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Great Pictures 
 
 as 
 Moral Teachers 
 
I* APR 4 1911 *: 
 
 GREAT PICTURES AS 
 MORAL TEACHERS 
 
 With twenty reproductions of photo- 
 graphs from originals of painting and 
 sculpture, each accompanied by an 
 interpretation ; also an introduction 
 on the use of pictures in teaching. 
 
 i\ 
 
 f*^ 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY E. JACKSON 
 
 ^iCj? 
 
 ^ 
 
 Author of 
 
 "Benjamin West, His Life and Work. " 
 "The Message of the Modern Minister." 
 
 THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
Copyright 1910, by 
 The John C. Winston Co. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
"The good picture front an educational point of view, is either 
 like a sermon, teaching a great moral truth, or like a poem, ideal- 
 izing some important aspect of life." 
 
 G. Stanley Hall. 
 
LIST OF REPRODUCTIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I, "Hope" George F. Watts 33 
 
 II. "Wise and Foolish Virgins". . . . R. Rinaldi 45 
 
 III. "Sir Galahad" George F. Watts 57 
 
 IV. "The Ruins" James Tissot 69 
 
 V. "The Magdalene" Guercino 81 
 
 VI. "David and Saul" Simeon Solomon 93 
 
 VII. "Love and Death" George F. Watts 105 
 
 VI 1 1. "The Scapegoat" Holman Hunt 1 17 
 
 IX. "Jacob's Ladder" Murillo 131 
 
 X. "Death and the Sculptor" Daniel C.French 145 
 
 XI. "The Pursuit of Pleasure" Henneherg 159 
 
 XII. "Christ in Gethsemane" Hofmann 171 
 
 XII I. "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" George F. Watts 185 
 
 XIV. "Christ and the Fishermen". . Zimmermann 197 
 XV. "St. Michael and the Dragon" . . Guido Reni 209 
 
 XVI. "Ecce Homo" Antonio Ciseri 223 
 
 XVII. "Temptation in the Wilderness" Wm. Dyce 235 
 
 XVI 1 1. "The Angels' Kitchen" Murillo 253 
 
 XIX. "Christ Bound to the Column" . .// Sodoma 265 
 XX. "Destiny and Humanity". . . Jef. Leempoels 279 
 
 (9) 
 
"7m the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to pene- 
 trate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal 
 the spiritual — this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and 
 his achievement is art." 
 
 NOYES. 
 
LIST OF INTERPRETATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Religion of To-morrow Morning 37 
 
 II. Character not Transferable 49 
 
 III. The Eyes of the Heart 61 
 
 IV, The Measure of Sympathy 73 
 
 V. Deliverance through Love 85 
 
 VI. The Language of the Face 97 
 
 VII. Death as a Private Tutor 1 09 
 
 VIII. An Enemy of Himself 121 
 
 IX. The Use of Dreams 135 
 
 X. Death not an End, but an Incident 149 
 
 XI. Happiness a By-Product 163 
 
 XII. The Heroism of Jesus 175 
 
 XIII. A Disappointed Man 1 89 
 
 XIV. They Who Trust Us Educate Us 201 
 
 XV. The Human Heart a Battle Field 213 
 
 XVI. An Unavoidable Question 227 
 
 XVI I . Temptation as Opportunity 239 
 
 XVIII. The Commonplace made Uncommon 257 
 
 XIX. The Invulnerable Man 269 
 
 XX. The Inspiration of the Imperfect 283 
 
 (II) 
 
Introduction 
 
 on 
 
 The Use of Pictures in Teaching 
 
The principle of art is the incarnation of God's eternal beauty: 
 The principle of religion is the incarnation of God's eternal human 
 heart. Neither can do the other's work, yet their work is comple- 
 mentary, and I wish the divorce between them were more nearly 
 healed. I wish the artists felt ^nore of the need which art can 
 never -fill; I wish the religious felt ynore of the need that art alone 
 can fill," 
 
 Principal Forsyth. 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE 
 
 There never was a time, when the educational value 
 of pictorial art was more generally recognized than it is 
 to-day. That pictures are more used now than ever 
 before, is partly due to the fact that time is more valuable 
 than ever before, and pictures are time-savers. They 
 represent to the eye, what it would take much longer to 
 tell to the ear. They do a work of mental economy, and 
 this is a real service, for the less time and strength it takes 
 to get an idea, the more will be left to use and enjoy it. 
 The right use of pictures, therefore, rests on sound 
 principles of teaching. A truth which reaches the mind 
 through the ear gate and the eye gate at the same time, 
 doubles the impression. Psychologists tell us that sense 
 impressions received through sight are of a higher order 
 than those received through any other sense. We say, 
 "in one ear and out the other." We do not say, "in 
 one eye and out the other." That pictures are of great 
 value in teaching certain forms of knowledge is not now 
 questioned; on the contrary, it is approved and practiced. 
 
 (is) 
 
1 6 THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 In view of this fact, it is surprising that there is so 
 h'ttle use made of really great art in religious teaching. 
 Time was when art rendered religion an incalculable 
 service. From the Edict of Milan to the Reformation, 
 the church was the patron of art. In the days when the 
 truths of religion were preached in Latin to people who 
 could scarcely have understood them even in their own 
 tongue, the sacred story was told in the universal lan- 
 guage of the painter and the sculptor. For the masses 
 the painter's brush has taught the Christian story more 
 convincingly than the pen of the theologian. Works 
 of art were the people's Bible. But the Puritanism of the 
 Reformation divorced art from religion, and as in Greece 
 art killed religion, so in Christian Europe religion killed 
 art. The protest of Puritanism against art was made in 
 the heat of conflict, and was therefore one-sided and 
 prejudiced. Religious people to-day have regained a 
 truer perspective and a saner judgment. They see that 
 the abuse of a thing is no sufficient reason for its disuse 
 altogether. They see that to present truth in the form 
 of beauty is not a hindrance, but a help, to truth. They 
 see that the Bible has been denied the imagination as an 
 aid, and its value has been lessened in consequence. 
 They see that the function of art is to render visible the 
 Divine and it is, therefore, not a foe, but a friend of 
 religion. 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 17 
 
 The religious world is beginning to turn to art with a 
 new spirit. This may be due in part to the fact that 
 undiscerning condemnation leads to indiscriminate ap- 
 proval. It is due even more to the ease with which the 
 public now has access to the originals of great pictures, 
 or may possess copies of them. As the printing-press 
 ushered in the democracy of learning, the camera ushered 
 in the democracy of art, and the pictures that were once 
 found only in the great collections, or in the homes of the 
 few, are now found everywhere in reproductions. The 
 very multitude of pictures in the people's hands brings 
 with it a great danger and produces a crying need; the 
 need of careful selection and of educating the popular 
 taste. The present work makes an attempt to do what 
 it can to meet this need. 
 
 Whether we will or not, the child will visualize the 
 stories he hears. He makes images of the characters and 
 incidents of the Bible. To render him the best service, 
 in this process, only the best pictures ought to be put 
 into his hands. Poor pictures will do more harm than 
 good, for they will give false notions which must later be 
 unlearned. Here, as everywhere else, the good is not to 
 be substituted for the best. Coleridge would sometimes 
 say, after looking at a picture, "There is no use in stop- 
 ping at this, for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere 
 technical drawing." In every great picture there are 
 
1 8 THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 two elements, the idea and its expression. There ought 
 to be no disparity between these, for in proportion as an 
 artist values the thought he portrays, he will spare no 
 pains in perfecting his technique. All truly great art 
 is both adequate in form and significant in content. For 
 this work only those pictures were selected which are 
 considered great, both from the standpoint of the artist, 
 and from that of the teacher and people as well. 
 
 HOW A PAINTING DIFFERS FROM A PHOTOGRAPH. 
 
 If pictorial art is to do real service for religion it is 
 of first importance to keep in mind the distinction, made 
 by Henry Turner Bailey, between a view and a picture. 
 That distinction, in brief, is that a view is taken directly 
 from nature, whilst a picture is composed to embody an 
 idea. Views are valuable aids in creating mental images 
 of places outside of one's experience. Views may serve 
 as a background of actual occurrences. The view of a 
 city "so compacted together" that a woman on her own 
 housetop could drop a stone upon the head of a King pass- 
 ing in the middle of the street below; a bed of such 
 proportions that a man could pick it up and carry it 
 through a crowd to his own house; a roof that could be 
 opened by four men without creating a panic in the 
 packed congregation below; photographic views of such 
 elements as these in Biblical scenes, serve to give one 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 19 
 
 vivid images. It ought to be remembered, however, 
 that such photographs give one only the mere externals. 
 A view of Jacob's Well, for example, as it is to-day, has 
 value only as indicating the fact that the Well still exists. 
 It has no value in teaching any truth about the water of 
 life. The truth that Jesus presented to the woman of 
 Samaria is vastly more important than any fact about 
 the Well. Truth is always more important than facts. 
 
 The difference between a view and a picture is like 
 this: If the brain cap of a man could be removed and a 
 photograph of the brain, in active work, could be taken, 
 what would it reveal? It would reveal only decomposi- 
 tion and recomposition, molecular agitations and vibra- 
 tions. These are physical phenomena. There is abso- 
 lutely nothing else which the eye can see. But the man 
 on whom the operation is performed, what does he see? 
 He is conscious of an entirely different set of phenomena. 
 He is conscious of thought, emotion, will, hopes, aspira- 
 tions, and ideals. The photograph gives one the external 
 physical facts. The artist's picture gives one the true 
 inwardness of the same facts. Art does not deal with 
 things as they are in themselves. Science does that. 
 But art deals exclusively with things as they affect the 
 human soul. "Science," says Ruskin, "studies the 
 relations of things to each other, but art studies only their 
 relation to man; and it requires of everything which is 
 
20 THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 submitted to it imperatively this, and only this, what that 
 thing is to the human eyes and human heart." The 
 difference between a view and a picture is well illustrated 
 in human portraits, which Carlyle thought were, of all 
 portraits, the welcomest on human walls. Tennyson 
 once asked Watts his notion of what a true portraitist 
 should be. Watts' reply so impressed the poet that he 
 wrote it out in the beautiful lines, which afterwards 
 appeared in the poem of Elaine in "The Idyls of the King:" 
 
 "As when a painter, gazing on a face 
 Divinely thro' all hindrance, finds the man 
 Behind it, and so paints him that his face, 
 The shape and colour of a mind and life, 
 Lives for his children ever at its best." 
 
 The camera gives one the physical features of the 
 face, but the artist finds the man behind them and pre- 
 serves the man's true spirit ever at its best. It is the 
 artist's function to portray what the camera cannot give 
 and what the eyes of other men often do not see. A 
 woman, looking once with the English artist, Turner, at 
 one of his marvelous delineations of nature, said to him, 
 "Mr. Turner, I cannot see in nature what you put into 
 your pictures." The artist's quiet answer v/as, "Don't 
 you wish you could, Madam?" Precisely this is the 
 artist's mission, to help us see, in nature and in human 
 life, what the physical eye, unaided, could never discern. 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 21 
 
 He is not an artist who merely puts on canvas that 
 which any man can see with his own eyes. The artist's 
 function is to show us something we have not seen, or 
 have only imperfectly realized. Thus he becomes an 
 interpreter and a teacher. The vast majority of pictures 
 now used by Bible teachers are not pictures at all, but 
 merely views; and while they serve to impart information, 
 they are of little or no value for religious purposes. It 
 is time to turn to something higher. While we use views 
 to impart information on facts of minor detail, there is an 
 inviting field for the use of the masterpieces of art which 
 have a spiritual message. 
 
 THE SERVICE WHICH ART RENDERS 
 
 Classical religious paintings render at least two great 
 religious services. One is to impress deeply on the mind 
 and heart some great truth or Biblical scene which has 
 made only a slight impression before. Such a service is 
 rendered by Holman Hunt's picture of the "Scapegoat;" 
 this picture makes more vivid the sense of desolation 
 caused by sin, as set forth in the Old Testament. There 
 is a great opportunity for works of art, because the Bible 
 record is very brief. The Bible expresses an important 
 truth in a few verses, or in a brief scene which may fail 
 to make a deep impression. Many a picture does for a 
 Biblical scene what Browning's poem "Saul" does for a 
 
22- THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 scene in Saul's life. The poet has taken an incident in the 
 life of Saul, and by a legitimate use of the imagination, 
 has elaborated it into a long poem, and by this means, 
 makes us see the true import of what the Bible so briefly 
 states. 
 
 Another great service which classical pictures render, 
 is to call our attention to a side of some truth which we 
 have never before noticed. Browning says this is one 
 of art's great functions. 
 
 "For don't you mark? We're made so that we love, 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see. 
 And so they are better painted, better for us. 
 Which is the same thing. Art was given for that. 
 God uses us to help each other so. 
 Lending our minds out." 
 
 Pictures may tell us what we have often seen with 
 the eye, but never grasped. How true this is can be seen 
 by the simplest test. Ask almost any man who has been 
 raised in the country and has seen apple trees a hundred 
 times, to tell you the color of apple blossoms. In all 
 probability he does not know, though he thinks he does. 
 If you tell him that Dante says, "apple blossoms are a 
 little less than rose and more than violet," he will have 
 to confess that he never noticed the violet color in them, 
 but there it is, as distinct as the blossom itself. An 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 23 
 
 artist's picture would have given him that fact. In like 
 manner Holman Hunt's picture, "Finding Christ in the 
 Temple," does a similar service. It embodies a dozen 
 passages of Scripture from Deuteronomy to John, and 
 sums up, in small compass, all the facts of the subject, 
 many of which we may never have noticed. More impor- 
 tant still, a picture often opens up a side of some great 
 spiritual truth which we may never have known. Watts' 
 picture, "Hope," embodies a trait of the grace of hope 
 which is not infrequently passed over. The pictures 
 selected for this work are those only which make a positive 
 contribution to moral or spiritual truth. 
 
 ART FOR art's SAKE 
 
 There are those who believe that it is not a legitimate 
 function of art to teach religious ideas. Curiously enough, 
 the people who thus believe, belong to two classes very 
 widely separated in other respects. One class is that of 
 the mere technical artist, the other is that of the Puritanic 
 type of the religious man. Extremes meet sometimes, 
 when they are extreme enough. Both classes believe 
 in "Art for Art's Sake." "Art for Art's Sake" and "Art 
 for Truth's Sake" have been in conflict for many cen- 
 turies, and the conflict represents a side of one of the old- 
 est problems of human history. It is the conflict between 
 the Hebrew and the Greek ideals of life. I believe there 
 
24 • THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 is a reconciling principle between the two. John Ruskin 
 reconciled them in his own person. It is only because 
 of the common human defect, which prevents us from 
 seeing more than one side of a truth at the same time, that 
 we imagine there is any antagonism between these two 
 ideals. 
 
 If by "Art for Art's Sake," is meant that beauty is an 
 end in itself, and one of the functions of art is to give pleas- 
 ure through beauty, there is nothing in this statement to 
 which the religious man ought to object, for there is such 
 a thing as the holiness of beauty as well as the beauty of 
 holiness. It ought to be remembered that the early 
 Christians undervalued beauty because the beauty they 
 saw about them was an element in a civilization which 
 was only corrupt. They put beauty away because, for 
 the moment, they had to fight for righteousness. The 
 condition was only temporary, not complete or fmal. 
 When the crisis had passed and they were free to look 
 at life whole, they craved beauty, as before they had craved 
 truth. We are so accustomed to look at beauty as merely 
 decorative and ornamental that we forget that beauty 
 is a moral necessity. God wrought beauty into the 
 structure of the world. Beauty is the highest form of 
 righteousness. Beauty and truth are not separated in 
 God's world, and ought not to be in our thought. It is 
 only because we are accustomed to righteousness in its 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 25 
 
 lower and cruder forms, that we have made the separa- 
 tion. God, who gave as much care to painting a lily 
 as to forming the eternal hills, joined truth and beauty 
 in holy union, and v/hat God has joined together, man 
 ought not to put asunder. Beauty has a moral value for 
 truth. To assert that beauty has a moral value, does 
 not mean that beauty has any pov,er to create the moral 
 or spiritual life, but the spiritual life, having been already 
 started, beauty is of great service in its development. 
 Art cannot regenerate religion, but religion can regene- 
 rate art, and ought to do so, and thus utilize the help that 
 art can give. "The Kingdom of God, " says Martineau 
 in his "Hours of Thought," "is not a business set up in 
 rivalry with worldly business, but a divine law regulating 
 and a divine temper pervading the pursuits of worldly 
 business. It does not change the materials, but the form 
 and spirit of our lives." 
 
