercely! Emotion will not do, with the tears we shed and the hymns we sing. And aesthetics will not do, whereby we are being taught just now that if we can't live as we should because it is right why then to live as we should because it is Lovely! What is lovely? "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchers that appear beautiful outwardly but within are full of dead men's bones!" Is that lovely? "If your right eye offend you, pluck it out." Is that lovely? "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." How lovely is that? There is something saccharine about our butterfly-chasing, and the religion that goes sniffing about for comfort and embroidery instead of for the sharp, soul-cleansing truth!

A paragraph in a recent issue of The Reader's Digest records "the most stupendous deception in history." It was practiced on Catherine II of Russia in 1787 "when she sailed down the Dnieper River to see her new territory. To preclude her disappointment in the barren country, her ministers lined the banks with thriving towns and farms—all painted on wood and canvas, and peopled with extras decked out in peasant finery who constantly traveled ahead to greet the credulous Empress upon her arrival. The same herd of cattle also preceded her into every mock settlement during the 1,800-mile journey."

We are all like that, more or less—erecting lovely asylums for the insane and beautiful hospitals for the crippled, and then thinking ourselves much better off than India, for instance, who leaves hers on the streets where folk can see and pity them! We prefer not to look at ours, expert as we are in false fronts! Is that it? And so we whitewash war with lies that often take the form of parades—men in the brightest of uniforms and the shiniest of buttons. Why don't they let the shell-shocked march sometime, and the maimed, and the widows, with caskets instead of bands? It would be true, anyhow! And we whitewash economic disaster with lodging-houses that keep its victims out of sight, and international relations with newspapers that never can print half the truth and too often garble the other half so that few events have any chance of recognizing themselves in print!

I am just inquiring how much of our vaunted knowledge and charity has its roots in aesthetics, and is aimed at keeping our eyes on the beautiful and our noses on the better smells. It is easy to criticize, and many things in the American scene need more than easy criticism; they need to be thought through privately and corporately. But shouldn't we make a beginning with some new passion for the truth? It may not always be beautiful, but it's purging!

Just here, however, we are faced with a difficulty. There seems to be an amazing sort of certainty abroad that any adequate knowledge of truth is utterly impossible. "No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea," writes Mr. Lippmann, "than does the average human being born in the twentieth century. Never has the road been wilder, or the sign-posts fewer. Our ancestors thought they knew their way from birth through Eternity; we are puzzled about day after tomorrow."

You might conclude, and with reason, that how the best life of the world has been lived doesn't matter, and the only solid purpose to which we can put our heads is to stand on them. Nobody, it seems, who is sufficiently intellectual can know anything. You ask them hopefully and respectfully of life, and they can't tell. The only kind of mind they are willing to accredit is the kind that scraps everything, begins at zero, and stands ready at all times to modify every statement, including the tentative theory of its own existence!

I submit to you that such complete and all-embracing ignorance is subhuman. When we come to our senses and quit being appalled by our own brilliance we shall realize that we are not condemned to it. Humanity has not been jogging along the last half-million years or so for nothing. There are a few things we may still accept as fairly well established. We do not have to insist, unless we wish, upon acting like strangers to everything God has written in the past, as well as in a Book! At the last, a man may still bring his moral judgments under the clear eyes of a Nazarene! For myself, I have reached a strange conclusion. I no longer believe that there is anywhere near as much perplexity in our modern life as is advertised. There is a deal of willfullness!

"The way of salvation," says Professor Mowat in the Fortnightly Review, thinking of that "silent shame of blind despair" in which the nations find themselves—"the way of salvation is known to everybody. Not physical courage is lacking, but intellectual courage, the desire to see the truth, and fearlessly proclaim and pursue it. The great prophet of humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, that leader of the West, has long ago pointed the way, and his doctrine has never been denied. Commonplace souls admit it; great souls practice it."

"Puzzled about day after tomorrow?" So are the pigs and chickens, if they ever give it a thought. All they can do is to look around. Let who will squat down with them and be nothing but genus homo, not even sapiens yet. You and I are fashioned differently in this, that if we will we can look before and after—yes, and up—"that greatest of the three which Shakespeare clean forgot!"

Not beauty; truth! You can turn John the Baptist into a gentleman if you like, by making him proper and comely; but gentlemen are bad swaps for prophets, nowadays at least! "Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it." There isn't anything "just as good."

Last in our gallery of twentieth-century religions, precisely opposite the cult of aesthetics, is the cult of fact. Here we live by neither size nor beauty; we live by chemistry and reactions, by tendencies and forces, by graphs and surveys. There is no use disregarding the facts! Though of course, Heaven knows, they are difficult enough to unearth, what with advertisements that belie them, and reports that color them, and a science that seems bent on complicating them. Here is Mr. Eddington, for instance, writing of what used to be thought a quite simple and straightforward experience: "I am standing on the threshold," he informs us,
"about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. I must move against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank which is traveling at twenty miles per second around the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, and the plank would be miles away. I must do this while hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of ether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through my body. Nor is that all. The plank itself has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. One hits me and gives me a boost. I fall, and another hits me, and so on. I can only hope to maintain my balance. These are a few of the minor difficulties. In the end I can hardly be sure, if I am to speak with scientific accuracy, that my passage over the threshold is an entrance and not an exit!" Perhaps we should be a bit more modest about our graphs and surveys, our tables and statistics and charts!

