GREAT MOMENTS WITH CHRIST
Miller had a profound, deep, sincere love for Christ, and more than any poet I know did he express with deep insight and with deeper sweetness the great moments in Christ's life. He made these great moments human. He brings them near to us, so that we see them more clearly. He makes them warm our hearts, and we feel that Christ's words are truly our words in this, our own day. In that great scene where Christ blessed little children, who has ever made it sweeter and nearer and warmer with human touch?
"Then reaching his hands, he said, lowly,
'Of such is my Kingdom,' and then
Took the little brown babes in the holy
White hands of the Saviour of Men;
"Held them close to his heart and caressed them,
Put his face down to theirs as in prayer,
Put their hands to his neck and so blessed them
With baby-hands hid in his hair."
The scene with the woman taken in adultery he has also made human and near in these lines, called "Charity":
"Who now shall accuse and arraign us?
What man shall condemn and disown?
Since Christ has said only the stainless
Shall cast at his fellows a stone?"
That Jesus Christ died for the world, that Calvary had more meaning for humanity than anything else that has ever happened, Miller put in four lines:
"Look starward! stand far, and unearthy,
Free souled as a banner unfurled.
Be worthy! O, brother, be worthy!
For a God was the price of the world!"
He caught Christ's teaching, and the whole gist of the New Testament expressed in that immortal phrase "Judge not," and he wrote some lines that have been on the lips of man the world over, and shall continue to be as long as men speak poetry. A unique pleasure was mine on this afternoon. I had noticed something that Mrs. Miller had not noticed in this great poem. She quoted it to us:
"In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce Divine
I find so much of sin and blot,
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not!"
Miller wrote it that way when he first wrote it, in his younger days. It was natural for Mrs. Miller to quote it that way. But I had discovered in his revised and complete poems that he had changed a significant phrase in that great verse. He had said, "I do not dare," in the fifth line, instead of "I hesitate." His mature years had made him say, "I do not dare to draw the line!"