 The universal love of beauty is one of those resources 
 of human life which Christianity ought to pervade v.ith its 
 spirit and claim as its own. It is to this common instinc- 
 tive love of the beautiful that the artist makes his appeal, 
 and, therefore, gets a wide hearing for the truth he presents 
 in this universally loved form. The universality of the 
 love of beauty, and what it does for men, is well stated 
 by Mark Rutherford in his " Deliverance. " "The desire, " 
 he says, "to decorate existence in some way or other with 
 
26. THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 more or less care is nearly universal. The meanest and 
 most sensual almost always manifest an indisposition to be 
 content with mere material satisfaction. I have known 
 selfish, gluttonous, drunkerf men spend their leisure 
 moments in trimming a bed of scarlet geraniums, and the 
 vulgarest and most commonplace of mortals considers 
 it a necessity to put a picture in the room or an ornament 
 on the mantelpiece. The instinct, even in its lowest forms, 
 is divine. It is the commentary on the text that man 
 shall not live by bread alone. It is evidence of an acknowl- 
 edged compulsion, of which art is the highest manifesta- 
 tion, to escape." 
 
 If by "Art for Art's Sake" is meant that it is not 
 the business of art to preach or moralize, there is nothing 
 in this statement to which the religious man ought to 
 object, even though he be a preacher. For the preacher 
 knows perfectly well, that if one paints a picture of a 
 horse, and then has to write under it, "this is a horse," 
 it is evident that the picture has been poorly painted, 
 and has missed its aim. If, at the close of a story, one 
 must add the statement, "This is what I meant to 
 teach," it shows that the story has been lamely told. 
 
 Paul's letter to Philemon has done more for the 
 liberation of slaves than any other piece of writing in the 
 world, and yet in it there is not one word of moralizing 
 on the evils of slavery. The letter simply preserves the 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 27 
 
 record of Paul's act and attitude towards a runaway 
 Christian slave. That act did its own preaching. The 
 best preaching is always so done. It is didactic indirectly. 
 This is what Dr. Van Dyke meant when he prayed, " Lord, 
 let me never tag a moral to a story, nor tell a story without 
 a meaning." So a great work of art embodies a spiritual 
 truth, or fact, which speaks for itself. 
 
 Whilst a great painting does not need a moral label, 
 but chiefly needs only to be "dwelt on and wondered at," 
 yet a legitimate and needed service is rendered when one 
 man tells another what he sees in it, and what it says to 
 him. For a picture is of no private interpretation, and 
 may even mean more than the artist himself at first 
 intended, and it often suggests more than it says. G. 
 Stanley Hall conceives art as dealing to a great extent 
 with the future. Man is far from complete and is still in 
 the making. The best things in his history have not 
 happened yet. But art is prophetic. It deals with what 
 we wish and long for. Therefore painting or music will 
 suggest much more than they say, and stir up emotions 
 that cannot be put into words. They will, therefore, 
 suggest more to one man than to another, and if one man 
 tells, so far as he can, what a picture says to him, he may 
 help others to read the same message. The interpreta- 
 tions which accompany the pictures in this volume state 
 what they have said to one man. But since every work 
 
28 THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 of art has one center of interest, or covers one moment 
 of time, or embodies one central idea, the interpretations 
 are limited to pointing out the one chief idea for which 
 each picture stands. 
 
 That art was intended to embody such great spiritual 
 ideas and human interests for the upbuilding of men, few 
 will deny. If "Art for Art's Sake," meant that it was 
 not so intended, then Christianity, which is the mother of 
 painting, will disown her child, and Christian men could 
 no more believe in "Art for Art's Sake" than, as Chester- 
 ton says, they could believe in "voting for voting's sake, 
 or in amputating for amputating's sake." Art is for 
 life's sake. It must always speak to the great human and 
 divine interests of men, and this will always be its basis of 
 general appeal. Whilst real works of art are not moral 
 sign-posts they are profoundly moral, and are necessarily 
 so. Because, as Morley says, "Morality is not in the 
 nature of things, but is the nature of things." To 
 attempt, therefore, to describe the nature of things and 
 leave out the moral or spiritual side of them, is to mis- 
 represent them. All true art is a transcript from life, 
 and all art is great in proportion as it helps us to see things, 
 not as they seem, but as they are; in proportion as it 
 helps us to see life, "steadily and see it whole." 
 
 Art is the interpretation of the great eternal realities 
 of life, and as soon as the artist tries to embody the great- 
 
THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 29 
 
 est feelings and aspirations, he gets on Biblical ground, 
 for there is no great interest of man which the Bible has 
 not treated. It is for this reason that great artists have 
 dealt so largely with Biblical themes. Painting and the 
 Bible could not be kept separate. They are congenial 
 companions. They have in common one leading char- 
 acteristic. The function of art is to embody the universal 
 and eternal. It deals with nothing local or temporary. 
 Its symbols are concrete, but they are symbols of what is 
 universal and true. The Madonna and Child are not 
 intended as historical figures, but are types, and stand for 
 the universal ideas of motherhood and childhood. One 
 of the greatest services of art is that it looks at life under 
 the aspect of eternity; and this is also the Bible's chief 
 characteristic, and the Bible, for this reason, has been 
 called eternal literature. It is concrete and historic, 
 but it describes all concrete acts in their eternal relations. 
 When it describes the sowing of seed it immediately 
 discloses the harvest. In every deed it reveals the ulti- 
 mate results of the deed in power or misery. It does not 
 foretell by looking ahead, but by looking at the heart of 
 things. It sees life through the sense of eternity. The 
 chief characteristic of the Bible and of art is the same. 
 They belong together. 
 
 When the Bible's spirit more generally pervades 
 artists' work, and men become more familiar with the 
 
30 THE USE OF PICTURES IN TEACHING 
 
 work of such artists, then great pictures will be "Sabbaths 
 to the soul," and art will render to religion the service 
 which George Frederic Watts, the Prophet-painter of the 
 Nineteenth Century, longed for it to render. In a 
 letter to Julia Cartwright, Watts said, " I even think that 
 in the future, and in stronger hands than mine, art may 
 yet speak, as great poetry itself, with the solemn and 
 majestic ring in which the Hebrew prophets spoke to the 
 Jews of old, demanding noble aspirations, condemning 
 in the most trenchant manner prevalent vices, and warn- 
 ing in deep tones against lapses from morals and duties." 
 There is something more to be done in this way, I believe, 
 than has yet been done. 
 
Hope 
 
 From a painting by George F. Watts 
 
HOPE 
 By George F, Watts 
 
 This picture was presented by the artist to the Tate Gallery, 
 London, in 1897. It is four feet seven and a half inches high 
 and three feet seven and a quarter inches wide. The color of 
 the flesh is a pale carnation tint. The twilight is dusky blue, 
 the nebulous robe is light green. The reproduction is from a 
 
 photograph bv Hnllvf-r Tntirl,,n 
 
I 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Religion of To-morrow Morning 
 
" For by hope were we saved ; but hope that is seen is not 
 hope; for who hopeth for that which he seeth? " 
 
 Paul. 
 
 "Who can really think and not think hopefully?" 
 
 George Meredith. 
 
 "Hope is the real riches as fear is the real poverty." 
 
 Hume. 
 
 "All men hope and see their hopes frustrate, 
 And grieve awhile, and hope anew. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "I have set free thy prisoners from the pit wherein is no 
 water. Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope: Even 
 to-day do I declare that I will render double unto you. " 
 
 Zechariah. 
 
 "Hope is that vigorous principle, which sets the head and 
 heart to work, animates the man to do his very utmost, puts 
 difficulty out of countenance and makes even impossibility 
 give way. " 
 
 Jeremy Collier. 
 
 "What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, 
 But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. 
 Hope springs eternal in the human breast; 
 Man never is, but always To Be blest. " 
 
 Pope. 
 
 (36) 
 
THE RELIGION OF TO-MORROW 
 MORNING 
 
 A prominent physician of New York once introduced 
 a lecture on nervous diseases, with the remark: "Gentle- 
 men, the world is full of four things, sin and sorrow and 
 books and neurasthenia." In his opinion, a character- 
 istic of the world to-day is its sadness. Watts' picture, 
 "Hope," pronounces the same verdict. The figure in the 
 picture represents the soul of the age. She is sitting on 
 the globe, having attained much knowledge, and made 
 many achievements, and yet she is unspeakably sad. 
 The figure is bowed and stricken with the burden and 
 pressure of life, straining to make in the dim twilight, 
 what music she can from the last remaining string of her 
 lyre. 
 
 The picture says that, in spite of the world's weari- 
 ness, something still remains. Watts calls this thing 
 Hope. It may be called faith, or will to live, or the 
 religion of to-morrow morning, as Chesterton calls it. It 
 is that delicate indestructible last refuge of the spirit, a 
 something that always seems ready to disappear, yet 
 abides, a string stretched to snapping, yet still holding. 
 
 (37) 
 
38 "HOPE"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 This trick or trait of hope is represented in the picture. 
 It is the hope which always threatens to desert men, 
 but one string is left, however empty and desolate may 
 be the lyre of life. The fact that hope is a universal hu- 
 man grace is suggested in the picture by placing the figure 
 of Hope on the summit of the globe. All normal men hope. 
 If their plans are frustrated they grieve and hope again. 
 
 Ought not Watts to have called his picture "De- 
 spair" rather than "Hope?" It seems so. In fact great 
 doubt or despair is what the figure does represent, but 
 the chief point to be noted is that it is a despair that hopes. 
 Of course this is paradoxical; the picture itself is a 
 paradox. This is its merit. It seems contradictory to 
 say that despair hopes. But what our painter means to 
 say is that hope is not a virture — does not exist at all 
 indeed, apart from doubt, despondency, or despair. Only 
 in the presence of this downcast attitude does hope reveal 
 its true meaning and acquire value. The function of hope 
 is to create a prospective joy when as yet no joy exists or 
 seems likely to exist. When the joy is realized, hope for 
 it ceases. Hope is the evidence of things not seen. Mr. 
 G. K. Chesterton, with his natural love of a paradox has 
 expressed in words the same paradoxical truths about 
 hope which Watts expressed on canvas. Hope, he says, 
 means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue 
 at all. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circum- 
 
THE RELIGION OF TO-MORROW MORNING 39 
 
 stances which we know to be desperate. The virtue of 
 hope exists only in earthquake or eclipse. For practical 
 purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require 
 the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at 
 all or begins to exist at that moment. 
 
 This, then, is the truth which is strikingly embodied 
 in the picture. When every other prop has broken down 
 hope remains to stay the soul. It has been said that 
 exiles live on hope because nothing else remains on which 
 they can live. 
 
 In Pandora's box, full of the ills of life, hope lay at 
 the bottom. In Bunyan's allegory, when Faithful is 
 killed, Hopeful becomes his successor and remains a 
 fellow pilgrim of Christian to the end. Hosea says that 
 in the valley of Achor, that is, in trouble, a door of hope 
 is opened. Watts' picture, then, emphasizes the impor- 
 tant but neglected truth about hope, that it forever nestles 
 in the human heart, and when the future is blackest it 
 sheds its greatest light. It is for this reason that Paul 
 says, " We are saved by hope. " For this reason also, there 
 can be no such thing as a pessimist. When a man says 
 that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and that if he 
 could have made it, he would have made it better, he testi- 
 fies to the high standard in his own heart. The world 
 cannot be all bad, for his own heart has light and hope 
 in it. 
 
40 "HOPE"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 The bandaged eyes in the picture mean much. The 
 hands of the figure are free. Why does she not pluck 
 the napkin away? It is because she cannot safely look 
 at the only things she can see with her eyes. Her exalted 
 position and worldly success have not brought peace. 
 Her hope now lies in shutting her eyes to them and looking 
 within her own heart, listening to the still small voice from 
 the one string that is left: 
 
 " If thou wouldest taste each dear surprise 
 Tear not the bandage from thine eyes 
 Within the heart love's vision lies." 
 
 This hope in the heart, the picture says, is no mere 
 dream. There is an answering reality outside. There 
 falls on the figure the light of a dawn not seen. Its 
 source is outside the picture. Heaven responds to the 
 instinct in the soul. There is one star in the sky, a morn- 
 ing star. Hope's note in the human heart is answered by 
 hope's star in the sky. By this the artist says that man's 
 hope for a future has some other answer besides the de- 
 lusive echo of his heart. Hope is no blind-alley. Men 
 on the sea would not have longings for land, if no land 
 existed. 
 
 The man, then, who has hope has a reality; — one 
 of the three great mystic virtues of Christianity. The 
 man who has it not is dead, even though he may seem to 
 
THE RELIGION OF TO-MORROW MORNING 41 
 
 be alive. "The most fearful thing in life," said Machia- 
 velli, "is not poverty nor care, sickness nor sorrow nor 
 death, it is its weariness of spirit. " Weariness of spirit is 
 due to loss of hope. Hopelessness is a spiritual disease, 
 but wherever health is, there is hope. The mood of 
 discouragement exposes one to the worst of dangers. 
 When the tone of the physical system is lowered it is 
 more vulnerable to attack from germs of disease which are 
 in health easily repelled or thrown off. In like manner, 
 when hope declines, the door is opened through which the 
 worst of evils come. The practical message of Watts' 
 picture is, that there is always a best thing left to do, and 
 to do that, is virtue. Its message is that of Dickens' 
 life motto, — "Don't stand and cry, but press forward 
 and help relieve the difficulty." 
 
II 
 
 Wise and Foolish Virgins 
 
 From a photograph of the original work in marble 
 By Rinaldi 
 
Ky Rinaldi 
 
 This statue was made by the Sculptor, R. Rinaldi, in i86r, 
 for Mr. Hardy of Boston. The standing figure is four feet six 
 inches high. It was presented to Wellesley College in 1904, by 
 Mr. Hardy's family. 
 
II 
 
 Interpretation 
 Character not Transferable 
 
"If thou art wise, thou art wise for thyself. " 
 
 Proverbs. 
 
 "The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 Is — the unUt lamp and the ungirt loin. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil for 
 our lamps are going out. But the wise answered, saying, Per- 
 adventure there will not be enough for us and you; go ye rather 
 to them that sell, and buy for yourselves. 
 
 Matthew. 
 
 "God gives each man one life. 
 Like a lamp, then gives 
 That lamp due measure of oil. 
 Lamp lighted — hold high, wave wide 
 Its comforts for others to share! 
 Once quench it, what help is left?" 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill. 
 Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. 
 Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 
 
 No light had we: for that we do repent; 
 And learning this the bridegroom will relent. 
 Too late! too late! ye cannot enter now. 
 
 No light; so late! and dark and chill the night! 
 O let us in that we may find the light! 
 Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. 
 
 Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? 
 O let us in, tho ' late, to kiss his feet! 
 No, no, too late! ye cannot enter now." 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 (48) 
 
CHARACTER NOT TRANSFERABLE 
 
 Rinaldi, in his statue, represents to the eye the idea 
 which Christ embodied in the story of the wise and fooHsh 
 virgins. Jesus, in his dramatic story of an Eastern 
 wedding, with its sudden midnight cry, its sense of sur- 
 prise, its shut door of opportunity, pointed out the indis- 
 pensable importance of preparing for all moral crises. 
 It is the moment of such a moral crisis that Rinaldi has 
 represented in his statue. It is "the moment, one and 
 infinite; the tick of one's lifetime," as Browning calls it. 
 
 Such moments are big with consequences. Failure 
 to measure up to emergencies shuts doors that sometimes 
 cannot be opened again. The power of critical moments 
 to settle destinies has been a favorite theme with the 
 moralist and the student of human life. When Julius 
 Caesar, the proconsul of Gaul, crossed the little bridge 
 of the Rubicon that was forbidden him by law, his eye 
 was fixed on Rome, and he was too accustomed to victory 
 to be careful of consequences. As men have read this 
 turning point of his history they have put words upon his 
 lips, "The enemy awaits me, the opportunity invites, 
 the die is cast." Men have attributed these words to 
 
 4 (49) 
 
50 "WISE AND FOOLISH VIRGINS"— RINALDI 
 
 him because they felt how his own and his country's 
 destiny hung upon that one event. Lord Tennyson 
 rightly grasped the point of Christ's story of the virgins 
 when he applied it to Queen Guinevere in her effort to 
 reopen a shut door, 
 
 " Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? 
 O let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet! 
 No, no, too late, ye cannot enter now." 
 
 Some things are done in critical hours that cannot be 
 undone, and other things are left undone that cannot be 
 done. This is a tragic fact of life, apparent to all. 
 