More than that, after we have got together such facts as we can there seems to be an odd sort of embarrassment about what to do with them. Half the time we just file them. I know, because I have a whole drawerful of them. They represent an exhaustive research into the state of my church. It's the right-hand lower drawer, and it's stuck. It's been stuck for years! The fact is that facts of themselves are very meager diet. Not long ago a French professor is said to have returned home and remarked about one of our 184-acre universities, "I have nevair seen a colleege so fool of nawthing." And yet every year, writes Miss Lillian Symes, that college turns out as only one item about a hundred tomes on such Ph.D. subjects as "An Analysis of the Duties and Characteristics of American Janitor Service," revealing to us the hitherto unsuspected fact that the average janitor has 654 duties and should possess 58 separate and distinct traits! But nobody knows what to do about it!

That you can't get away from the facts is one of our modern fixations. A certain carpenter from Galilee kept on doing it from morning to night, disregarding them and getting away from them! Simon, the hearer? No! Peter, the rock! Levi, the publican? No! Matthew, the saint! If a man has anything in him at all he knows that he is here to change the facts!

It is in forgetting this that we have come to our present day despair about humanity. We talk of our realistic approach to the problems of life, and pride ourselves on it. We forswear all illusions, and forego all enthusiasms. Says George Jean Nathan in Living Philosophies, "My code of life and conduct is simply this: work hard, play to the allowable limit, never do a friend a dirty trick, eat and drink what you feel like when you feel like it, never grow indignant over anything, trust tobacco for calm and serenity, and never seek to prove anything unless you get paid for it. Politics is a peepshow full of low humor. Patriotism like religion is an insurance against insanity: you swallow it, give up thinking, and are happy."

And we call that realism! To sit down and gaze out at life as you find it; to take it as it is; not to worry your head very much about improving it, perhaps not even to agree that it calls for any serious improvement; to give it as your considered opinion that there is nothing really the matter with it, nothing at least that can be remedied. It may be out of gear somehow at the moment, but leave it alone; it will come right of itself—as near right as it will ever come. No doubt, when all is said and done, humanity isn't worth working for, in the words of Mr. Clarence Darrow. "You can't make anything of man but man. Selfish, mean, tyrannical, aggressive, that's what man is, and a lot more. It would be a sad day for us if some superman should appear: he would eat us up, just as we, the supermonkeys, eat up other animals!"

Thank God there are other people who live, not by consent to the actual, but faith in the ideal, to paraphrase D? Ernest Fremont Tittle in his World That Cannot Be Shaken! They do not accept an order, he goes on to say, cursed by greed, embittered by injustice, haunted by fear. Through long delay and bitter opposition and apparent defeat they keep the faith that what ought to be can be made to be. They refuse to be spectators, looking on and doing nothing. They refuse to be victims, profiting nothing by their own misfortunes. They refuse to be reactionaries, patching up an old order in the vain effort to make it run again. They will be prophets, believing in a new world and determined to make some contribution toward its appearing. They form but a small minority. Yet the future belongs to them. It always has belonged to them.

Facts! It's one thing to spend your days toiling along in the ugly face of the present, counting over its liabilities on your fingers when your mind is too dull to count—staring in the night at the way things are going, with wide, burning eyes, when you ought to be asleep, wondering how you can ever stop that dreadful drift!

Faith! It's another thing entirely, with all of that unpromising material there in front of you, and the wornout tools still in your hands, to straighten the tired, bent muscles of your back and let your gaze wander away until it's caught and held again by the dream you have had of that which is to be!

I have seen it in the great art-galleries of the world: men and women sitting day in and day out in front of their easels, building up slowly and lovingly against the glaring white of an empty canvas some hint of a master's fadeless form. The poor dead colors seemed to lie about in hopeless chaos. The lines ran dimly in and out. But ever and again the stooping shoulders would lift, and without a moment's hesitation the eager eyes would turn unwaveringly toward that radiant square of elusive beauty on the wall; then a surer sweep of the brush, and something would spring into life—the glow from a window on a cheek, the fold of a garment, the leaping of spray in the wind, until, as you waited, stealing up behind and holding your breath, light and shadow, curve and line, somehow this new canvas began to stand alone in its strange likeness to the old Titian yonder, or Leonardo and his mystery!

Is it a secret any longer, with the facts here, and there above them the vision?

And now let me close with a parable. Fred Lewis Pattee in one of his essays recalls the archery contest in the fifth book of Virgil's Eneid. The target was a mast with a fluttering dove tied to its head; the archers could take their choice. Number one, the kind that always shoots first, chose the mast, and clove the very heart of it. It was a thing the crowd could understand, and it yelled its approval, as the crowd still does for the folk who shoot straight and hard at the one mark that seems to be within its mental grasp, huge fortunes, great homes, wide estates and reputation. That's the sort of thing to aim at! The cult of size, and numbers, and bigness; of how much and how many.

Number two shot the string that bound the bird. What a thrill! How lovely and how kind! Oh the joy of it, to watch that winged creature breast the skies and to forget for a moment that your own "feet are on the muddy earth!" Happy the mother with a son like you! The tearful eye and swelling bosom! The cult of asthetics.

Number three let drive and pierced the bird among the very clouds. "Her life she leaves among the deathless stars; her lifeless form restores the arrow to its owner's hand!" The cult of fact, with its devotees who have no faith, shooting down "the old great life, sneering and jeering at the dead bird," at all visions and beauty and hope; and they give some of them the Nobel prize for their marksmanship!

