We scribes and pharisees–we are the bulwarks of law and order and of existing religion. Let Christ come to-day and we would crucify Him–if the law allowed us to do so–just as we scribes and pharisees did nineteen hundred years ago. For is it not better, indeed, that one man should die rather than that all existing order should be overturned, and that law and religion should perish?
Go ye down, scribes and pharisees, into the secret, hidden places of your city where the immortal and living image of God lies with its face in the dust of humility. There alone you will find the living Christ, and if you, finding Him in His rags and poverty, can truly take Him by the hand and lift Him up, then will He also raise you up into a life that shall be everlasting. For there is no other God of humanity than that poor and lowly image–no, not in heaven or on the earth or in the abyss beneath the earth.
For out of the dust of misery and of sin He lifts the lowly up and makes him new so that in a life hereafter he shall shine with a glory that is of God’s creating, and not of man’s.
He who has ears to hear let him hear, let him hear; only God be merciful to us poor hypocrites and sinners, who deny His living presence. Happy, indeed, is it for us that His mercy is infinite and endures forever, else we would perish in our own pride of lawfulness and virtue, and be forever lost to any hope of salvation.
XIV
VERITAS DIVINIS, VERITAS MUNDI
A DISTURBANCE even of a great magnitude does not pervade the whole of a community. You may hear, for instance, in the heart of the town that there is a riot going on in the suburbs, but you may not be brought any more actually in touch with it than though it were a hundred miles away. Unless you have the time to spend, and sufficient curiosity to go and hunt it out, you may not see anything of it unless it directly collides with some of your daily habits.
So it was with this riot. The public journals were heavy that morning with reports of gathering disturbances in the upper parts of the city, and there was a general feeling of apprehension of coming trouble. But when it actually came, people living in the houses in the upper reaches of the town saw nothing of it, even though it was then in actual progress within a mile of their own door-sills.