 What is not so apparent is why it should be so. 
 Why should a man's future and his happiness be decided 
 by the action of a single critical hour? It does not seem 
 just. When a well-known New England essayist noticed 
 in Rinaldi's group the pathetic entreaty of the foolish 
 virgin and the uplifted hand as if to guard her treasure, 
 and the look of deep sadness as the wise virgin refuses 
 her sister's request, he expressed a not uncommon feeling, 
 saying, "She should have given her the oil." The essay- 
 ist would not have made this remark had he seen that in. 
 both the story and the statue, the subject is character; 
 and that their essential message is that character is not 
 transferable. You may give a man money or material 
 aid in his hour of need, although whether you ought to do 
 
CHARACTER NOT TRANSFERABLE 51 
 
 so is often doubtful, but to give him character is not 
 possible, however much you may desire to do it, or 
 however much you sympathize with his distress, as the 
 essayist sympathized with the foolish virgin. Sympathy 
 cannot change the facts of life, but can change only our 
 feeling towards them. A man cannot put on character 
 as he would put on a suit of clothes which he orders from 
 his tailor in an emergency. It is strictly a personal 
 achievement and it cannot be acquired in a moment. 
 The foolish virgins asked to have the results of experience 
 given them when they had not served the necessary 
 apprenticeship. 1 1 was a request that from its very nature 
 could not be granted. It was a request that two and 
 two may not make four. 
 
 The critical hour may seem harsh in its dealing with 
 men, but it is never unjust. It never makes nor unmakes 
 any man; it is simply an hour of revelation, revealing 
 what the man has been making himself during his previous 
 years. Wellington understood this when he said that the 
 Battle of Waterloo was won on the cricket field at Eton. 
 It is an inescapable spiritual law that the unworthy are 
 by their own act excluded from the highest achievements 
 when life's greatest moments come. Herein consisted 
 , the foolish virgin's folly, for "Man's whole life and training 
 is just to fit him to do the right thing at the critical 
 moment. He who fails at this juncture fails not because 
 
52 "WISE AND FOOLISH VIRGINS"— RINALDI 
 
 he, by mere accident, took the wrong path, or made a bad 
 guess, or lost his stake; he fails because he has not so 
 ordered his previous life that he might instinctively do 
 the right thing at a push." Preparedness is the crux of 
 the question. 
 
 It was generally supposed that Daniel Webster's 
 reply to Hayne, which is the high-water mark of American 
 eloquence, was the product of the emergency. But 
 Webster has left it on record that it was entirely prepared 
 long before. When he was called on by his alarmed fellow- 
 New Englanders to meet the Carolinian's attack, he said 
 all he had to do was "to turn to his notes tucked 
 away in a pigeonhole. If Hayne had tried to make a 
 speech to fit my notes, he could not have hit them better. 
 No man is inspired by the occasion, I never was." As 
 in every other emergency, so in moral emergencies, the 
 real critical hour is not the hour of the emergency, but 
 it is the unobserved preceding hour, for it silently and 
 imperceptibly builds up the character whose strength 
 or weakness the emergency will reveal. What Christ's 
 story so forcibly teaches and Rinaldi's touching rendering 
 of it illustrates, is the truth that there are no short cuts 
 to the attainment of character; that character is not a 
 dower but an achievement, and being a personal achieve- 
 ment, is not transferable, and that if a critical hour 
 discovers to a man that he has an "ungirt loin and an 
 
CHARACTER NOT TRANSFERABLE 53 
 
 unlit lamp," it is only revealing the results of his previous 
 life and conduct. 
 
 "Therefore, in life's small things be resolute and great 
 To keep thy muscle trained; Knowest thou when Fate 
 Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, 
 'I fmd thee worthy; do this deed for me?' " 
 
Ill 
 
 Sir Galahad 
 
 From a painting by George F. Watts 
 
SIR GALAHAD 
 
 By George F. Watts 
 
 This is doubtless the most popular of all the pictures painted 
 hy Watts. It is the representation of Sir Galahad, the Knight 
 of King Arthur's Round Table, and was suggested by Tennyson's 
 sketch of him, the spirit of which is almost perfectly embodied 
 in the picture. There are two versions of the original. The 
 earlier one was given by the artist to Eton College, where it now 
 hangs in the beautiful chapel, a most appropriate home for it ; 
 the other is owned by Alexander Henderson, Esq., London. 
 
Ill 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Eyes of the Heart 
 
"Only the good discern the good. " 
 
 Mrs. Browning. 
 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. " 
 
 Jesus. 
 
 "Godliness is profitable — unto the life that now is." 
 
 Paul. 
 
 "The holier a man is the more perfectly does he understand 
 Sin; the more wicked he is the less. " 
 
 Fairbairn. 
 
 "My good blade carves the casques of men, 
 My tough lance thrusteth sure, 
 My strength is as the strength of ten 
 Because my heart is pure. " 
 
 Tennyson, 
 
 "And one there was among us, ever moved 
 Among us in white armor, Galahad. 
 'God made thee good as thou art beautiful, ' 
 
 Said Arthur, when he dubbed him Klnight; and none. 
 In so young youth, was ever made a Knight 
 Till Galahad. " 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 ''Neither is a horse elated nor proud of his manger and 
 trappings and coverings, nor a bird of his little shreds of cloth 
 or his nest; but both of them are proud of their swiftness; one 
 proud of the swiftness of the feet and the other of the wings. 
 Do you also, then, not be greatly proud of your food and dress, 
 and, in short, of any external things, but be proud of your 
 integrity and good deeds. " 
 
 Epictetus. 
 
 (60) 
 
THE EYES OF THE HEART 
 
 In Walter Pater's "Marius, the Epicurean," an 
 Italian mother tells her son that his soul is like a white 
 bird, which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded 
 public place. Would it reach the opposite side unruffled 
 and unsoiled ? The question of this anxious Italian 
 mother is typical of all thoughtful mothers. The task 
 which such mothers set for their sons, the task of keeping 
 their souls undishonored, is the most difficult achieve- 
 ment in life. If the pathway to it is long and steep, it 
 is the pathway that leads to sovereign power. It is the 
 universal law that things most worth while are always 
 the most difficult. The youthful Sir Galahad, of the old 
 legend, stands as the representative of the class, larger 
 than is sometimes supposed, of those who succeed in the 
 attempt. The story of his achievement and its results is 
 told in Tennyson's poem and embodied in Watts' picture 
 of the spotless Knight of the Arthurian epic. 
 
 As the Knights of the Round Table provided a center 
 for mediaeval chivalry, so the Sangrael, or royal blood, the 
 Holy Grail, "the cup from which our Lord drank at the 
 last sad supper with His own," provided medieval 
 
 (6i) 
 
62 "SIR GALAHAD"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 Religion with a center for its aspirations. In the legends 
 of Parsifal and Lohengrin and Arthur, the elements of 
 knightly heroism and religious aspirations are wedded 
 together. Tennyson has made the legend of Arthur live 
 again in his "Idyls of the King." The Knights of King 
 Arthur go in search of the Grail. The mystic symbol is 
 such that at the same time and place it could be seen by 
 some and not by others. To some it seemed veiled with a 
 luminous cloud. The Knights had a vision of it mani- 
 fested in proportion to their purity. One Knight alone, 
 Sir Galahad, the Knight of virgin heart and will, the 
 Knight who knew no fear, he alone saw the Grail, clear 
 and distinct. 
 
 The moment represented in Watts' picture of him is 
 the moment when the heavenly vision of the Grail is 
 revealed to him in the luminous sky through a break in 
 the trees. He dismounts from his white horse and stands 
 fascinated with the vision which lights up his face and 
 armor. 
 
 Both the legend and the picture seek to represent the 
 truth that purity of heart gives men power to see things 
 which men without it cannot see. They seek to give 
 concrete form to the statement of Jesus that the pure in 
 heart are blessed, for they shall enjoy the vision of higher 
 things, especially of God, denied to those who indulge 
 their imagination in sensuous images. Galahad's purity 
 
THE EYES OF THE HEART 63 
 
 put what Paul calls, "eyes in his heart," gave him the 
 faculty of faith or imagination, by means of which he 
 could see what no physical eyes ever see. One of Arthur's 
 Knights confessed the truth of this when he said — 
 
 "Then every evil word I had spoken once. 
 And every evil thought I had thought of old. 
 And every evil deed 1 ever did 
 Awoke and cried. This quest is not for thee,' " 
 
 It is only Galahad who can say to the King — 
 
 " I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry — 
 O Galahad and O Galahad follow me! 
 'Ah, Galahad, Galahad,' said the King, for such 
 As thou art is the vision, not for these. '" 
 
 The passionate desire, the "cry of the human" to approach 
 and mingle with the divine, common to all religions, can be 
 satisfied only in proportion to purity of heart. Plato 
 gives a practical application to the power of vision which 
 purity gives. In speaking of what constitutes a good 
 juryman, he said that to be qualified to administer sound 
 justice, he must be free from the taint of evil habits, 
 and must have "been pure-minded from his early youth. 
 In order to deal with evil, he must be guided by knowledge 
 of it, not by personal experience. "Your smart and 
 suspicious jurymen," says Plato, "who himself has been 
 
64- "SIR GALAHAD"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 guilty of crimes, fancies himself knowing and clever, but 
 when he comes to deal with men of years and virtue, he 
 shows himself to be no better than a fool, with his mis- 
 timed suspicions and his ignorance of a healthy character, 
 due to his not possessing any example of such a phenom- 
 enon." Then Plato states the general principle that 
 vice can never know both itself and virtue, but virtue in 
 time acquires a knowledge at once of itself and of vice. 
 Is not Plato right? It is surprising how the pernicious 
 fallacy persists that an experience of evil gives a man a 
 truer knowledge of life. Impurity of heart destroys the 
 capacity for any true knowledge. Darkness can know 
 only itself, and that only in part; but light knows itself 
 and also its opposite, darkness. It is the Galahads who 
 see, not only the highest in life, but the whole of life. 
 In Watts' picture a sword hangs by Galahad's side 
 to indicate that he is not a mere dreamer, but a stalwart 
 fighter. Purity gives, not only power of vision, but 
 power of achievement. Goodness is essentially strong, 
 evil is essentially weak. Galahad's purity gave him the 
 strength of ten. The vision of the Grail gave him power 
 to perform. 
 
 "And in the strength of this I rode; 
 Shattering all evil customs everywhere, 
 And in the strength of this, came Victor." 
 
THE EYES OF THE HEART 65 
 
 They called Parsifal " the guileless fool, " but he it was who 
 wrought the salvation of Wagner's drama. 
 
 It is not without significance that the only Knight 
 of Arthur's court who saw the Holy Grail was the youngest 
 knight of the Round Table. The strength of youth lies 
 in the purity of its ideals and the warmth of its enthusiasm. 
 And it is a fact of history that it is not to the cautious, 
 calculating men of experience, who have exchanged their 
 ideals for their comfort, but to the vision-seeing chivalrous 
 youth, that the great causes of God owe their greatest 
 debt. 
 
 There is a kind of energy which scientists call 
 "energy of position." It is locked-up motion in an 
 elevated body. A pile-driving machine illustrates it. 
 The ram is slowly elevated to the top of the machine. 
 When it is freed by the releasing hook, it falls with accu- 
 mulated force on the pile-head. The stored-up energy 
 of position is converted into energy of motion. Like- 
 wise moral elevation gives practical efficiency. Moral 
 feebleness destroys it. Tennyson was true to life when 
 he made Galahad to be the most effective w^arrior of all 
 the Knights. During the riot in Paris in 1848, a mob 
 swept down a street blazing wuth cannon, killed the 
 soldiers, and spiked the guns. A few blocks beyond it was 
 stopped by an old white-haired man, who uncovered and 
 signaled for silence. Then the leader of the mob said, 
 
66 "SIR GALAHAD"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 "Citizens, it is De La Eure. Sixty years of pure life is 
 about to address you!" Purity of character is a more 
 effective force than cannon. If men are to be effective as 
 Galahad was, they must, like him, wear "the white 
 flower of a blameless life." When Ulysses went to 
 Circe's isle, he accomplished what none of his companions 
 were able to do, because Hermes gave him for protection 
 the little flower "moly. " The flower's real name and 
 meaning was "Shield-Heart, White Integrity." 
 
 "Traveller, pluck a stem of moly, 
 If thou chance at Circe's isle, — 
 Hermes' moly, growing solely 
 To undo enchanter's wile." 
 
The Ruins 
 
 From a painting by James Tissot 
 
THE RUINS 
 
 Bv Tames Tissot 
 
 This picture was exmouea, in England and America, with 
 Mr, Tissot's pictures on the "Life of Christ," for reasons which 
 appear in the interpretation. After Mr. Tissot's death in 1903, 
 it was sold at public sale, in Paris, by the Executors of the Tissot 
 Estate. The size of the picture is sir by nine feet. 
 
IV 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Measure of Sympathy 
 
* ' I sat where they sat. " 
 
 EZEKIEL. 
 
 "Who can bear gently with the ignorant and erring, for 
 that he himself also is compassed with infirmity. " 
 
 Book of Hebrews. 
 
 "If you tell me a sad story about the fairies, I shall probably 
 shed no tears. The reason of the dry eyes will not be that the 
 story is untrue: we shed most tears over untrue stories. The 
 cause will lie in the fact that Fairyland is foreign land, that 
 the wants supposed to be there experienced are not the wants 
 felt by me. " 
 
 George Matheson. 
 
 "He prayeth best who leaves unguessed 
 The mystery of another's breast. 
 Why cheeks are pale, why eyes o'erflow, 
 Or heads are white, thou needst not know. 
 Enough to note by many a sign 
 That every heart hath needs like thine. " 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 "Then gently scan your brother man, 
 
 Still gentler sister woman; 
 Tho ' they may gang a kennin wrang, 
 
 To step aside is human : 
 One point must still be greatly dark, 
 
 The moving why they do it; 
 And just as lamely can ye mark 
 
 How far perhaps they rue it. 
 
 Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
 
 Decidedly can try us; 
 He knows each chord, its various tone, 
 
 Each spring, its various bias: 
 Then at the balance let's be mute, 
 
 We never can adjust it; 
 What's done we partly may compute, 
 
 But know not what's resisted. " 
 
 Burns. \ 
 
 (72) I 
 
 I 
 
THE MEASURE OF SYxMPATHY 
 
 James Tissot was fifty years old, when the unex- 
 pected happened, which changed the entire nature of his 
 future artistic work. Before the change came he was 
 recognized as a master hand, but the subjects of his art 
 were commonplace; their spirit was worldly. Suddenly 
 he began to paint pictures which had to do only with the 
 life of Christ, pictures which have made his name a 
 household word in religious circles. 
 
 What wrought the change in his life and work was the 
 experience, whose story is embodied in his picture, "The 
 Ruins." He was engaged in painting a series of fifteen 
 pictures to represent the society pursuits of the women 
 of gay Paris. While painting one of this series, called 
 "The Choir Singer," he went to church one day, not to 
 worship, but to catch the atmosphere for his picture. 
 He found himself joining in the devotions, and as he bowed 
 his head and closed his eyes he saw a strange and thrilling 
 picture. It seemed that he was looking at the ruins of a 
 modern castle. The windows were broken, the cornices 
 and drains lay shattered on the ground. Then a peasant 
 and his wife picked their way over the littered ground. 
 
 (73) 
 
74 "THE RUINS"— JAMES TISSOT 
 
 Wearily he threw down the bundle that contained their 
 all, and the woman seated herself on a broken pillar. 
 Her husband, too, sat down, but in pity for her sorrow, 
 strove to sit upright, to play the man even in misfortune. 
 Then there came a strange figure gliding towards these 
 human ruins. Its feet and hands were pierced and 
 bleeding, its head wreathed in thorns, while from its 
 shoulders hung an oriental cloak, inscribed with the 
 scenes, "The Fall of Man and The Kiss of Judas." This 
 figure, needing no name, seated itself by the man and 
 leaned its head upon his shoulder, seeming to say, 
 "See, I have been more miserable than you. I am the 
 solution of all your problems; without me, civilization is a 
 ruin." Tissot said the vision insistently pursued him for 
 weeks, and when he could not fight it off, he painted it. 
 
 This vision and the picture of it marked the parting 
 of the ways for the artist. The next ten years were spent 
 in Palestine, and from this period came three hundred- 
 sixty-five paintings, and one hundred fifty pen-and-ink 
 sketches. They cover almost every incident in the life 
 of Jesus, preserving, with fidelity, the oriental atmosphere 
 and constituting a vivid commentary on the Gospel 
 record. 
 