Number four was Acestes, the winner, who, having no mark, "drew his arrow to the head and did a thing no
archer ever dreamed before: he launched the shaft with mighty arm straight into the Olympian blue where dwell the gods. And that arrow, speeding swift among the thin clouds, burst into flame, and like a star unloosed from heaven left behind it a long train of light, a burning pathway for the race in its upward groping progress toward the gods!"

Was it Acestes, this number four? Or is it Christ?— and the arrow he shot into the Olympian blue? "Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it!"

"There was a man of the Pharisees called Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night"
— John 3: 1, 2

I HAVE always had a good deal of sympathy for him. He is such a human sort of figure, full of little concealments and wistful hesitations and agonizing uncertainties. He doesn't really come into the focus of this shifting drama very often. In fact, if it were not for the author of the Fourth Gospel we should know nothing about him at all. After our third chapter here he makes only two brief entrances, and both times he is recalled as the one who at first came to Jesus by night, until now one can hardly any longer separate the night and Nicodemus! He is somewhat like a place where the shadows are thicker in the dark at the edge of one of Rembrandt's canvases: you gaze at it, and slowly it takes form, seems strangely less void, becomes a man peering at you through a curtain of fog. So with this ruler of the Jews. Your imagination has to play around with him a bit before he can be said actually to get inside the picture and function!

There is, however, one thing which seems clear enough to begin with—he is at war with himself. That is apparent the moment he opens his mouth, and launches into this interview which he has so stealthily sought. There is evidence in the language he uses that he had intended all along to take his courage in both hands and preface what he had to say with a frank confession of the Messiahship of Jesus: "Rabbi, we know that thou art"—and in the very middle of the sentence he changes his mind!—"a teacher come from God." He draws a deep breath, plunges desperately toward an acknowledgment of the Christ in that simple Galilean peasant before him, catches himself, and staggers back into something safer. Instead of the gallantry of a great leap, he has left us the dull stammering of a cautious tongue: "a—teacher—come from God!" And Jesus on the instant slaps into his cowardice with the violence and sound of a revolution: "Verily, verily I say unto thee, Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God!" Follow it through and you will grow weirdly conscious of watching a human soul being haunted along, holding back every step of the way, drawn by a kind of hypnotic power, a man against himself, his eyes more than a little dazed, his hands fumbling.

Several chapters farther on he stands up in the Sanhedrin. The controversy about this carpenter has begun to rage angrily all around. His colleagues in the Council have turned bitter. They sneer at every report of the Nazarene that comes to them. They shout down every good word the messengers try to speak. Nobody who is worth anything believes in that devil's spawn. Nobody there, at least; and they look haughtily from one to the other. Nicodemus stirs restlessly in his place, and finally stands up. Silence falls, red silence, like the sullen glow of fire against the sky. For a space, while we clutch the arms of our chairs and lean forward, he holds his ground against that battery of hostile eyes. You feel like whispering to him: "Courage, Nicodemus! This is better. You have torn the shadows loose. You are on your feet at last in the open. You don't know how it has happened, but it has happened! Go the whole way now. Your heart is thumping like a triphammer. Say what it's saying, what it's singing: that Galilean is the Christ, and you love him! Out with it!" And then he speaks: "Doth our law judge any man before it hear him, and know what he doeth?" Poor fellow! It was hardly worth putting into words, was it? He is half a coward still, God pity him! And what a chance he had had! They threw up their hands and taunted him with his own wretchedness and went home. Such a question as his meant no real opposition, and they knew it. They could dismiss it, and safely. This was no time for quibbling. They knew what they meant to do.

And so one day it was done. All morning there had been an uproar; but the carpenter was finished now, and with some of his own nails on some of his own wood! God had not come to his rescue—nor hell, either, somebody chuckled, which was more to the point! And that raised a snicker which spread for a moment like ripples on the surface of water and then died out. Good work! Evening was coming on. They could eat the Passover tonight in peace. And nobody in the crowd missed Joseph of Arimathaa. And nobody missed Nicodemus. The one was opening his own new tomb in the twilight, wherein was never man yet laid; the other was binding a dear body fold on fold with linen, spreading his rich offering of spices between. The story leaves him there, with his lavish gift, among the disciples of the Nazarene. The stone was rolled against the door of the sepulcher, and Nicodemus—? One may at least hope that he faced the coming years with peace in his soul, the peace at this long last of one firm, clean act of devotion.

It is easy for us now to see what it was all along that had been holding him back. They were the things that hold us back from the kind of loyalty this Christ keeps asking of us. There was his position. To have that pulling one way and the truth pulling another was not pleasant: salutations in the marketplace, respect, influence on this side; contempt, and futility, and who knows what else on the other? There was stuff out of which to fashion many a sleepless night! And we are not strangers to it. Just let this Christianity come cutting across our privileges, as it cut across his, and you will see: when we have to shave the edges of honesty a bit or lose our jobs; when it is going to war or being slapped into jail; when it is a question of economic justice against a fistful of real estate or a private bank account. Mr. John Dewey says that most of our attitudes, even in critical times of great social change like the present, are determined by what we happen to have at stake, the size of our income, the value of our stocks and bonds. God help us if he is right! It is a bit ruthless what life does to selfishness like that! I should be sorry to think we were facing the future with it just now!

