friend,—is to leave us of all men most pitiable.
Love—the prisoned God in man—
Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
Cries like a captain for eternity.
Again, Christ gives men an ideal for themselves which in their threescore years and ten, more or less, they cannot hope to achieve: "Be ye perfect as your Father." Jesus Himself, in whom we see the Father, is for us that which we feel we must be, yet which we never are. Immortality becomes a necessity to any man who seriously sets himself to become like Jesus. Our mistakes and follies, the false starts we make, the tasks we attempt for which we discover ourselves unfit, the waste of time and energy we cannot repair, the tangled snarls into which we wind ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out on its
quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor.
The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best.
We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory is forever impossible for sheer want of time.
Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order—the Kingdom of God—a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its accomplishment. We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is redemptive. But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go
slowly. Things as they are have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, and then—!
Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though without a Christian's faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached, "The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags." But the allusion to death set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued: "It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a good deal—at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate and company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this way." He was repeating the experience of the old Greeks as it is expressed in Pindar's Fourth Pythian: "Now this, they say, is of all
griefs the sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide without lot therein." It is glorious to hold up before ourselves the splendors of the age that is to be, to dream of our cities made over in ideals, of our land as a world-wide servant of righteousness and peace, of a whole earth filled with truth and beauty and goodwill; and glorious to give ourselves unremittingly to bring this consummation nearer. But can we be content with no personal share in it? Are our lives merely fertilizer for generations yet unborn?