 "The Ruins," taken by itself, apart from the place 
 it holds in the artist's life, tells the secret of true human 
 sympathy. Sympathy is usually thought to be a 
 
THE MEASURE OF SYMPATHY 75 
 
 feeling of tenderness and pity for others, whereas in its 
 essence it is an act of will or imagination, by which we sit 
 where others sit and enter into their condition. Up to a 
 certain point sympathy is a memory. I feel for you what 
 at one time 1 felt for myself. The remembrance of my 
 own grief is the point of contact between me and you. 
 But into those sorrows of others which I have not known, 
 I can enter only by an act of will, and whether it be an 
 act of memory or imagination, or both, the true measure 
 of my sympathy is the degree to which I am able in 
 imagination, to sit beside you and share your experience. 
 When Ezekiel went to the captives by the river 
 Chebar, he was silent and overwhelmed for days. He 
 says, "I sat where they sat. " He entered by sympathetic 
 appreciation into their lives and looked at them from their 
 point of view. He has expressed the problems and 
 aspirations of the exiles, as no other prophet has done, 
 and he could do so because he sat where they sat. Eze- 
 kiel understood the life of the Hebrew exile for the same 
 reason that Kipling understood the life of the English 
 exile in India. The reason Kipling states in his own 
 words, 
 
 "I have eaten your bread and salt, 
 I have drunk your water and wine. 
 The deaths ye died I have watched beside. 
 And the lives that ye led were mine." 
 
76 "THE RUINS"— JAMES TISSOT 
 
 Tissot's picture represents this fundamental fact of 
 Christ's life, His ability to put Himself into another man's 
 place. He achieved that for which George Fox prayed. 
 " I have prayed to be baptised into a sense of all conditions 
 that I might be able to know the needs and feel the sorrows 
 of all." Such power is rare; men like Dante and Shake- 
 speare have the power of penetrating to the secrets of the 
 human heart and seem to have expressed every emotion 
 and aspiration of which the heart is capable. But most 
 men, in their view of others, are limited by their own 
 experience and look out from their own little chinks. 
 
 Gallaudet, the well-known instructor of deaf mutes, 
 tells a pathetic story of one of his favorite pupils, a little 
 boy. He asked the boy whether he knew the story of 
 Washington and the cherry tree. With his nimble fingers 
 the boy began to repeat it. When he came to the point in 
 the story when George's father discovered the tree and 
 asked him who had hacked it, the boy said, "George put 
 his hatchet in his left hand and," " Stop, " said the teacher, 
 "how do you know he put his hatchet in his left hand ?" 
 "because," answered the boy, "he needed his right hand 
 to tell his father he cut the tree." The boy made his 
 own experience his basis of judgment. 
 
 There can be no true judgment of others, or sym- 
 pathy with them until we can take their point of view 
 instead of our own. Such power usually comes only after 
 
THE MEASURE OF SYMPATHY 77 
 
 a long experience of life. For this reason no man in 
 England is allowed to sit as a judge in a criminal court 
 until he is fifty years old. Our lack of sympathy is largely 
 due to our inability to see another's life from his point 
 of view. 
 
 Our failure to follow the Golden Rule comes less from 
 lack of good intention than from inabilty to put ourselves, 
 in imagination, into the place of others. In Hugo's 
 "Les Miserables," the Bishop's sympathy was a real 
 factor in the convict's life, because he had this power. 
 He expressed the habit of his life when the convict stood 
 hesitatingly at his door. "This house is not my house," 
 he said, "it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does 
 not demand of him who enters it whether he has a name, 
 but whether he has a grief." 
 
The Magdalene 
 
 From a painting by Guercino 
 
THE MAGDALENE 
 
 By Guercinn 
 
 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, »..yiiiiw.,i.,v ivwuwu as Guercino 
 painted two pictures of Mary Magdalene, with the same motive. 
 One is in Rome. The other, reproduced here, is in the National 
 Museum at Naples. The reproducti'>" - *" — f, photograph 
 by Alinari, Florence, Italy. 
 
Interpretation 
 Deliverance Through Love 
 
"Though ye have lain among the pots, yet ye shall be as 
 the wings of a dove, covered with silver and her feathers with 
 yellow gold. " 
 
 Psalms. 
 
 "And if at times an evil strain, 
 To lawless love appealing, 
 Broke in upon the sweet refrain 
 Of Pure and healthful feeling, 
 
 But think, while falls that shade between 
 
 The erring one and Heaven, 
 That he who loved like Magdalen 
 
 Like her, may be forgiven. " 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 "Can peach renew lost bloom? 
 Or violet lost perfume? 
 
 Or sulUed snow turn white, as over night? 
 Man cannot compass it; yet never fear 
 The leper Naaman 
 Shows what God will and can ; 
 God, who worked there, is working here. " 
 
 Christina Rossetti. 
 
 "According to 'the master of them that know, ' the aim of 
 tragedy is to refine the affections through pity and terror; but 
 if there be any one lesson which, above all others, is taught by 
 the Inferno and Purgatorio, it is that the sight of the eternal 
 tragedy of Hell and the contemplation of the sufferings which 
 follow sin, are weaker far than the power of love to quicken 
 and refine the soul. " 
 
 W, J, Payling Wright, 
 
 (84) 
 
DELIVERANCE THROUGH LOVE 
 
 Almost no other heroine of the Bible has been so 
 often represented by artists as Mary of Magdala. That 
 this is so is not strange. For one of the most beautiful 
 and pathetic chapters in Christ's life is the story of His 
 relation to Mary Magdalene. She followed Him from 
 Magdala, through Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, to Jeru- 
 salem. She was the last at the cross, the first at the grave. 
 When she brought spices to the grave on Sunday morning 
 to perform her task of reverential love to the Master's 
 body, and when she was robbed of this task, her wild 
 grief deprived her of the power to recognize His voice or 
 form. Of the action of the two Marys at the cross, it has 
 been said that the Magdalene's grief is the wild grief of a 
 lover; the other Mary's is the unselfish love of a mother 
 who has others to care for. If the Magdalene's strange 
 love for Jesus had in it something of selfishness, in some 
 respects it was a love deeper than anyone else had. 
 
 The place she occupies in Christian thought is not 
 due, however, to her strange deep love for Jesus, but 
 is due to what was wrought in her by Christ's love for her. 
 It was Christ's love for her, which delivered her from her 
 
 (S5) 
 
86. "THE MAGDALENE"— GUERCINO 
 
 past, and made her what she became. This is the center 
 of interest in the Magdalene's life. This central fact 
 Guercino, with the true instinct of the artist, has seized 
 and portrayed. In the picture two symbols are so used 
 as to express one idea. Mary in her own person is made 
 by the artist to symbolize her past life. The crown of 
 thorns is the symbol of the love through which she was 
 delivered. Her deliverance through the love of Him who 
 wore the crown of thorns is the thought at which she is 
 weeping as she now looks at it. The picture thus repre- 
 sents the central truth for which Mary's life has come to 
 stand, that it is possible to be delivered, through love, from 
 the lowest depths to the shining heights where dwelleth 
 God; that there is a method by which soot can be washed 
 from the soul's wings and they be made white. There is 
 a Roman Catholic tradition which says that Mary 
 Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were the same person. 
 Whether this tradition is founded on fact or not, it is 
 founded on the truth that any Mary Magdalene can become 
 a Mary of Bethany, and that there is no stage of human 
 sin, on which, if one gets, one is compelled to remain. 
 
 The Magdalene is an outstanding illustration of the 
 great fact of human experience, that "To whom much 
 is forgiven, the same loveth much. " What she was deliv- 
 ered from, regulated her love for Christ. Her experience 
 is universally true. Mark Rutherford says that, "If a 
 
DELIVERANCE THROUGH LOVE 87 
 
 man wants to know what the potency of love is, he must 
 be a menial, he must be despised. In the love of a woman 
 to a man who is of no account, God has provided us with 
 a true testimony of what is in His own heart. I cannot 
 write poetry, but if I could, no theme would tempt me 
 like that of love to such a person as I was — not love to the 
 hero, but love to the Helot. When I have thought about 
 it, I have felt my poor heart swell with a kind of incon- 
 trollable fervor." — Such Mary felt Christ's love for her to 
 be, and this is the open secret of her love. Men's response 
 to divine love is proportioned to their feeling of unworthi- 
 ness, and it is a fact of history, that the philosophy which 
 has treated sin lightly, has also failed to exalt Christ. 
 
 Deliverance through love is one of these religious 
 principles which, like many others, has been expressed 
 in terms of human experience by modern novelists. It is 
 strikingly illustrated in Winston Churchill's "Coniston." 
 Jethro Bass is delivered from his unscrupulous life and 
 political machinations, not by his love for his adopted 
 daughter Cynthia, great as that was, but by her love for 
 him. Her pure love had idealized him, and it was not 
 destroyed by her discovery of his flagrant sin. What 
 redeemed him was the thought that she, being what she 
 was, could love him, being the kind of man he was. His 
 discovery that her idealizing love could not be destroyed 
 by sin, was the power which made him forsake his low 
 
88 "THE MAGDALENE"— GUERCINO 
 
 principles and take his stand along side of her, who became 
 his savior. The same great principle is powerfully 
 portrayed in Mary Johnston's "Lewis Rand." Deliver- 
 ance at the last is wrought for Lewis Rand, through the 
 idealizing and heroic love of his wife, Jacqueline. 
 
 The Magdalene will always remain a prominent 
 illustration of the creative power of love. It is a creative 
 power because it leads the loved one to look upon himself 
 as the loving one looks upon him. Love idealizes its 
 object. That is what love is for. By so doing it creates 
 the hope and inspires the effort in the loved one to live 
 up to that ideal. Christ's love led the Magdalene to see 
 in herself the possibilities which He saw in her. This 
 is the explanation of the profound statement, — "We 
 love Him because He first loved us." God's love idealizes 
 men. The man who feels as the Magdalene felt — 
 
 "That all I could never be. 
 All men ignored in me. 
 This I was worth to God," 
 
 has the secret by which he will become other than what 
 he is. It matters much what he thinks God thinks about 
 him. 
 
 We have, then, in the deliverance of the Magdalene, 
 through the love of another for her, a principle of common 
 and universal application. It furnishes the key to the 
 
DELIVERANCE THROUGH LOVE 89 
 
 right and helpful attitude to the whole of life. This 
 attitude means that a man will look in his brother man, 
 not for pin points, but for possibilities. No doubt he 
 can find pin points, if he looks for them. No doubt, 
 either, he can find possibilities, if he look for them. Which 
 he chooses to look for is for him to decide. In deciding 
 which attitude to deliberately adopt, the strangely beauti- 
 ful story of the Magdalene is of supreme value. 
 
 The one great principle which that story embodies 
 and emphatically asserts is that the best things in life 
 always come through appreciation, not through deprecia- 
 tion. For the man who reads a book in a critical spirit 
 with no sympathetic appreciation, the book has little 
 to say. For the man who approaches a painting with 
 no spirit of appreciation, the picture has no message. 
 Likewise the man who approaches his fellows with an eye 
 open only for their defects and with no appreciation of 
 their possibilities, gives to them nothing but despair and 
 gets from them nothing but a negative response. 
 
 Love is said to be blind. No statement is more 
 untrue, for nothing is so keen-eyed as love. If you want 
 to know a man's defects, ask his wife. Love is blind only 
 in the sense that it deliberately shuts its eyes to defects, 
 and centers its attention on the possibilities in order to 
 help them grow and crowd out the defects. No other 
 kind of love is worth the having. Only so can one be 
 
90 "THE MAGDALENE"— GUERCINO 
 
 delivered either from ignorance or from moral weakness; 
 only so was the Magdalene delivered ; only so can deliver- 
 ance of any kind come. Men's thought of the possibilities 
 which God's love sees in them is the greatest creative 
 power in hiiman life, for, by it men are delivered from 
 what they are, as the Magdalene was delivered, through 
 the idealizing love of Jesus. 
 
VI 
 David and Saul 
 
 From a painting by Simeon Solomon 
 
By Simeon Solomon 
 
 he original of this subject is a pencil drawing, thirteen 
 jiui one-half by nineteen inches. It is now in London. "Study 
 your Plutarch and paint," was the advice given by David, the 
 great French classicist, to his pupil, Grqs. Solomon acted on this 
 advice, for what Plutarch did with his pen for the strong men 
 of the past, Solomon has done with his pencil for David and Saul. 
 He has made the character of each stand out vividly. He has 
 made the features of the face accurately embody the central 
 motive that dominated each man. The picture is a good example 
 of an ideal portrait. ♦ 
 
VI 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Language of the Face 
 
"A wicked man hardeneth his face." 
 
 Proverbs. 
 
 "The countenance is the portrait of the soul. " 
 
 Cicero. 
 
 "The face, an evidence 
 Of the soul at work inside. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was 
 upon Saul, that David took the harp, and played with his hands; 
 so Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed 
 from him. " 
 
 Samuel. 
 
 Fitzgerald and Tennyson were one day looking at two busts 
 of David and Goethe. "What is there wanting in Goethe," 
 asked Fitzgerald, "which the other has?" Tennyson at once 
 replied, "the divine intensity." 
 
 "Wherefore it is to be known that in whatever part the 
 soul most fulfils its office, it strives most earnestly to adorn 
 that part. Wherefore we see that in the Face of Man, it causes 
 that no face is like another, because its utmost power over 
 matter, which is dissimilar in almost all, is there brought into 
 action, and because, in the face the Soul works especially in two 
 places, that is, in the eyes and in the mouth; these it chiefly 
 adorns and there it spends its care to make all beautiful, if it 
 can. " 
 
 Dante, 
 
 (96) 
 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE FACE 
 
 An old riddle asks, "What is the greatest wonder 
 God wrought in a small thing?" "The human face," was 
 the answer, "in that God made so many and no two are 
 alike." The face is a wonder also because of what it is 
 able both to hide and to reveal at the same time. Howells 
 makes Silas Lapham say, "The astonishing thing to me 
 is, not what a face tells, but what it don't tell. When you 
 think what a man is, and what most of 'em have been 
 through before they get to be thirty, it seems as if their 
 experience would burn right through, but it don't." 
 While the face hides the facts of a man's experience, it at 
 the same time reveals the true spirit of a man's life. 
 It is the exhibition room of his thoughts. 
 
 Simeon Solomon, in his picture, "David and Saul," 
 has attempted to make portraits of the two men without 
 having any suggestion from a model. He is justified 
 because of the accepted general law that the face is an 
 index of the soul. His picture is, therefore, the truest 
 of all portraits. He paints the mind as well as the body. 
 He makes the eye no mere organ of vision, but the window 
 of the soul. He reveals the man behind the face. 
 
 (97) 
 
98 "DAVID AND SAUL"— SIMEON SOLOMON 
 
 The picture represents the episode in which David 
 is sent for, as the one man who can charm away Saul's 
 demon of madness. Henceforth the two men are bound 
 up in the bundle of life together. The Bible and picture, 
 alike, represent them side by side; Saul, moody, melan- 
 choly, his great spear always by his side; David, fresh 
 from the fields, with his harp and shepherd's crook, the 
 one bright spirit in a gloomy court. The artist has given 
 the two men tell-tale faces. On Saul's is the blackness of 
 despair, on David's the light of love. 
 
 The picture gives the explanation of David's un- 
 usually gracious conduct towards Saul. The same ex- 
 planation is given in Browning's poem, "Saul." Both 
 the poem and the picture represent the same moment in 
 David's life, and hence explain each other, and both inter- 
 pret the Biblical scene. The poem's explanation is given 
 in a dramatic climax, — David comes to charm away with 
 music the evil spirit, which the Bible says, choked the 
 King. He untwists from his harp the lilies that were 
 twined around the strings to keep them cool. He sings 
 many songs to show the King what sane joyous living 
 ought to be in God's fair world. He plays the pastoral 
 tunes, known to the sheep and to the animals, which Saint 
 Francis used to call his brothers and sisters. He plays 
 the tune of the reapers to remind the lonely King of the 
 good friendship of the toilers. He sings the funeral 
 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE FACE 99 
 
 march, the marriage chant, and wild joys of living. He 
 sings the memories of childhood, the gray hairs of father 
 and the thin hands of mother. At this the sullen King 
 becomes aroused; his mad glare is gone. He puts out his 
 hand and tenderly touches the brow of the beautiful 
 young harpist. 
 
 In that moment David is seized with a passion of love 
 for the saddened soul of the unhappy King, and he thus 
 expresses the discovery he then made, — 
 
 "Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to 
 
 enrich, 
 To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — knowing 
 
 which, 
 I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through 
 
 me now! 
 Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — 
 
 so wilt thou ! 
 He who did most, shall bear most; O Saul, it shall be 
 A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like 
 
 this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 
 
 Christ stand!" 
 