Then there was what others thought. Nicodemus counted them over on his fingers, and they were an imposing majority. They had hurled it in his teeth that day in the Sanhedrin: "Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?" It was a company of nobodys, this Galilean rabble—some women and a few obscure fishermen, none of the intelligentsia, people of no culture. I wonder if it sounds familiar. Mr. Henry Mencken once remarked that if Paul were alive today he would have the same kind of nitwits running after him that he had before! And as though to prove it there was recently published a study of Who's Who in America setting forth how large a number of distinguished folk are agnostic, and how pitifully few profess today the historic faith of the Christian Church in the deity of Jesus! Apparently we are not what you would call a brilliant galaxy! And it is odd how that disturbs some of us "rugged individualists"! If only we had a majority of the bright people on our side it would be ever so much more comfortable—just a small majority! We could take their word for it then and quit puzzling our poor heads. I wonder if we are beginning to understand this Nicodemus, this man who was divided against himself. Maybe that is your tragedy, too, and mine—pulled this way and that, apologetic folk, not quite sure, with a minority complex!

And there was another thing—he did not relish the uncertainty of discipleship. That was holding him back. He did not understand it very well to begin with—being born again, and all that. He had a few facts, and a few traditions, and a few practices which meant religion to him, and these newfangled ideas were beyond his reach. They opened an untraveled, uncharted path, with risks along it, and mysteries. It was rather like asking a man to get out of his own country, and from his own kindred, and from his father's house, and cross over into a strange land, as Abraham had done; and Nicodemus did not have enough of the spirit of adventure in him for that. He had been brought up in Judaism, and he knew his way around in it: this was pioneering,—loving your enemies, and doing good to them that hate you, and losing your life if you wanted to save it! The old order may not have been so good, but at least it was familiar, and knowledge counted for something. did it not? There was a great deal that was visionary about this Nazarene, and even unreasonable; and there is yet—asking nations to push off into danger by throwing down their arms; asking governments to think their way through toward peace, and social justice, and some fair measure of economic decency; asking you and me to hurl ourselves wherever we can into the thick of Life, no matter how it bites at us, bent only on doing something for its betterment somewhere before we die! It is not easy to go at living Christ's way.

But it haunted Nicodemus. And I so want it to keep on haunting us! I hope it will never leave us alone! Jesus was the best he had ever seen, and he could not for the life of him get away from it. He kept coming back to it, like a man under some hypnotic spell, reluctantly, inevitably. All the religious folk he knew were busy laying down intricate rules for living, just as our Mr. Lippmann has tried to do in his Preface to Morals. And there was Jesus, free and radiant soul, that crystal Christ! They talked very learnedly of knowledge, and of education, and of such science as they had; but they went on turning out unlovely lives, full of hatred and bigotry. And there was Jesus!

Say what you please, there is something in the human heart that responds to him. The things we have and want to keep get in the way of our following now and then; we read whole books of what other men think, like one that I have, called Living Philosophies, the product of twenty-two first-class minds. Jesus is mentioned in passing by nine, by two of the nine somewhat sarcastically, by two others with more serious attention. Mr. Wells writes largely of himself, and Mr. Hilaire Belloc of the Catholic Church. One is a it startled at first to find fn Nazarene so quietly ignored by gentlemen who take it upon themselves to discourse of Life; but when you close the book and set about the business of living—there is Jesus! You may not know just what to do with him; neither did Nicodemus: but there he is, and he is strangely insistent, and you do not dodge him so easily if you care about living as the finest of the arts! He kept haunting this ruler of the Jews, because for all the talking men did there was none like him for mastery! I remember a friend who told me once of his business, and how devious were some of its ways: suddenly he threw back his shoulders, and there was a great tenderness in his eyes. "But there is Jesus," he said, "and I don't care to swap him for anything now!" Another friend told me of his home and the difficulties that were there. I asked him if he knew how Christ would go at them, and he looked at me wistfully. "I know only too well," he answered. Somehow there is no getting rid of Jesus. He is just the best a man knows, and do what a man will, go where a man please, away back somewhere in a man's soul there is that bell ringing!

Jesus haunted Nicodemus; that was one thing; and dreams haunted him; that was another. He did not want to lose anything if he could help it; he did not like the idea of what people would say about him; he was a little too old, too lacking in the spirit of adventure, to relish starting out on a new and untried course. But God! he couldn't sit still where he was any longer! He had dreams, he had! Comfort wasn't everything! There was a life to live that a man could yearn toward for its beauty, and other lives to tend, throwing some little loveliness around them like the fold of a cloak hanging from your arm! There was a better world waiting—each day in the quiet of his soul he pictured it —waiting for the people who would help the carpenter build it! He couldn't sit still any longer, and look around, and keep saying to himself that nothing could be done about it, that he would have to put up with it as it was! That would be all right if it were not for your mind, and the dreams you had! But you were not an animal, you were a man, and you had to dream! It was the price you paid for being a man! You had to edge on a little toward love, and mercy, and justice, and brotherhood, and the Kingdom of God. If you didn't you couldn't sleep. That's what, you couldn't sleep! Things got hold of you by the arm, and caught you round the feet, and tried to hold you back; but you had to move! The eyes of that man from Nazareth, or his hands, or the queer things he said—pictures, echoes, furtive hopes—what was it? Something. You had to move! Perhaps we here might dream a bit more, in-stead of spending all our time worrying about the present and being unhappy!

And so the story ends there, in the twilight, before a tomb: Joseph of Arimathaea, and some one else. Look through the shadows. You will see him drawing nearer, steadily now, like a man who knows his own mind. "There came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred-pound weight." It's the story of one man against himself, and the hero is the conqueror, Christ!