 In that hour DaviH saw the wonder of love, the vica- 
 rious love of one man for another. And through his human 
 love, he saw what God's love is like. He says his face was 
 
loo "DAVID AND SAUL"— SIMEON SOLOMON 
 
 to Saul, as the face of God, a remark that Jacob once made 
 of Esau's face. Both poem and picture accurately repre- 
 sent the feeling which the Bible says David had for Saul 
 during his whole life, a feeling best embodied in David's 
 lament after the battle of Gilboa. 
 
 The face of a pure soul is God's smile, as David's 
 must have seemed to Saul. Such a face is the best image, 
 in nature, of God's likeness. The picture's comment on 
 David and Saul is that all external beauty, the beauty of 
 facial expression, of actions, of words, is born of internal 
 spiritual beauty. 
 
 "The heart ay's the part ay 
 That makes us right or wrang." 
 
 All real beauty is organic; it is not mere superficial 
 decoration. It is the flowering out of an internal prin- 
 ciple. It was David's heart that made his face to be like 
 the face which the artist has given him. 
 
 When Jean Valjean, the ex-convict, but now rich and 
 respected and the mayor of the town in which he lived, 
 stood in the court room of a distant village and con- 
 fessed his identity to save the innocent man, who was being 
 condemned to the galleys in his stead, the judge and 
 lawyer saw a strange light upon the mayor's face. It 
 was a radiant light, reflected from within; from his brave 
 and honorable deed. 
 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE FACE xoi 
 
 During the boxer war in China, the Chinese Christians 
 could not have escaped even if they had tried, because 
 their faces betrayed them. There was a light on their 
 faces which made them marked men. The radiant new 
 light in their hearts had engraved itself on their faces. 
 
 When Longfellow died, Emerson had lost his memory 
 for facts, but not for principles, and, as he stood by the 
 dead body of his friend, he said, " I do not know who he is, 
 but he must have had a beautiful soul." Rightly had 
 he read the language of his friend's face, and rightly has 
 the artist read the heart of David and Saul, and written 
 his reading, concretely, in their faces. 
 
VII 
 Love and Death 
 
 From a painting by George F. Watts 
 
LOVE AND DEATH 
 By George F. Watts 
 
 This is one of the best known and most finished of Watts' 
 pictures. He presented the originaf to the City of Manchester. 
 He presented a replica of it to the Tate Gallery, London. It is 
 ligh and three feet ten inches wide. Technically, 
 r li characteristic of Watts, in that he painted so many pictures 
 m which the leading figures' backs alone are seen. Watts has 
 been called the discoverer of the artistic effect o^ the human 
 back. The picture is characteristic also in its theme, in that 
 it is one of a dozen pictures on the same subject in which the 
 artist has sought to disarm death of its terror. 
 
VII 
 
 Interpretation 
 Death as a Private Tutor 
 
"I shall go softly with dignity and caution, as in a pro- 
 cession, all my years, because of the bitterness of my soul. Ah 
 Lord, it is upon these things that men live; and wholly therein 
 is the life of my spirit. Behold, for perfection was it bitter to me, 
 so bitter. " 
 
 Isaiah. 
 
 "The great touchstone of a philosophy or a religion is its 
 treatment of death. A man's creed, or his soul, is to be gauged, 
 not indeed by the way he meets death, — for many accidents for- 
 eign to the soul, may interfere in the death hour, — but by the 
 way he views death. " 
 
 P. H. Forsyth. 
 
 "The mere lapse of years is not life. To eat and drink 
 and sleep, to be exposed to darkness and to light, to pace round 
 in the mill of habit, to turn thought into an implement of trade. 
 This is not life. In all this but a poor fraction of the conscious- 
 ness of humanity is awakened, and the sanctities will slumber 
 which make it worth while to be. Knowledge, truth, love, 
 beauty, goodness, faith, alone can give vitality to the mechanism 
 of existence. The laugh and mirth that vibrate through the 
 heart, the tears that freshen the dry wastes within, the music 
 that brings childhood back, the prayer that calls the future near, 
 the doubt that makes us meditate, the death that startles us 
 with mystery, the hardship that forces us to struggle, the anxiety 
 which ends in trust, — are the true nourishment of our natural 
 being. " 
 
 James Martineau. 
 
 (io8) 
 
DEATH AS A PRIVATE TUTOR 
 
 Dean Stanley says he does not recollect that there is 
 an3nvhere in Greek poetry, the emblem of the setting sun. 
 The Greek deliberately turned away from the somber 
 and sad. He refused to think of the mystery of life and 
 death. On the question of physical death, the modern 
 Christian still shares the Greek attitude. He still looks 
 on death as an enemy. The feeling of resentment 
 expressed in the dirge of Hezekiah after he had 
 his near view of death, is still shared to a degree by 
 all men. 
 
 In the struggle of love against death, in Watts' 
 picture, the artist has expressed the natural feeling of the 
 human heart. All who look at the picture are instinc- 
 tively on love's side. The background of the picture is 
 the entrance of a happy home, to which the tragedy of 
 life has now come. Pushing into the doorway is the 
 gigantic draped figure of the foe that men fear, with back 
 towards us and coming with slow, steady, irresistible 
 force. Love is in the form of a winged youth, frantically 
 and hopelessly barring the entrance. His wings are 
 broken in the fray and his roses strewn upon the ground. 
 
 (109) 
 
no "LOVE AND DEATH"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 The turtle-dove with its one tone of monotonous sadness 
 lends a touch of weird loneliness. 
 
 The sense of the blight and helplessness and loneli- 
 ness of the experience, which most men know so well, are 
 all here. It was out of this feeling indeed that the picture 
 arose. Watts was painting the portrait of a brilliant young 
 friend who was dying by inches during the sittings. He 
 had all that rank and fortune could give, and everything 
 that love and skill could do was done to keep death at 
 bay, but it was utterly unavailable. The memory of this 
 situation haunted the artist and ultimately found ex- 
 pression in his great picture. The truth of the picture 
 finds echo in many a heart as it did in Lowell's, who wrote 
 shortly after the death of his little daughter, Rose, 
 
 "Console, if you will, I can bear it, 
 'Tis a well-meant alms of breath. 
 But not all the preaching since Adam 
 Has made death other than death. 
 
 "That little shoe in the corner 
 
 So worn and wrinkled and brown, 
 With its emptiness confutes you 
 And argues your wisdom down. " 
 
 Whilst the artist, in his picture, has expressed a 
 feeling felt most keenly, when in the struggle against an 
 apparently cruel foe, and never wholly forgotten, yet he 
 is not a Greek but a Christian, and therefore this feeling 
 
DEATH AS A PRIVATE TUTOR m 
 
 is only half the picture's story. Watts has put about 
 death a splendor that robs it of half its sting. To him 
 it was inevitable, but not terrible. It partially, but not 
 completely, overshadows love. His figure of death is a 
 woman, implying that she is a nurse, consoler, and the 
 mother of another life. Her head is bowed in pity as she 
 comes, her face is veiled and her tenderly outstretched 
 arm is like the shadow of a protecting wing. To those 
 who go, "death," as Watts once said, "is that kind nurse 
 who puts us all as her children to bed." 
 
 But what about those who remain? This is the heart 
 of the tragedy. For the cruelty of death does not lie 
 in the loss of one's own life, but in making desolate those 
 who might otherwise have been happy. It is to them 
 that the picture brings its greatest message. The chief 
 point of the picture is the great light which falls on death's 
 back from a source outside the picture. Death leaves a 
 train of light behind her for those who are left, which 
 they see only when she is gone by. By this the artist says 
 that death is a private tutor, teaching each man who 
 walks in her pure white light, things he could not other- 
 wise know. From the beginning death has been the 
 mightiest teacher of men. Hezekiah says that in spite 
 of his natural feeling, death taught him the things by 
 which men truly live; taught him a new dignity and 
 caution; made his spirit alive by bringing into time a sense 
 
112 "LOVE AND DEATH"— GEORGE F. WATTS 
 
 of eternity, and hereafter he would walk "with the step 
 and mien of a conqueror." 
 
 George Eliot's "Legend of Jubal" graphically de- 
 scribes the condition of man before and after he knew 
 death, and shows the value of death as a tutor. Fair- 
 bairn has well stated the poem's teaching. In the old 
 soft sweet days, when all that was known of death was 
 the single black spot in the memory of Cain, his descend- 
 ants lived in gladsome idleness; they played, sang, 
 loved, and danced in a life that had no gravity and no 
 greatness; but when the second death came and men 
 saw that there was a sleep from which there was no awak- 
 ing, a new meaning stole into life, — the horizon, which 
 limited it, defined it and made it great. Time took a 
 new value; affection, by growing more serious, became 
 nobler; the thought of possible loss touched with tender- 
 ness all the relations of life. The limit set to time drove 
 their thoughts out towards eternity. Without it man 
 would have had no sense of kinship with the Infinite, for 
 the finite would have been enough for him. It is a poor 
 and pitiful dream to imagine that it were a happier 
 state, were man to know no death, but to endure in 
 characteristic innocency, never feeling the light within him 
 made resplendent by the darkness, which death shed with- 
 out. For death breathed into life the spirit out of which 
 all tragic and all heroic things come. The light in Watts' 
 
DEATH AS A PRIVATE TUTOR 113 
 
 picture is what George Eliot's imagination saw. It is 
 what countless numbers of men have seen in their own 
 experience. 
 
 The effect of the death of Beatrice on Dante may 
 be taken as a typical illustration of the truth of the "Le- 
 gend of Jubal." It did not convert his love into remorse. 
 It sanctified it. It inspired him with a new ambition. 
 It imposed new and solemn duties. It induced him to 
 strive to render himself more worthy of her. It enlarged 
 his heart. "Whensoever she appeared before me in 
 vision," he says, "the flame of charity kindled within me, 
 caused me to forgive all who had ever offended me." 
 This is the light which Watts says the tutor death sheds 
 on man's pathway, and because of which, death is no more 
 evil than its counterpart birth, but is, rather, a positive 
 good. The tangible evidence that death brings light in 
 her train is the fact that she teaches men how for the first 
 time truly to live. 
 
VIII 
 
 The Scapegoat 
 
 From a painting by Holman Hunt 
 
THE SCAPEGOAT 
 By Holman Hunt 
 
 The original of this picture was painted in Palestine, and 
 sent to England for the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1856. 
 It is now in the possession of Sir Cuthbert Quilter. It was 
 painted at Oosdoom, on the salt-encrusted shallows of the Dead 
 Sea, where Dr. Hunt spent three months laying in the back- 
 ground of his picture. The mountains beyond are those of 
 Edom. In the figure of the goat, Mr. Hunt does what no other 
 painter has ever done, he has made an animal the symbol of a 
 distinctly spiritual idea. The picture is a fine illustration of 
 symbolism in. its best sense. The goat, whilst painted true to 
 life, is made almost to speak. The mountains, whilst literal 
 to the last touch, have a language. It is not the reading in of 
 far-fetched meanings, but the choosing of those forms in the 
 outer world, which stand as the natural speech of inward 
 
rr 
 
 
 
 
VIII 
 
 Interpretation 
 An Enemy of Himself 
 
"He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul, " 
 
 Proverbs. 
 
 "What a man takes from himself, it is not just he have. " 
 
 Dante. 
 
 "My stress lay on the incidents, in the development of a 
 a soul; little else is worth study." 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of 
 his own heart; his next to escape the censures of the world; if 
 the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neg- 
 lected. 
 
 Addison. 
 
 "I sent my soul through the invisible, 
 
 Some letter of that after-life to spell, 
 And by and by my soul returned to me, 
 
 And answered, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell. ' " 
 
 Omar Khayyam. 
 
 "Before I commit a sin, it seems to me so shallow that I 
 may wade through it dry-shod from any guiltiness, but when I 
 have committed it, it often seems so deep that I cannot escape 
 without drowning. " 
 
 Thomas Fuller. 
 
 (120) 
 
AN ENEMY OF HIMSELF 
 
 "An empt}' little shoe," says Forsyth, "will unman 
 the strongest." It is a slight symbol, but most effective 
 in hinting and recalling a whole world of past and tender 
 memories. 
 
 The chief feature of the Old Testament ritual was its 
 use of such simple and effective symbols to hint and 
 suggest spiritual thought and emotion which could not be 
 put into words. Among its many symbols, one of the 
 most effective was that of the scapegoat. 
 
 The economy of Judaism centered in the Day of 
 Atonement. On this day the priest, after going through 
 scrupulous ceremonies of cleansing, took two goats 
 exactly alike. Lots were cast — one was elected for 
 immediate sacrifice by a lot marked "for Jehovah." 
 The other was elected to be the scapegoat by a lot marked 
 "for Azazel." A red fillet of wool was tied around its 
 horns to distinguish it. The priest put both his hands 
 upon its head and confessed the sins of the people. While 
 this was going on the people showed their impatience by 
 calling on the priest to hasten the departure of the scape- 
 goat. He was then led away to a cliflf about ten miles 
 
 (121) 
 
122 "THE SCAPEGOAT"— HOLM AN HUNT 
 
 from Jerusalem, in the region of the Dead Sea, there to 
 wander till he died. These symbols stood for two distinct 
 ideas; one was the blight which sin brought on human 
 life; the other was the desire to get rid of it. 
 
 One of these truths has been made vivid for us by 
 Hunt's picture, "The Scapegoat." To express it, the 
 artist has used three natural symbols. In the back- 
 ground are the mountain ranges of Moab, upon which 
 Moses died. Its porphyry rock is lit up by the parting 
 light of the setting sun. The splendor of the color of the 
 hills suggest that there ought to rest on nature and man, 
 not a curse, but a natural glory. Just at the foot of the 
 mountains lies the Dead Sea, with its salt ooze and life- 
 less waste, as a symbol of the bhght of sin. The salt is 
 caked and crusted along the low shore. 1 1 looks like snow. 
 But the suggestion of the beauty of a snow-covered beach 
 serves only to heighten the hard, hopeless blight of this 
 shore. In such a place the soft light of the rising moon is 
 marred, for in the disc of the moon's reflection on the 
 damp shore is seen the bleached skull of a goat, the victim 
 of a past year. In the foreground stands a heavy and 
 shaggy goat, its bleeding feet breaking through the 
 crusted salt, gasping with fatigue, ready to die. Its 
 forelegs tremble and its hindlegs are outspread as if it 
 were bearing up against some outside load. The artist's 
 masterly power is seen in the fact, that, as we look at the 
 
AN ENEMY OF HIMSELF 123 
 
 creature, the chief thing we notice is not its physical 
 suflfering, but the pressure of the invisible burden that 
 weighs it down. Hunt's picture is at once a history and a 
 poem. It recalls a great historic rite of the past, and it 
 haunts the imagination as a ghost-like vision. 
 
 The truth so vividly represented in the ancient rite, 
 and in Hunt's picture, is that the chief effect of sin is the 
 blight it brings to the soul; that the wrong a man does 
 to himself is the worst part of the punishment of sin; that 
 the man who sins is a moral suicide; that every sin against 
 God is a sin against oneself. In the Louvre at Paris hang 
 two portraits of Rembrandt painted by himself. In one, 
 the artist paints himself as a young man full of life and 
 courage and in all the bravery of rich garments. The little 
 mustache is twirled up audaciously, the bright brown eyes 
 are alight with the foreknowledge of victory. The other 
 portrait represents him about the age of fifty, prematurely 
 old. "The dress is untidy, even dirty; an old cloth is on 
 his head, a discolored rag around his throat; the mus- 
 tache draggled; patches of grey hairs grow like sedge 
 round the jaws and the searching eyes have become 
 intensely sad, darkened, as it were, by the shadow of 
 inevitable death. " Between these two portraits lies a sad 
 tragedy. Between them lies the middle period of his life, 
 with its public shame. In the second picture the artist, 
 during a season of remorse, has painted the blight which 
 
124 "THE SCAPEGOAT"— HOLM AN HUNT 
 
 had fallen on his soul. He had murdered his better 
 nature. 
 
 Hunt's picture does men a great service in reminding 
 them of this spiritual tragedy, because it is a singular 
 thing that the deterioration of the soul is the very part 
 of the punishment of sin which men think of least of all. 
 What they think of most is the exposure of the sin. It is 
 on this external side that the novelist and dramatist 
 centers his attention. He thinks the v/orst thing that 
 can happen to a man is detection, and the public shame 
 and loss of social position. In point of fact, detection 
 would be a blessing, because lie who is undetected only 
 gets worse. The real tragedy which the novelist and 
 dramatist and the average man do not see is the debase- 
 ment of the soul itself. This fact about sin is eternally 
 true, whatever terms are used to describe it. Whatever 
 philosophical explanations are given of its origin and 
 nature, the effects it produces have always remained the 
 same. It weakens the will and causes a disintegration of 
 character which, unless it is arrested, ends in ultimate 
 wreckage. 
 
 The truth for which Hunt's picture stands corrects 
 the common error that sin may not always be punished; 
 that the man who sins, like a soldier in battle, may escape 
 the bullet and come out unscathed. The picture says 
 that no man can ever sin and remain morally clean. Sin 
 
AN ENEMY OF HIMSELF 125 
 
 and its due results are always "riveted together," as 
 Plato said. Whilst the outward consequences of sin are 
 not always uniform, the inward always are. Dr. J. W. 
 Dawson finds the best illustration of this fact in the sin 
 against love. The young man who sins against love 
 wastes himself on those shallow indulgences of affection 
 which leave the soul sterile and the heart empty. He 
 thinks he can squander purity and still have enough pure 
 passion left to realize an intense and noble love, such as a 
 Dante's or a Kingsley's. But when he comes to the 
 great sacramental hour of love, he discovers in himself a 
 soul-stain and a thought-leprosy which have blighted 
 him with an incapacity of love in any great and noble way. 
 He discovers that the Nemesis of all unbridled animal 
 indulgence is that the desire grows faster than its satis- 
 faction. He discovers that he has murdered part of his 
 soul. 
 
 This is the truth embodied in Hunt's picture, but the 
 picture is not without hope. The artist has put into it the 
 beauty of nature seen in the hills, to remind men of what 
 they ought to be. He has put over the blight of the Dead 
 Sea a rainbow of promise, which is not visible in the re- 
 production, to indicate what men may still become, and 
 the scapegoat in the old ritual itself stands for an effort to 
 get rid of the blight of sin. 
 
 Whilst men may "waste and desecrate their man- 
 
126 "THE SCAPEGOAT"— HOLMAN HUNT 
 
 hood," one cannot say that they ever quite lost it. The 
 artist believed that God could re-make the soul which the 
 man himself had unmade, but he does well to put his chief 
 emphasis on the blight of sin, because men's use of the 
 means of discovery depends on their appreciation of what 
 the disease is. Forgiveness never comes to a man till the 
 sin in his soul is stopped, not that the act of forgiveness is 
 dependent on repentance, but the effect of forgiveness is. 
 For the object of forgiveness is not to remove the penalty 
 of sin, but to arrest the process of disintegration and im- 
 part to the soul the power of moral recovery. 
 
 Whilst the distinctive glory of Christianity is its 
 good news that there is always the possibility of forgive- 
 ness and moral recovery, yet no man can look at the truth 
 of life embodied in Hunt's picture without seeing that 
 there is something better than God's forgiveness. So far 
 as the father is concerned, it is possible for the prodigal to 
 return, but it is better for the prodigal never to leave the 
 old home, or to forfeit the father's approval. Christ's 
 story takes us no farther than the return of the prodigal. 
 From that time on his life was that of a crippled soldier. 
 He was a soldier, and he was home, and he was forgiven, 
 but he was a crippled soldier still. 
 
 What Hunt's picture says is that the gain of wrong- 
 doing is not worth the price; that, because a man has to 
 live with himself, his chief business is to keep the bridal 
 
AN ENEMY OF HIMSELF 127 
 
 adornments of his soul bright and pure. It's of little use 
 to guard the outposts while the citadel itself is in danger. 
 The picture calls on men, in tones like the solemn tolling 
 of a bell, to make it their chief concern to guard, not any- 
 thing external or foreign to their inner life, like their 
 wealth or reputation or social position, but to guard their 
 own souls from blight and decay. Holman Hunt bids 
 all men to do for their own souls what Tennyson bids 
 Englishmen to do for their own country: 
 
 "Call home your ships across Biscayan tides. 
 To blow the battle from their oaken sides. 
 
 Why waste you yonder, 
 
 Their idle thunder? 
 Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne? 
 
 Seamen, guard your own. " 
 
IX 
 "Jacob's Ladder" 
 
 From a painting by Murillo 
 
JACOB'S LADDER 
 By Murillo 
 
 The original of this picture is now in the Hermitage at St. 
 Petersburg. The subject has been frequently painted. Of the 
 many pictures of it, the two, which by common consent are 
 considered the best, are Rembrandt's, now in the Dulwick 
 Gallery, and Murillo's, reproduced here. 
 
IX 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Use of Dreams 
 
"In a dream, in a vision of the night, 
 When deep sleep falleth upon men, 
 Then He uncovereth the ears of men, 
 And setteth a seal upon their instruction 
 To make man put away his evil deed. " 
 
 Job. 
 
 "The uttered part of a man's Hfe, let us always repeat, bears 
 to the unuttered unconscious part, a small unknown proportion. 
 He himself never knows it, much less do others. " 
 
 Carlyle. 
 
 "All my days, I'll go the softlier, sadHer, 
 For that dream's sake!" 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "Though, like the wanderer. 
 
 Daylight all gone. 
 Darkness be over me, 
 
 My rest a stone; 
 Yet in my dreams I'd be 
 Nearer, my God, to Thee 
 
 Nearer to Thee. 
 
 There let the way appear 
 
 Steps unto heaven; 
 All that Thou send'st me 
 
 In mercy given ; 
 Angels to beckon me 
 Nearer, my God, to Thee, 
 
 Nearer to Thee. " 
 
 Sarah Flower Adams. 
 
 "Our sleep is not only a great mystery to philosophers, but 
 a practical mystery to all men. Make as little of our dreams as 
 we may, they do, at least, show us the fearfully sublime activity 
 of our nature, that must still act, when we have no longer any 
 will to action. Sleep is a spiritualizer. By it the capacity of 
 other modes of existence is made familiar. We get a sense in it 
 of ourselves that very nearly contains that faith. It is impos- 
 sible, in this view, to overrate the importance of it in the moral 
 training of souls. " 
 
 BUSHNELL. 
 
 (134J 
 
THE USE OF DREAMS 
 
 The Greeks and Romans had great faith in dreams. 
 Homer said, "They come from Jove." The Emperor 
 Augustus, in obedience to a dream, went begging money 
 through the streets of Rome. The strange activity of the 
 mind in sleep, which has always interested and puzzled 
 men, naturally has found a place in the Bible. But the 
 Bible's use of dreams is always sane and restrained and 
 devoid of superstition. This is seen in the fact that many 
 of its dreams are the dreams of men alien to the common- 
 wealth of Israel; still further in the fact that many of the 
 dreams ascribed to children of Jehovah belong to the 
 period of their most imperfect knowledge of Him; most 
 of all in the fact that .all the dreams which are said in the 
 Bible to have been employed by God, as means of com- 
 munication, were logically connected with men's waking 
 thoughts, as in the case of Joseph, and Paul, and Pilate's 
 wife. A dream, to have any moral value for guidance, 
 must be the natural outgrowth of the thought or action of 
 a man's conscious hours. 
 
 The true use of dreams has never been better stated 
 than in the remark in the book of Job, that in a dream 
 
 (135) 
 
136 "JACOB'S LADDER"— MURILLO 
 
 God uncovers the ears of men in order to confirm them 
 in a proposed course of action, if it is right, or to warn 
 them against a proposed course of action, if it is wrong. 
 It is possible for a dream to perform this two-fold function 
 because of a well known fact of mental experience. In 
 sleep the fiction of time and space are destroyed, all 
 external impediments and checks are removed, and 
 the mind acts without interruption. The root meaning 
 of the Anglo-Saxon word "dream" is "melody." With- 
 out the discords and interruptions of the day, the mind 
 in sleep can carry out a thought to its harmonious and 
 logical conclusion. In this way, the dream exhibits the 
 true nature and tendency of the waking thoughts, by 
 revealing their natural results. It is like this: A poor 
 woman had come to look on her child as a burden. One 
 night she dreamt she had drowned it, and woke in horror 
 at the fancied sound of the plunge. The dream warned 
 her against her waking thought, by exhibiting its natural 
 conclusion. There is then nothing absurd in the true 
 dream. 1 1 does a real service by revealing the true inward- 
 ness of the waking thought. 
 
 Jacob's dream at Bethel is a typical Bible dream. 
 The frequency with which it has been painted is a true 
 index of its popularity. The beauty of Murillo's picture 
 of it is matched by the beauty of the dream itself. How 
 familiar it became is seen in the fact that it furnished 
 
THE USE OF DREAMS 137 
 
 almost the entire imagery of what is doubtless one of the 
 greatest of English hymns — "Nearer my God, to Thee." 
 Both the dream, and the hymn inspired by it, have 
 become immortal because they are fme expressions of the 
 universal desire for a more intimate acquaintance with 
 God, the desire for a highway between the seen and the 
 unseen. 
 
 Jacob's dream strikingly illustrates the principle of 
 dreams expressed in Job. It both confirmed and cor- 
 rected the ambition of Jacob's life. It seems at first a 
 psychological puzzle that a man, so apparently bad, 
 should have so beautiful a dream. The puzzle vanishes 
 when we notice what George Matheson has pointed out, 
 that the dream at Bethel was the result of the dream and 
 ambition of Jacob's whole past life. All his life long he 
 had coveted the birthright. What was that? In Eng- 
 land and America the birthright of the firstborn means 
 the inheritance of material things, of houses and lands. 
 In Jacob's land and day it meant the High Priesthood. 
 For Jacob to succeed his father, meant not only that he 
 would be the ruler of the clan, but also the minister of 
 religion, the ladder of communion between earth and 
 heaven. 
 
 To this office he desired to be heir. But the 
 law of primogeniture debarred him. Esau was the 
 firstborn. Esau was manifestly unfit for it. Jacob 
 
138 "JACOB'S LADDER"— MURILLO 
 
 believed that his own abilities adapted him for it. He 
 was excluded by the mere incident and external barrier of 
 birth. About this he had fretted and dreamed all his 
 life. When one day Esau asked him for a loan, he con- 
 sented to make it on the condition that Esau sell him his 
 birthright. Esau being controlled, as children are, by the 
 necessities of the moment, agreed In spite of the law of 
 primogeniture and against the wishes of his father, and by 
 the aid of his mother's wit, Jacob secured the birthright. 
 But Esau sought to undo what he had done. He pre- 
 pared to take vengeance for the wrong he thought Jacob 
 had done him. 
 
 Jacob had to take refuge in flight. He traveled 
 in haste all day and come to the rocky backbone of 
 Palestine by night; he lay down exhausted in this deso- 
 late waste. He himself was desolate; a homeless wan- 
 derer and a fugitive from justice, with nothing but his 
 shepherd's staff. He was discouraged and lonely. He 
 doubted whether the birthright was worth the price, 
 whether his ambition would ever be satisfied, whether 
 God, too, had deserted him. It was most natural, then, 
 that his dream assumed the form it did. For the thought 
 foremost in his dream had been the chief thought of his 
 waking hours. He regarded his dream as a message from 
 God in an hour of doubt and discouragement. At least 
 his desire for the birthright had been noble, whatever may 
 
THE USE OF DREAMS 139 
 
 be said of his method of getting it. The ladder that 
 rested upon the earth and against heaven was the mystic 
 symbol of his life's ambition, and encouraged him to 
 believe that he would one day be the medium of commun- 
 ion between earth and heaven, as he had desired to be. 
 
 George Matheson suggests that the mystical ladder 
 of Jacob's dream contained also a warning against a 
 serious defect in his youthful ambition. Jacob had 
 craved the birthright, not so much for the love of it, as 
 for the pride of it. It would give him a position of com- 
 manding importance. Its chief characteristic he had yet 
 to learn. This is suggested by the fact that the angels 
 who ascended the ladder were the same also who descended. 
 He w-ho would ascend to the exalted position, which 
 Jacob craved, must be willing to descend to the lowliest 
 service of earth. Paul says of Christ, that He who 
 descended was the same as He who ascended. John 
 called Jesus, "Jacob's ladder." 
 
 Jacob's dream showed him this principle which his 
 ambition involved, that the position was not only one of 
 power, but of service, that it was not only a joy, but a 
 burden, that the highest are the servants of the lowest, 
 that the sinless are to be the sin-bearers, that the man 
 who most deeply feels the sin is not the man who com- 
 mits it, but the pure in heart who are highest on the 
 ladder of spiritual elevation. Whether or not Jacob saw 
 
I40 "JACOB'S LADDER"— MURILLO 
 
 this principle on the night of his dream, certain it is that 
 it is the principle he most needed to see, and which later 
 he did see. 
 
 The habit of mind revealed in Jacob's and in all true 
 dreams suggests, then, a principle of vast importance. 
 It is the habit of looking at every proposed act in the 
 light of its ultimate results, the habit of "seeing life 
 steadily and seeing it whole," the habit of living one's 
 life in the "light of eternity." This is one of the unique 
 powers of the Bible among the books of the world. When 
 it looks at a seed, the tree stands before it. When it 
 vividly pictures the sowing of the seed, it instantly dis- 
 closes the harvest. In every deed the Bible foresees 
 its fruitage in power or in misery. This is the secret of 
 its prophetic quality. It is not so much a look ahead; 
 it is a look at the heart of things. It is like Angelo's 
 picture of the "Last Judgment." This is a picture, not 
 of a great event to come in a distant future, but the 
 drama of an eternal process now going on. a process in 
 which every moment, men are being sifted, tried and 
 judged. 
 
 To thus look at one's life after the manner of dreams, 
 always in the light of what life might be, would do for 
 men the two great services which Jacob's dream did for 
 him. It v/ould prevent the doing of many deeds before 
 they are done, as Richter has so beautifully stated in his 
 
THE USE OF DREAMS 141 
 
 well-known dream, "The Two Paths." It would also, 
 in moments of discouragement and baffled purposes, inspire 
 the growth of the faintest desire and ambition for good- 
 ness. To every man who aspires to a goodness he has 
 never attained, Jacob's dream and Murillo's picture of 
 it say, — 
 
 "All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed 
 of good shall exist, not its semblance but 
 itself." 
 
X 
 
 Death Staying the Hand of 
 the Sculptor 
 
 From a photograph of the original work in bronze and stone 
 By Daniel C. French 
 
t 
 
 I 
 
DEATH STAYING THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR 
 
 .!s piece nr sculpture is a monument at Forest Hills Ceme- 
 ^.■=ton, Jn memory of Martin Milmore, a young sculptor 
 ■beautifully appropriate because Milmore 
 bc ar ine oeginning of what promised to be a brilliant 
 areer in art. Tt was exhibited in Paris in 1891 , where it ^f■c^\^■^d 
 the gold me and also the universal verdicr 
 
 that it has coucnea tiie high-water mark of Christian art in 
 America. A cast of this bronze is in the Art Museum. Boston, 
 
 J 
 c 
 
X 
 
 Interpretation 
 Death not an End but an Incident 
 
' ' I said, Oh my God, take me not away in the midst of my 
 days. " 
 
 Psalm. 
 
 "My soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars. " 
 
 Dante. 
 
 "I do not wonder at what men suffer, but I wonder at 
 what they lose. We may see how good rises out of pain and 
 evil; but the dead, naked, eyeless loss, what good comes of that? 
 The fruit struck to the earth before its ripeness; the glowing 
 life and goodly purpose dissolved away in sudden death; the 
 words half spoken, choked upon the lips with clay forever; 
 these are the heaviest mysteries of this strange world. " 
 
 RUSKIN. 
 
 "Somewhere is comfort, somewhere faith, 
 
 Though thou in outer dark remain; 
 One sweet sad voice ennobles death, 
 
 And still, for eighteen centuries saith 
 Softly, — 'Auf Wiedersehen ! ' 
 
 "If earth another grave must bear. 
 
 Yet heaven hath won a sweeter strain, 
 And something whispers my despair, 
 
 That, from an orient chamber there, 
 Floats down, — 'Auf Wiedersehen I ' " 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 "The body of Benjamin Franklin, like the cover of an old 
 book, its contents torn out, and stripped of its leather and gilding, 
 lies here food for worms; yet the work itself shall not be lost, 
 for it will, as he believes, appear once more in a new and more 
 beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author. " 
 
 Franklin's Epitaph, written by himself. 
 
 "When I go down to the grave I can say, like so many 
 others, I have finished my day's work; but I cannot say, I have 
 finished my life ; my day's work will begin again the next morn- 
 ing, my tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It 
 closes in the twilight to open in the dawn. " 
 
 Victor Hugo. 
 