"Pilate had written an inscription to be put on the cross; and what he wrote was, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews"— John 19:19

IT WAS a deliberate insult. But what did that matter? It was like Pilate, proud Roman that he was, to give this gallows fruit a royal title, and so turn the whole Jewish nation into a wayside sneer. And he stuck to it, too, in the face of their resentment. "Write not the King of the Jews," the high priests said. "What I have written, I have written," and there was an end of it. It made no difference. It was just a day's sardonic jest. And he turned to the other business that was on his calendar. He lunched and dined at home with his wife, and in the evening read a little Virgil. Joseph of Arimathra came in to ask for the body of the carpenter. Well, why not? Let him help himself. And Pilate went to bed.

It was just such a day for almost everybody. The man with the sponge went home to his family, and the centurion a little wistfully. They talked about it at the table: "Another bit of work on Golgotha today. Troublesome people, these Jews." And Simon of Cyrene blazed out in his rage at supper : "They made me carry a cross this morning—the curse of God on them!—and I didn't get to the city till twelve o'clock!" And the merchants along the way put up their shutters, waiting only to drive one last bargain with a passer-by; the children came home from school, and darkness fell. That was all. The incident would not have been recorded in the press with more than a footnote.

You simply can't see it as the world saw it then, hardly saw it at all—a burst bubble that some Galilean had blown, what's his name? It took a little nerve to preach that, and the silly story of a resurrection on its heels! "Jesus of Nazarah, the King of the Jews!" "His Majesty, the day-laborer from nowhere!" Now say your creed: "Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead." One might think it would take two thousand years to bridge that gulf. It took less than fifty! Matthew Arnold has put it in dramatic verse:

She heard it, the victorious West,
In crown and sword arrayed!
She felt the void which mined her breast,
She shivered and obeyed.

She veiled her eagles, snapped her sword,
And laid her sceptre down;
Her stately purple she abhorred
And her imperial crown.

She broke her flutes, she stopped her sports,
Her artists could not please;
She tore her books, she shut her courts,
She fled her palaces.

Lust of the eye and pride of life
She left it all behind,
And hurried, torn with inward strife,
The wilderness to find.

Tears washed the trouble from her face!
She changed into a child!
'Mid weeds and wrecks she stood—a place
Of ruin—but she smiled!

It isn't the failure of anybody's hopes you are dealing with when you read once more the record of the crucifixion; it's a miracle by the side of which raising the dead is nothing but a marginal note! That Jesus should have conquered that way in the kind of world he lived in is either the weird fancy of a man in a padded cell, or else this thing is of God.

Let's see if we can come anywhere near its meaning for us. Surely it is more than a sudden and sinister fact standing out against a Judean sky with its arms flung wide in a gesture of abandon. Those who regard it merely as an incident in history are in danger of missing the profoundest bearing it has upon human life. The cross is the whispered word of a God travel-stained and footsore, seeking some one, ever away from home, whispering a name. They say the search began in a garden in the cool of the day among the trees where a man stood, trembling and ashamed, and a woman with him, listening to a voice that seemed at first like the sad murmur of leaves. From all around it came, within, without, until nowhere under the sky could one hide from it, and the sorrow of it, grown so strangely old, as though it had never had beginning, nor ever should know an end: "Adam!—Adam!—Where art thou?" It may be that you spell the name of the garden Eden; but the God who walked there will never be a stranger in Gethsemane! The scene need hardly be shifted in the long drama that plays itself out between them forever. It was Eden, and

Into the woods my master came
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to him,
The little gray leaves were kind to him;
The thorn-tree had a mind to him,
When into the woods he came.

The voice of the Lord God, as He walked in the garden away from home, seeking some one whom he must find, whispering a name: "Adam!—Adam!" Or is it your name —or mine? And then Gethsemane:

Out of the woods my master came,
Content with death and shame.
When death and shame would woo him last,
From under the trees they drew him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew him—last
When out of the woods he came.
[Sidney Lanier, "A Ballad of Trees and the Master."]

It was the only way he had of finding anybody—a life like the life of God, ranging from the hills of Judea to the quiet little mounds under the skies of Flanders, wistful, hopeful, with no sorrow like his sorrow—if only he can restore, reclaim, redeem! "Jesus bearing his cross went forth." It's the call of the storm to the life-guard, the feel of the oar in his hands, the sound of the lost on the wind!

I think now we understand even better than the apostles how inevitable it all was. In that moving panorama of life presented a few years ago on the stage and called "Green Pastures," the problem of human redemption loomed larger and larger; from the call of Adam, and his simple response, as he looked wonderingly out into the void, "Here, God!" —until the curtain fell on the Creator Himself, sitting in the pathetic imagery of age, quite perplexed, gazing down out of His window upon the earth and shaking His head; when He speaks it's with the burden of pain in His voice, "I guess there must be a sacrifice." Somehow you didn't need to be told what was going to happen after that! It was the only way for God. Never for countless ages shall men be able to conceive of Him again without the nail prints in His hands and feet.