 (148) 
 
DEATH NOT AN END, BUT AN INCIDENT 
 
 Pericles once said to the young men of Athens, 
 "You are the spring of our year." It is the promise of 
 springtime in the young that makes their death seem to 
 us tragical. We lose not only what they are, but what 
 they might become. The tragedy lies in the fact that 
 their sun has gone down while it is yet day; that a 
 beautiful dawn has ended in sudden eclipse. It is this 
 tragedy in the life of Martin Milmore which French's 
 "Death and the Sculptor" embodies and commemo- 
 rates. The work of the young sculptor is abruptly 
 broken off, when death calls him away, and must remain 
 incomplete. 
 
 Browning faced the same tragedy in the sudden 
 death of Miss Egerton-Smith, who was staying with the 
 Brownings in a little town of Switzerland. One evening 
 he arranged for a mountain climb with her for the next 
 day. When, early the next morning, he came to keep 
 his appointment, she was dead. Tennyson, had a like 
 experience in the death of Arthur Hallam. After four 
 years of intimate friendship with the poet and after a brief 
 youth, that promised much for the future, the news of 
 
 (149) 
 
150 "DEATH AND THE SCULPTOR"— FRENCH 
 
 Hallam's sudden death in Vienna stirred the poet as 
 nothing had ever done before. 
 
 This tragedy all three artists faced and battled with, 
 and each has left a monument of his conflict in a work 
 of art; French in his bronze memorial, and Tennyson 
 and Browning in their noble poems "In Memoriam" 
 and "La Saisiaz." They have compelled the mystery 
 to declare itself. All three made the same discovery, 
 and all three have expressed in common the two great 
 sidelights, which Christianity throws on the tragedy. 
 The two Christian words which they have made clear and 
 concrete for us, by working them out in their own experi- 
 ence, are the only two words which they found to be of 
 any comfort. 
 
 Their first word is that the very mystery of the 
 tragedy becomes itself a source of comfort. Not that the 
 mystery did not weigh heavily upon them. It did. 
 French has put a bewildered look on the young sculptor's 
 face, as he turns to inquire of his unasked visitor, why 
 she has come so soon. Browning climbed the mountain, 
 which he and Miss Smith were to have climbed together, 
 that there he, by himself alone, might face the ultimate 
 questions — "Does the soul survive the body? Is there 
 God's self, no or yes?" It took all his noble faith and 
 optimism to give him courage to face them. The death 
 of Hallam was the deepest grief of Tennyson's life, and 
 
DEATH A MERE INCIDENT 151 
 
 its turning point. It was to him the baptism of fire. 
 His poem begins with a wail, and for seventeen years he 
 worked on "In Memoriam" before he came out into his 
 noble conclusion. 
 
 The mystery which at first bewildered all three men, 
 at last became a comfort. French, by the delicate 
 shading of the death angel's face with folds of drapery, 
 indicates that it is not possible to know why she has come. 
 But this is not the only mystery. The young man in the 
 statue is chiseling the sphinx, the personification of 
 mystery, by which the artist suggests that the mystery of 
 life is as great as the miystery of death. Just to recognize 
 that mystery is on every hand and that it cannot be 
 penetrated is itself a comfort. What mystifies us in this 
 tragedy is the fact that we see the beginning of a life, but 
 not its end. We are like dwellers in a room with the 
 blinds down. Our inability to see the end ought to 
 prevent all dogmatizing as to what the end is, and keep 
 us from thinking that it may not be better than the 
 beginning. The wise man knows how to be ignorant. 
 
 In like manner Job found comfort. After he and his 
 friends had made their answers to his problem, it still 
 remained an open wound. Then God presents to Job 
 indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is 
 comforted. Job flings at God one riddle; God flings 
 at Job a hundred riddles and Job is at peace. One of the 
 
152 "DEATH AND THE SCULPTOR"— FRENCH 
 
 greatest contributions ot the book of Job, says Chesterton, 
 is the conviction that, if we are to be reconciled to this 
 strange world, it must be as something divinely mysterious. 
 
 The silence of the book of Job is typical of the whole 
 Bible. The man who lay on the bosom of the Master is the 
 most modest and reticent about the future, " It doth not 
 yet appear," says John, "what we shall be." One of the 
 chief elements of the Bible's greatness lies in the things 
 it does not tell us. It is a silence that is silver and a 
 reticence that has comfort in it. Id this silence Browning 
 and Tennyson both found comfort, and by it were driven 
 to a reliance on the simple faith of the heart and compelled 
 "to believe where they cannot prove." It is then and 
 then only that they discover Christianity's greatest 
 message on their problem. 
 
 Relying thus on the logic of the heart they made their 
 second discovery. The conviction forced itself upon 
 them that death, is not an end, but a mere incident; that 
 man is an animal by accident but a spirit by birthright, 
 that a man's engines are built for a longer voyage than 
 that between the ports of life and death. "In Memo- 
 riam" began with a wail but ended in the song — "men were 
 not born to die." Browning said that if this life is not 
 the school time for a larger one, then all is chaos. They 
 refused to believe that God would educate His master- 
 piece, man, and then shoot him down. They believed 
 
DEATH A MERE INCIDENT iS3 
 
 in the immortality of the soul as John Fiske said he did 
 "not in the sense in which I believe in the demonstrable 
 truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the 
 reasonableness of God's work." 
 
 This conviction is beautifully embodied in the 
 symbols of French's statue. In it death comes to the 
 young man, as a beautiful woman, to indicate that she is 
 the mother of another life. She does not snatch the 
 chisel from him, but touches his hand enticingly, 
 calling him not to stop work, but to exchange his present 
 work for something better, calling him home as a mother 
 calls her child. She carries in her hand a cluster of lotus 
 blossoms. The legend is that no one ever wants to leave 
 the land where the lotus blooms. The death angel calls 
 him to a land, from which he will not wish to return, a 
 land where, unhampered by limitations, he will finish 
 what he here began. The artist would say that death is 
 not much; it is just a turn in the road; it changes no 
 essential; it is passing from one room into a larger; it is 
 a mere incident by the way. 
 
 The conviction, which thus became a living thing 
 to these three artists, is one which Christianity alone 
 enabled men to hold. Jesus was the first man in history 
 to make the absolute continuity of life seem real. There 
 were scattered hopes of it among the Jews. To the Jew 
 death seemed abnormal and irregular. He never asso- 
 
154 "DEATH AND THE SCULPTOR"— FRENCH 
 
 dated his great men with it. Enoch escaped it. Elijah 
 passed by it. Moses had a hidden grave. The Bible 
 does not record the death of a single one of its prophets. 
 The reason suggested by Matheson is, that in the thought 
 of the Biblical writers, the prophet dwelt with things that 
 were eternal, and they felt that his image in the record 
 ought to be timeless as his message was timeless. The 
 Jew, like the Greek, had a horror of death. But the teach- 
 ing of the continuity of life is not found in Jewish or 
 pagan literature before the time of Christ. Jesus made 
 it the cardinal question of belief. When Martha came to 
 Him on the death of her brother and was not satisfied 
 with a far-off resurrection but asked for some present 
 comfort. He said, " I am (now) the resurrection and the 
 life. He that believeth on me shall never die; believest 
 thou this?" 
 
 What was it Jesus asked her to believe? It was this, 
 that Lazarus was not mere matter, subject to decay, but 
 was a spirit and that he was now alive. He asked her 
 to believe in the spiritual nature of man; to trust the 
 logic of the heart rather than the logic of the head; to 
 believe in the absolute continuity of life. Jesus brushed 
 death aside as a mere incident in an unbroken career. 
 Lazarus is not dead, He said, but living and close at hand. 
 This is the meaning of French's lotus blossoms, which, 
 Jesus says, death always brings with her when she comes. 
 
DEATH A MERE INCIDENT 155 
 
 This is the root principle of all faith. It is the one 
 article of faith Jesus submitted to Martha. If this is not 
 true, then there is nothing worthy to be true. 
 
 The man who believes that death is a mere incident, 
 can feel, as Victor Hugo said he felt, like a bird perched 
 on a frail bough, who feels its branch give way, yet keeps 
 on singing, knowing it has wings for flight. Nothing 
 discloses the rich meaning of this belief like the death of 
 the young, as French and Browning and Tennyson dis- 
 covered with amazement. With this belief any man 
 may say with one of these poets, what no man without 
 it could ever say, — 
 
 "At noon day in the bustle of man's work-time. 
 
 Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
 Bid him forward, breast and back 
 
 As either should be, 
 'Strive and thrive!' cry speed, — ^fight on. 
 
 Forever, there as here." 
 
XI 
 
 The Pursuit of Pleasure 
 
 From a painting by Henneberg 
 
THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE 
 
 By Henneberg 
 The igi,3, ,, ^^.^ p.^^^^^ ^.^.^ j^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^ 
 
 - the National Gallery at Berlin. It was painted in .868. 
 js seventy-s.x inches high and one hundred fifty-three inches 
 long. The reproduction is from . nh,.^..„..„u u.. ,, ^ ,. 
 Photograph Company, N, ^'^'° 
 
XI 
 
 Interpretation 
 Happiness a By-Product 
 
"Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall lose it, but who- 
 soever shall lose his life shall preserve it. " 
 
 Jesus. 
 
 "The instinct which leads us to compare what we are with 
 what we might be, is no doubt of enormous value, but like every 
 instinct, it is the source of greatest danger. I remember the 
 day and the very spot on which it flashed into me like a sudden 
 burst of the sun's rays, that had no right to this or that, to so 
 much happiness. Straightway it seemed as if the centre of a 
 whole system of dissatisfaction were removed. Cease the trick 
 of contrast. " 
 
 Mark Rutherford. 
 
 "It's no in titles nor in rank; 
 It's no in wealth like Lon ' on bank, 
 
 To purchase peace and rest: 
 It's no in makin ' muckle mair, 
 It's no in books, it's no in lear 
 
 To make us truly blest; 
 If happiness hae not her seat 
 
 An ' centre in the breast 
 We may be wise, or rich, or great 
 
 But never can be blest. 
 Nae treasures nor pleasures 
 
 Could make us happy lang; 
 The heart ay's the part ay 
 
 That makes us right or wrang. " 
 
 Burns. 
 
 "The whim we have of happiness is somewhat thus: By 
 certain valuations and averages, of our own striking, we come 
 upon some sort of average terrestrial lot ; this we fancy belongs 
 to us by nature and of right. It is simple payment of our wages. 
 Only such overplus as there may be do we account Happiness, 
 any deficit again is misery. Now consider that we have the 
 valuation of our deserts ourselves, and what a fund of self- 
 conceit there is in each of us, — do you wonder that the balance 
 should so often dip the wrong way? The fraction of life can 
 be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator 
 as by lessening your denominator. " 
 
 Carlylb, 
 
 (162) 
 
HAPPINESS A BY-PRODUCT 
 
 "How far, how far, how far is it from here, from 
 here to happiness?" This is the song which the car 
 wheels sang to James Whitcomb Riley's little friend 
 "Jamsie." It is the song perpetually singing itself to 
 human hearts. Whilst many would not openly avow 
 the Epicurean doctrine that pleasure and pain are the 
 chief motives of action, or defend with Herbert Spencer 
 the position that happiness is a legitimate object of 
 endeavor, yet, whatever meaning each may for him- 
 self assign to it, the majority make happiness, of 
 some sort, their chief goal of direct pursuit, as Henne- 
 berg represents the central character in his picture as 
 doing. 
 
 The striking fact is that all such seekers after happi- 
 ness confess that their search is fruitless, and that the 
 lees of life to them are bitter. Long would be the recital 
 of the names of famous men who had toiled through a 
 long life and at last confessed with bitterness that they 
 had caught nothing. The verdict of the book of Eccle- 
 siastes has been repeated every time its experiment has 
 been tried. "In all my seventy-five years," said Goethe, 
 
 (163) 
 
i64 "PURSUIT OF PLEASURE"— HENNEBERG 
 
 "I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being." 
 Burns spoke from experience when he sang, 
 
 " But pleasures are like poppies spread 
 You seize the flower, its bloom is shed, 
 Or like the snow-fall in the river, 
 A moment white, then gone forever." 
 
 The words "pastime" and "diversion," used to describe 
 our pleasures, bear the same sad testimony to the fact 
 that men have not found happiness in themselves, but 
 must seek for something to fill up the time and divert their 
 thoughts from themselves. The search for pleasure is 
 largely an effort to avoid self-reflection. The popularity 
 of Omar Khayyam and his pessimistic poem indicates 
 how wide-spread is the sense of failure in the pursuit of 
 happiness. The chief consolation which the amusement 
 seeker, suffering from ennui, finds in the Persian poet 
 is the discovery that other failures like himself are so 
 numerous. 
 
 Failure to find happiness is made more pronounced 
 by the additional truth, that such failure is not due to any 
 lack of the means, which are used to secure it. Those 
 who have the most of such means are the least happy. 
 Among all the characters in Mrs. Wharton's novel, 
 "The House of Mirth," the only two, who are happy, are a 
 plain warm-hearted woman, whose income barely keeps her 
 
HAPPINESS A BY-PRODUCT 165 
 
 from actual poverty, and the wife of aworkingman, whose 
 husband, baby, and tiny "flat" constitute her little 
 world. The frantic pursuit of pleasure by all the other 
 characters ends in empty failure or in misery. 
 
 Such failure becomes pathetic when it is remembered 
 that it all could have been avoided by the simple dis- 
 covery, that happiness is a by-product. This is the first 
 and chief thing to be said about happiness. It ought not 
 to take a long experience to reveal the truth, that pleasure 
 cannot be sought directly with success. Johnson wrote 
 his "Rasselas" with the sole purpose of demonstrating 
 the truth of this statement. This is the truth which 
 Henneberg has told with cruel bluntness in his picture, 
 "The Pursuit of Pleasure." The chief figure in the 
 picture is accompanied in his mad haste, not by happiness, 
 but by an image of death. His pursuit contains the 
 seeds of its own defeat. He is after an ever-receding 
 figure riding on a bubble, that is sure to burst. The 
 bridge, over which he dashes, ends in a narrow plank, 
 from which the fall of his horse will be inevitable. By 
 the flowers which he tramples down; by the virtuous 
 and prostrate woman on whom he treads, and by the 
 money which is flung from his hand into the abyss, the 
 artist says, that the man has passed by and wasted the 
 very means, which produce happiness, if he had only 
 known it. 
 
1 66 "PURSUIT OF PLEASURE"— HENNEBERG 
 
 The bitter irony of this picture was felt by the 
 followers of the Epicurean philosophy in the beginning, 
 and by its devotees ever since. Epicureanism assumed that 
 a man was a bundle of natural appetites and passions, 
 and that the end of life is their gratification. It ended 
 by teaching that the thing most desirable was the "divine 
 apathy," indifference to all desires. The pursuit of 
 pleasure had completed the circle and defeated itself. 
 It is the same blunder made by the miser, who confuses 
 happiness with the means of happiness. He begins by 
 seeking for money for the pleasure it procures. He ends 
 by sacrificing every pleasure in order to secure money, 
 and it is a sad commentary on his error that the words 
 "miser" and "miserable" are from the same root. 
 
 The fact is that happiness is a by-product of other 
 and higher causes than itself. This is the meaning 
 of the oft-repeated paradox of Jesus, which He said had 
 a universal application, "whosoever shall seek to gain 
 his life, shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life shall 
 gain it." Jesus does not say it is wrong to desire happi- 
 ness, for He came. He said, to give men joy. What He 
 does say is, that it is wrong to seek it, and not only wrong, 
 but futile. That the way to get it, is to lose oneself in 
 devotion to other and unselfish ends, and happiness will 
 come incidentally. Make pleasure the object of pursuit 
 and it is never attained. 
 
HAPPINESS A BY-PRODUCT 167 
 
 Jesus' position, Tolstoi found to be literally true. 
 He lived for years among an exclusive, pleasure-loving, 
 royal company in St. Petersburg. He became depressed 
 when he awoke to the fact, that they were all wretchedly 
 unhappy. Then he went to his farm and noticed that 
 the plain people of the countryside were uniformly happy. 
 He tried to discover the reason for this difference. The 
 explanation he gave himself was, that the people of St. 
 Petersburg were in mad pursuit of pleasure for its own 
 sake, and the country folk were absorbed in mutual serv- 
 ice. He had discovered that happiness was a by-prod- 
 uct, as Jesus had said. He pathetically adds that, 
 what it took him years to discover, he might have learned 
 easily, if he had had the good sense to open the pages of 
 the New Testament. 
 