For centuries they had been stumbling along blindly enough in their quest. Nothing in the history of the human race is darker or more tragic than the record of its gods—whimsical, ferocious; altars reeking with the blood of beasts and of children; the air filled with the sound of battle; the coming and going of priests, austere and dreadful; among them tricksters, cunning and treacherous, polluted, shameless; once and again a prophet, with ringing, authentic voice; then silence, and the slow toiling of multitudes out of darkness; a Moses, a Samuel, an Isaiah,—and people climbing, entangled, slipping. I wish I could make you conscious of the long and bitter sadness of those years. And it isn't so much humanity's sadness I'm thinking of. Will you, can you, understand me when I say it's God's? That's what all those pages of the Book mean to me: Love trying across the gulf to pronounce its own Name in syllables never to be forgotten—never—never! You see all the groping and the falling, the faces with fear on them, the poor maimed lives that so wanted to live but were too dull to hear; the dumb, red horror on "the world's great altar stairs"; you see it all as it seemed to men. It's what brought Maeterlinck, was it not, to say that if he were God he would pity mankind. Those who are men among us might pity God!!. Could you sit for a moment with blanched face and bated breath and think of how it seemed to Him? Hear above the confused going of that multitude, asleep now under their quiet tents in the bivouac of the dead; hear above the clamor of their voices, rising and then falling so strangely silent; hear the whispering anguish of One weary, with the dust of the road on Him: "Adam!—Adam!—Where art thou?"

I have read of a father walking the streets of a city calling the name of his daughter all through the night, giving it just the queer little lilt he used to give it at home before she ran away. "If she hears that," he said, "she'll come." "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." It's the same language. Calvary was God's way of saying that lilt so that nobody ever again need misunderstand. He had tried everything else. Patriarch and prophet, priest and nation and Book—He had tried them all. And then a motley crowd poured out of the Damascus gate: Roman soldiers with shining armor; the multicolored garments of the Sanhedrin. There were the heavy strokes of a sledgehammer. Three crosses dropped into their sockets in the ground. God could say no more. If they see this, they'll come. I think you will have to go far back along the way that led from a garden called Eden and came out on the top of that lonely skull-like hill—far back to find where first He made His rendezvous with death. "Absalom, my son! Would God I had died for thee. O Absalom, my son, my son!" Farther back than that: "Adam!—Adam!—Where art thou?"

But the cross was more even than the whispered word of a God travel-stained and footsore: it was the forthright gift of all that God had. Jesus' enlistment in the cause he came to serve was not by way of any perhaps or maybe. He cherished no illusions about the cost of it to himself. Its issue in death was clear enough. You can march away to war if you like, clinging to some hope of a glad return; you can figure it out mathematically as four chances in five or some such thing, nine in ten perhaps—it's safer than you think! But you can't head on into any kind of saviourhood and trust for some escape! "Worlds are not saved except where saviours die!" Jesus crossed the threshold of his high mission with his eyes open. Nothing was thrust upon him at the end which he hadn't foreseen. You can't read the gospel story without being impressed by the fact that he deliberately undertook to win by what must have seemed like throwing his life recklessly away, as a man drains a cup to its dregs and hurls it from him. The cross was not an inevitable result heroically encountered; it was a bitter method solemnly chosen. It was the gift of all he had, and it left him bare! The boat by the sea was Simon's; the loaves and the fishes belonged to a little lad; the upper room he had borrowed from a man carrying a pitcher of water; the sepulcher in the garden, that was Joseph's; but the blood was his own, sings some minor poet, and the wounds—they were his own! The best God had in His heaven, as He went looking among His treasures because the world had got well-nigh beyond His reach : and He gave them to woo it back. "I, Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Him whom you call your God, do give and bequeath to my heirs forever my whole estate—the life that I lived, the truth that I spoke, the power of my hands, the love of my heart, and the death that I died; and to the tomb all there is of me that the tomb can hold." That's why we can stand and look out into the dim and misty reaches of God's love today and know that never in all our lives will we see to its end. The God who went to Calvary, where will He stop and say: "No, not that. I can't do that"?

It was the gift of all Christ had; and it was the seal of all he said. Anatole France has a story of a Christ that never died, who was taken from the tomb and hidden away in the desert, a pallid, futile soul, mouthing his vapid sentiments in the ears of a little handful of clandestine apostles. And indeed it would have been so. The Sermon on the Mount might have been the dream of a mystic, or the empty poetry of an idealist who had lost all touch with reality, had it not been for the cross that caught every phrase and sentence of it on its own grim arms and turned them all into stark and daily prose. You remember how a hundred years ago in legal documents they signed men who couldn't write their names? A cross, then "John Smith, his mark." God signed so once! "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and there at the bottom, "God, His mark": two beams of wood, and an inscription in Hebrew and Latin and Greek. You read in this Book the quiet words he uttered: "Lo, I am with you alway." "In my Father's house there are many mansions." "Ask and ye shall receive." "Son, thy sins be forgiven." And you weigh them. And there at the bottom, "God, His mark!" Won't you ever realize that He was desperately in earnest? A man doesn't go to Gethsemane lightly. He doesn't put up a cross for collateral when what he says is guesswork! All through this story there is sweat on God's forehead, and the rippling of muscles that ache under the skin! If there is a word on Christ's lips about forgiveness, he means it; by all his fasting and temptation he means it! "God, His mark." If there is a word about the victory he can give you, the soul he can make of you, poor and prodigal as you are, he means it; by all his agony and bloody sweat he means it! If there is a word there about his companionship on the loneliest of ways, by his cross and passion, by his precious death and burial he means it! "God, His mark." I don't care what your circumstances have been, or what you have been, either—been or done, for that matter—I don't care, not when God dares you with His own signature to be one of His redeemed!

And now only one thing else. The cross was the gift of all Christ had. It was the seal of all he said. And it was the risk of all he hoped. Somehow it stands for his fearless, gallant confidence in you and me. It stands for his reckless adventure toward the Kingdom of God with nothing to rely on but the feet of men, and they fled; nothing but men's hands, and they nailed him fast; nothing but men's hearts, and there weren't many that were even touched with pity! Sometimes it seems to me that that's the most astounding thing of all—that he knew how poor we are and still expected so richly of us. To leave his cause there on that untimely gallows, with the kiss of Judas still warm on his lips, and Peter's curses in his ears; and yet to look up in God's face and say, "I have finished the work which Thou hast given me to do." Finished it? Why, man, God knows you have hardly begun! "Aye, finished," says he. "My teaching they have misunderstood; my spirit they have missed again and again; my life bewildered them; but my death shall win, and I am content to die." Then he looks straight at us. "Your failure will be my failure, too. All that I hoped is yours. You are its ward and watch. The hazard is mine. Let it be!" And Jesus knew us! He knew us, and risked a song in our keeping that the angels sang over Bethlehem. "Be not afraid! It is I." He risked that. "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden." He risked that. "Other sheep I have." And that. "This is my body, given for you." That. And Gethsemane. And the crown, and the cross, and the empty tomb. If Matthew should go back to his booth, and Peter to his fishing! If Thomas should doubt again, and James and John grow impatient! Philip take to philosophy and Andrew to business! And you—? It was a gesture that only God could make to die and leave it so!

"Jesus of Nazareth, King!" A.D. 29 to 1934. Is that as far as his scepter is going to reach, you who are keepers of his cross, whom he trusts? Is it safe in your hands?

"And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they anything to any man; for they were afraid" — Mark 16:8

In Eugene O'Neill's stirring drama, "Lazarus Laughed," they are afraid of Life, so afraid that there is nothing to do at the last but to find a tomb again for this weird villager of Bethany, brother to Martha and Mary, who had come forth one day bound hand and foot with graveclothes, laughing softly as out of a vision, like a man in love with God, "There is no death!" And the world, with all its pygmy people in it, couldn't stand him! Such laughter made their ears drunk. It was wine. For a while they staggered away in his company, dwarfs dizzy at being sudden giants, groping after joy. The light of Eternity in his eyes was a flame, and as moths they darted toward it, and reeled, and turned, and dared not come too near. "If I were only sure of sleep," brooded one, "deep rest and forgetfulness of all I have ever seen or heard or hated or loved on earth! I fear there is no rest beyond, that one remembers there as here and cannot sleep,—a long insomnia of memories and regrets and the ghosts of dreams one has poisoned passing with white bodies!" And so they rushed upon those eyes with the flame in them, and put them away, and hid them in the grave again. "It was one terror too many" to have been laughing his laughter in the night. They had to murder it. How else could they ever laugh their own again, their own "hyena laughter, spotted, howling its hungry fear of Life"? How else could men forget, forget the God in them, lest remembrance imply too high a duty? "They went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre, for they were afraid."

I wonder if somehow this simple record doesn't shadow a deeper fear than the evangelist ever thought? I wonder if it isn't really a startling picture of humanity eternally afraid, not of Death, but of Life!—if Christ is true, shut now forever out of the "grave's most holy place," where a man as at "kind Nature's signal of retreat" might "fall asleep, and never wake again"; fleeing with their little lives from the long vista that would make the world too small and themselves too great; getting back out of that dreadful distance which would keep a man from hiding against the breast of his Mother Earth, and turn him upright into the high stature of a son of God! The kind of life we are glimpsing, now that the stone is rolled away, isn't it, after all, "too glorious a victory, too terrible a loneliness"? "They went out quickly."

Let's see for a moment what this brave faith is, and ask ourselves quite frankly if we can summon enough courage for it. Here we are in a world that seems so big to us. It keeps pushing out its chest with daily importance, and strutting about to fill our eyes from one horizon to the other. Its aspect is so grave, its bearing is so full of solemnity, as it shoves its heavy furniture around under our noses from Monday to Saturday, that after a while we soberly pull on our overalls and shake our heads at you if you suggest that perhaps it isn't of such tremendous consequence, after all; that there is something about Life that matters more than any of it. We'd like to know what it is, as we wipe the sweat off of our faces. All this talk about the soul of a man! We have to add and subtract and multiply and sell and dictate letters from the 7:42 to the 6:15. We may not know our wives very well, or our children. And it has been a long time since we saw our friends. We haven't much leisure for reading, and we aren't very religious. But for all that and all that, you see before you the second assistant vice-president, and the chief is getting along in years!

It takes a touch of gallantry to stand at the door of an empty tomb and see the things you gave your life to, broken — all except the godly height and carriage you've got out of it, if any! To be told that none of the rest matters really, that a man should sit very lightly by it, and not get so many furrows in his forehead. To have your goods gone over, and the success you have been striving for, breaking your back over a desk, and the books you have kept—to have this madman, with a grave behind him, dismiss them with a gesture, and look at you to see what kind of person you are—and you haven't been paying much attention to that! Well, he can't upset our world in any such fashion and expect us to take it quietly.

And that is just what Jesus did—he upset our world. With Eternity in his heart he lived as a man lives who visits for a time another land, sharing its joys and its sorrows, getting his shoulders under its burdens, yielding even to its tyrannies of hatred and of death, but free, so that nothing could come near him, or browbeat him, or build a prison for his soul! And because he stood like that outside their petty business, and wouldn't put their shackles on, men shrugged at him for a dreamer—we do it still; then they showed their teeth. To be meek and merciful and pure in heart; to drop your anxiety like a cloak; to love your enemies, and give to them that ask—this was to stand on its head every man's idea of what was what in Palestine, and who was who! "No!" they yelled on Calvary. "Yes!" whispered God to three women, "and they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher."

That empty tomb means that Jesus was right about Life, and we are wrong. Is this why we keep pushing his gospel back into the shadowland of pretty stories? Because if anybody should really drag it out among the facts he would have to begin being as mad as the Nazarene? We talk of being like him, and I think we waste a good deal of sentiment over it. A friend of mine said to me once, as his eyes went wide, "Like him? That would be hell in a world like this!" And I know what he meant. Jesus knew. O'Neill pictures it.

Martha and Mary looked sadly at their brother and cursed him—to greet the news of the Master's death like that, with low musical laughter! He had become a devil! Men worked there in the fields for him, and sang to the earth as they plowed. It was blasphemy, and there would be no harvest—you would see. Galley slaves forgot their fetters and made their oars fly as though they were bound for the Blessed Isles of Liberty! He laughed at gold, and at lust, and at war, and at the honors they tried to fasten on him. His father cursed the day he came from the grave. The emperor fled from that terrible laughter, and all the people who loved their solemn little affairs thrust their fingers in their ears. "A tomb for Lazarus!" Won't somebody put him away again? They did say that when he was gone nobody could remember his laughter, and the dead were dead once more, and the sick died, and the sad grew more sorrowful.

Is that what we want, just to be left comfortably alone with the world—this world that makes such good hard sense, whose ways we understand? Are we afraid to pick up the stuff from its counter, and take it away from the glare of artificial lights, and bring it here and look at it under the glow of that window yonder with the Resurrection angel on the wings of the morning? Do we prefer holding fast to our bargains without ever seeing how shoddy some of them are? They turned away and reported it to the eleven; but this story of the women seemed in their opinion to be nonsense! Nonsense to everybody who has other fish to fry! It's a vista that makes the world too small!

But that isn't the only thing: it's a vista I think that makes a man too great! To turn from a world that has dwindled, to a self that has grown dizzy at being a sudden giant, calls for courage. "They went out quickly and fled." We speak to one another very pathetically sometimes about the mean stature to which we are supposed to have shrunk under the impact of our modern scientific view of the universe. Living has had its dimensions taken inside and out, and now that the results are in there are any number of people who have an idea that it's hardly worth while. A whole army of diligent scientists got to work in laboratories with scales and graduated testtubes and made the discovery that Nature on the whole seemed fairly reliable. If you asked her the same question in the same way she would give you the same answer. From which they drew the unwarranted conclusion that she was bound hand and foot in a system of rigid and unbroken law which even God Himself was unable to direct or interrupt. After that the astronomers turned in their tables showing what a miserably insignificant place the world is. Along came the biologists with a report on evolution, showing us that we are brothers to the crystal and the clod. And thousands of sophisticated men and women, having got a peek at God's methods, decided that His existence was unnecessary. Soon psychologists began suggesting that reflexes, like your knee-jump, just about accounted for the human mind, and sociologists argued quite confidently in their classrooms that Christianity had always been a liability. All you had to do was to examine the figures! It was only left for the moral philosophers to trace the origin of conscience and amend the Ten Commandments in accordance with our modern needs! And so now they insist, these folk who know, that we betake ourselves to religion as a sort of antidote for insignificance: it gives us some fictitious stature under the stars!

But I have never worried long over a man's fear of being too small. What worries me is humanity's manifest fear of being too great! Let some one come to this huge city from the town back home where his name was bandied about the streets and everybody knew his uprising and his down-sitting. You will find him scuttling in here out of the limelight with a sigh of ponderous relief! Nobody knows him, thank God, and nobody cares what he does, thank God again! You can hide from a thousand responsibilities in a place like New York! I have an idea that this doctrine of human insignificance in the universe is a kind of wishful thinking! The resurrection makes our dimensions too big!

Dr. Gossip in one place draws this significant contrast between Anatole France and Jesus of Nazareth. Anatole France took a final look around toward the end of his life and gave it as his considered verdict that there is at least one thing of which we can be absolutely sure, that men are always smaller than they seem. Not at all, says Christ, with a sad gesture of his hand; not smaller, always bigger than they seem—bigger than they want to be! If they were to start living as big as they are, suggests Mr. O'Neill, they would be brave enough to love their fellow men without fear of anybody's vengeance. Thus far they have learned only to snicker meanly at their neighbors: if they should ever get out under the sky, instead of hiding about, there would be a laughing away of self, which gives a man his right to live forever. His heart would climb on laughter and look down at earth where great ones, smaller than he, walk in and out with braid and tinsel commanding Life under pain of death to do their will!

It isn't bigness we want—the bigness this tomb means, with its broken seal! We hide from that. We spend our lives in hiding from it, poor souls that we are, so much grander than we wish! For one fair moment in the play Caligula sees it, like a light shining through a rift in his madman's brain: "I am sick, Lazarus, sick of cruelty and lust and human flesh and all the imbecilities of pleasure, the unclean antics of half-witted children. I would be clean! To love men as you love them, not to fear them or despise them. If I could only believe in them—in life—in myself! Believe that one man or woman in the world knew and loved the real Caligula, then I might have faith again. I might laugh your laughter!" But around that instant of Eternity the madness closed in. It does still, and we are small again who have not the courage to be sons of God!

"They went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher, for they were afraid!" Is it that we are afraid of Life?—trembling here today at these vistas which would make the world too small and ourselves too great! "A tomb for Lazarus!" To be only a man again, the son of a woman, hiding against her breast, serene and silent and undisturbed! This gospel is for the brave! "An angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and his countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow." Will you dare it with him?