 An external unselfish end in life is the cause, from 
 which happiness comes as an inevitable result. William 
 De Witt Hyde thus illustrates the fatal error of the Epicu- 
 rean pleasure-seeker. " Build a good fire and warm your . 
 room and the mercury in the thermometer will rise. The 
 cause produces the eflFect. But it does not follow that 
 because you raise the mercury in the thermometer by 
 breathing on the bulb, or by holding it in your hand, that 
 the fire will burn or the room be warmed. The Epicurean 
 goes around with a clincal thermometer under his tongue 
 all the time. " Sooner or later he must see that there is no 
 
i68 "PURSUIT OF PLEASURE"— HENNEBERG 
 
 escape from the principle, stated by Jesus, and embodied in 
 Henneberg's picture, that happiness comes only as a 
 by-product. It can be found only by the practice of 
 what Lowell calls the "theory of the unsought." And 
 what Lowell says, in illustration of his theory, about his 
 pursuit of the muse, is the fundamental fact about happi- 
 ness. 
 
 "Coy Hebe flies from those who woo. 
 
 And shuns the hands would seize upon her; 
 Follow thy life, and she will sue 
 To pour for thee the cup of honor." 
 
XII 
 
 Christ in Gethsemane 
 
 From a painting by Heinrich Hofmann 
 
CHRIST IN GETHSEMANK 
 By Heinrich Hofm.p., 
 
 ^he scene of Tesu<; in r 
 
 — -e „„, „, .„.;,;;*,:=;;; 7^- -- s„«„.n, ,J 
 
 ""«'■ upon us ,he sordid brutalities .l!" ""'" "" "" "^l" to 
 "i^ Pas^ion unless he ™.e „ ' e^ Zl' """'' "'"°" ^^^ '» 
 """erlies the physical facts ! ,'""" ^"'""•=1 reality, which 
 ■hemselves only ,,,,,,.„^ \ ^'■J ""-■= »' sufl-ering are i„ 
 "nd why He suffered. To paint 7h """"'"" '"'o Jesus was 
 -Piri.ua, insight and synt^at^ whlc"! T' """^ ''^"'«= 
 •--ought they possessed sufficienMvT " ""'* """ "»' 
 
 Hunt Shrank from i, and oil! "'" "■' •^''•- H"taan 
 
 P'Cture has shown the same reserv! . "" "" '*"''«">ane 
 
 a'-Pted to represent on y 1 ." '°°'' ^■"'^"'""- «'"« 
 
 ^'-■■'--"-worthii;hi::;e:rr,i:i:— :-- 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
XII 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Heroism of Jesus 
 
"And He went a little further and fell on his face and 
 prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
 away from me. " 
 
 Matthew. 
 
 "The so-called heroes of the world have conquered by 
 shedding other men's blood ; but this man by shedding his own. " 
 
 H. B. RiDGAWAY. 
 
 "Gethsemane ought ever to be a veiled Holy of Holies, to 
 be visited, if at all, only at moments when we can look with 
 purified eyes and allow the meaning of our Saviour in His 
 Passion to steal softly into our minds. " 
 
 A. M. Fairbairn. 
 
 "Into the woods my Master went. 
 Clean forspent, forspent, 
 
 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. 
 
 "Out of the woods my Master went, 
 And He was well content. 
 
 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. 
 
 "To stand, with a smile upon your face, against a stake 
 from which you cannot get away, — that, no doubt, is heroic. 
 True glory is resignation to the inevitable. But to stand un- 
 chained, with perfect liberty to go away, held only by the higher 
 claims of duty, and let the fire creep up to the heart, — this is 
 heroism. 
 
 F. W. Robertson. 
 
 (174) 
 
THE HEROISM OF JESUS 
 
 To the proud and imperious Roman and to the early 
 pagan of Teutonic Europe, Jesus seemed unheroic and 
 unworthy of worship. "Do you know that Thor chal- 
 lenged your white Christ, and he refused to fight?" was a 
 taunt which an Icelander hurled at a Christian. To the 
 pagan, submission to an enemy was weakness. To them 
 a scene like that in Gethsemane was an obstacle, not an 
 attraction. The fact must be granted that in the garden, 
 Jesus is crushed with a strange weakness. 
 
 When one compares Jesus in Gethsemane facing 
 death, with Socrates in his cell facing death, Jesus suffers 
 from the comparison, if you look no deeper than the ex- 
 ternal facts. Socrates took his cup quite "readily and 
 cheerfully. " Jesus prayed in an agony to be delivered from 
 His. In the prison cell at Athens, Socrates met his last trial 
 with calm and good cheer. In Gethsemane there was the 
 sweat of blood, the broken prayer, the falling of the face, 
 the over-mastering depression, the terrible consternation of 
 spirit. " Ringed round with sorrow, " is the term the evan- 
 gelist uses. In view of this contrast how can Jesus be adored 
 as the supreme Man? Can it be true that He does not 
 
 (175) 
 
r76 "CHRIST IN GETHSEMANE"— HOFMANN 
 
 deserve the place given Him in Christian thought? Was 
 He less brave than Socrates? 
 
 Such questions are startling, but helpful, for they 
 compel one to look for the cause of the contrast between 
 the two men. When one looks for such a cause, he sees 
 that any comparison between the cup of hemlock and the 
 cup pressed to Jesus' lips, is unfair and out of place, be- 
 cause the problems faced by the two men are not in the 
 same class. With Socrates it was the question merely 
 of his own death. With Jesus it was the problem of sin 
 and its forgiveness. He did not fear death. He had not 
 ceased to speak about it familiarly, since He first mentioned 
 it at Caesarea Philippi. Nor did He fear sin for Himself. 
 "Conscience makes a coward only where there is guilt." 
 He was not punished for His own sin, or any other man's 
 sin. It would be both immoral and impossible for any 
 man to be punished for another's sin. He was not 
 punished for sin. He suffered for it. It was the problem 
 of sin, as He so often said, that caused His mysterious 
 horror. 
 
 The fact of sin tortured Him, because He, more than 
 any other man who ever lived, knew the meaning of sin. 
 Dr. Fairbairn truly says, that the holier a man is, the more 
 perfectly does he understand sin; the more wicked he is, 
 the less. The prodigal could not see into the depravity 
 and defilement of the "far country," as his father did. 
 
THE HEROISM OF JESUS 177 
 
 Jesus' agony was due in part to His intuitive, sensitive 
 knowledge of the nature of sin. It is this truth for which 
 Genthsemane stands first of all. The more Jesus loved 
 man, the more the sin, that was ruining the loved man, 
 tore His bleeding heart. 
 
 Jesus' wise and tender heart agonized, not only over 
 sin, as a fact, but also over sin as a problem. It was the 
 thought that in putting Him to death men were guilty 
 of an act of wickedness, from which He was helpless to 
 save them. They could kill Him if they would, but if 
 they did, they murdered their own souls. His unselfish 
 purpose to save, seemed to have hopelessly failed. His 
 own goodness seemed to have intensified the forces of 
 evil. 
 
 The problem that tightened at His heart was how 
 could forgiveness be found for such sin. Forgiveness 
 with men is a simple matter; it is to forget their injuries. 
 With God, who is always willing to forgive, and who alone 
 can truly forgive, forgiveness is a profound problem. 
 The problem is how to save men from sin, and at the same 
 time preserve the ethical order of the moral world, which 
 must condemn them for it. The thing over which Jesus 
 agonized was the ultimate relation of the three greatest 
 facts of life, — "the greatest thing in God, which is His 
 love; the strongest thing in the universe, which is law; 
 and the darkest thing in man, which is sin." How 
 
178 "CHRIST IN GETHSEMANE"— HOFMANN 
 
 intense was His agony only became manifest when "the 
 touch of a Roman spear showed that He had died of a 
 broken heart." 
 
 The world has not been mistaken in looking on Jesus, 
 alone in Gethsemane, as its greatest hero. His heroism 
 lies in this lonely struggle over men's deepest needs and 
 problems. The record says, "He went a little further," 
 — ^went into the night beyond human help and pity, to 
 endure "the loneliness of the hero and the thinker." 
 The acceptance of loneliness is the necessary condition 
 of all rare achievement. Lowell, in his three poems on 
 "Prometheus" and "Cromwell" and "Columbus" makes 
 the lonely conflicts in their souls over the problems of 
 human freedom and progress, to be the chief element in 
 their heroism. 
 
 The chief point of Hofmann's picture is the em- 
 phasis he lays on the loneliness of Jesus. "The first 
 law of all heroism is the courage to go on when others 
 are left behind." The artist wisely has given to his Hero 
 a regal aspect as of an uncrowned King, for so He was. 
 The light, which in the picture, streams upon Him, and 
 the halo about His head, is the artist's way of saying what 
 Luke says, that an angel from Heaven strengthened Him. 
 It was his filial trust and His Knowledge of His Father's 
 approval, which never deserted Him through it all. With 
 His Father's approval on His heroic struggle, He came 
 
THE HEROISM OF JESUS 179 
 
 out from !he olive grove "well content with death and 
 shame" and walked henceforth through his remaining 
 passion with the mien of a conqueror. 
 
 The sight of the solitary sufferer in Gethsemane has 
 been one of the mightiest redemptive forces in human 
 life. It made sin seem a new thing. The sin that caused 
 such suffering could not henceforth be looked upon lightly. 
 Gethsemane is the best corrective of the theory that sin 
 is only "involuntary error," Men become conscious of 
 sin, as never before, when they look at it through the eyes 
 of the stainless Christ. Such a sight supplies the strongest 
 motive to keep men from sin. Show a man the suffering 
 his sin imposes on an innocent wife or child, and this 
 motive operates, when all others have failed. 
 
 Gethsemane is at once a man's salvation from sin, and 
 his punishment for it. For one of the worst punishments 
 of sin is to look on the suffering we have caused the in- 
 nocent. "The rivers of the Inferno," says Dante, "are 
 made up of the tears we have caused others to shed. " It is 
 these two effects which Newman, in his " Dream of Geron- 
 tius," says the sight of the Master in the future world, 
 produces. 
 
 "That sight of the Most Fair 
 Will gladden thee, but it will pierce thee, too. 
 ********** though 
 Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinn'd 
 
i8o "CHRIST IN GETHSEMANE"— HOFMANN 
 
 As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire 
 To slink away, and hide thee from His sight: 
 And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell 
 Within the beauty of His countenance. 
 And these two pains, so counter and so keen, — 
 The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not; 
 The shame of self at thought of seeing Him, — 
 Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory." 
 
 Gethsemane is a challenge to all men to be heroic. 
 The trial question it puts to every man is whether he will 
 follow Jesus in His Gethsemane. "You cannot," says 
 Ruskin, "save men from death but by facing it for them, 
 nor from sin but by resisting it for them. That is the 
 final doctrine, the inevitable one, not of Christianity only, 
 but of all heroic faith; and the first trial question of a 
 true soul to itself must always be, — Have I a religion, 
 have I a country, have I a love that I am ready to die 
 for?" 
 
 This is the root of heroism. They alone who 
 grasp it can be heroes. Jesus left eight of His disciples 
 at the outer gate of the olive garden. A little later He 
 parted from Peter and James and John, who are seen in 
 the background of Hofmann's picture. He is left alone. 
 Who can follow in His train? Is no one able to watch 
 with Him in His lonely struggle? Who can follow now 
 in His train? When Charles Kingsley was hissed at a 
 
THE HEROISM OF JESUS i8i 
 
 workingmen's meeting by those to whom his heart went 
 out, lie burst into tears. Then he tramped off twenty 
 miles through the night, and at day-break wrote his poem, 
 "The Three Fishers," It was Kingsley's Gethsemane. 
 No man can understand Jesus in the olive garden, and 
 like Jesus, no man can be a hero or a Saviour until he 
 has a Gethsemane of his own. 
 
XIII 
 "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" 
 
 From a painting by George Frederick Watts 
 
"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MTrNDT" 
 By George F. WatU 
 
 This picture was suggested to the artist by the Queen of 
 Roumania, "Carman Sylva." During a visit to his studio she 
 quoted the old German motto, "What I spent, I had; what I 
 saved, I lost; what I gave, I have." The picture is a concrete 
 expression in form and color of this motto. "Watts has inscribed 
 it on the dark curtain, that hangs behind the shrouded figure. 
 The picture is three feet four inches high, and si.t feet eight inches 
 long. It was painted in 1892, and in 1897 was presented by 
 Watts to the Tate Gallery, London, where it now is. 
 

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XIII 
 
 Interpretation 
 A Disappointed Man 
 
"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted; 
 that is, strengthened. " 
 
 Jesus. 
 
 "In the crown of thorns and in the rod of reed, was fore- 
 shown the everlasting truth of the Christian Ages, — that all glory 
 was to be begun in suffering, and all power in humility. " 
 
 RUSKIN. 
 
 "Deem not that they are blest alone 
 Whose days a peaceful tenor keep ; 
 The God who loves our race has shown 
 A blessing for the eyes that weep. " 
 
 "Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath 
 settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to 
 vessel, therefore his taste remaineth in him, and his scent is not 
 changed. " 
 
 Jeremiah. 
 
 "It is indeed a remarkable fact that sufferings and hard- 
 ships do not as a rule abate the love of life ; they seem, on the 
 contrary, usually to give to it a keener zest ; and the sovereign 
 source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what 
 excite and inspire. Our hour of triumph is what brings the 
 yoid. " 
 
 William James. 
 
 "O Friend, we never choose the better part 
 Until we set the cross up in our heart. 
 I know I cannot live until I die 
 Till I am nailed upon it, wild and high. 
 And sleep in the tomb for a full three days, dead — 
 With angels at the feet and at the head; 
 But there in a great brightness I shall rise 
 To walk with stiller feet below the skies. " 
 
 Markham. 
 
 (i88) 
 
A DISAPPOINTED MAN 
 
 In the whole of the "Divine Comedy," Dante smiles 
 but once. When in the sphere of the Fixed Stars, at the 
 suggestion of Beatrice, he looked downwards, he smiled 
 at the mean appearance of our globe, "the little threshing 
 floor" he calls it, whose possession men so ferociously 
 dispute. A similar smile is caused by Watts' picture. 
 For the prospective, which Dante's position gave him, 
 is furnished in the picture by the touch of Death. In 
 the picture the artist has not painted a corpse. It is 
 the effect on life, of the touch of death, which he has 
 painted. Under its magic touch the things for which 
 the man had so passionately striven appear now as they 
 are, and they seem small. He is a disappointed man. 
 For this reason, the artist has put faded tints on the once 
 brilliant accessories. 
 
 The relics of the man's life, which are in the 
 foreground, tells us who and what the man was. The 
 ermine robe on the left indicates that he inherited a noble 
 name. The laurel wreath on the right shows that he 
 won fame, as well as inherited it. The spear, the gauntlet, 
 and the golden shield, tell us that he won his fame in war. 
 
 (189) 
 
I90 "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI"— WATTS 
 
 The peacock feathers show his love of the pleasures of 
 life and his taste for its decorations. The lute speaks 
 of his musical tastes. The book says he was not a 
 stranger to literature. The dark robe of the pilgrim with 
 its cockle-shell, points to the fact that he had his mystic 
 religious side, a presentiment that, after all, mere fame 
 was hollow. He was a man of culture and success. 
 There he lies on the bier, covered by the pearl-grey shroud, 
 which is the largest and most conspicuous object on the 
 canvas. It looms large and overshadows all his achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 He is now a disappointed man. The artist has indi- 
 cated this in the position of the head. The face is not 
 level in repose, but thrown back in question and eager- 
 ness. With head thrown back he is still craving and 
 pursuing. He is not much in himself. He has nothing 
 which can resist the solvent touch of death. Why is he 
 disappointed? Why has he now only poverty? Why 
 is he not at rest? It is because he lacks now what he 
 lacked in life. Amid all the glorious symbols of his life 
 there is no symbol of a cross. There is nothing to indi- 
 cate that he was anything but a self-seeker, an Epicurean, 
 not of the vulgar sort, but an Epicurean just the same. 
 In life he had given little in service, and now he has little. 
 "There was plenty of culture, but what of the cross? There 
 is the crown of laurel. Where is the crown of thorns?" 
 
A DISAPPOINTED MAN 191 
 
 With all the man's gifts and achievements he had 
 not learned the Christian commonplace, that the path- 
 way to peace and real riches, is the way of the cross. 
 The word cross has acquired two distinct meanings which 
 have become common. It has become the symbol of 
 what Christ did for men, an expression of what is most 
 precious in the spiritual life. As such it is a joy and 
 inspiration. It is the sign of the gentleness of God. This 
 meaning is expressed in Christian song. 
 
 "Beneath the cross of Jesus 
 I fain would take my stand, 
 The shadow of a mighty rock 
 Within a weary land." 
 
 The second meaning it has acquired is, that the cross is a 
 test, a burden, a conflict, a somber thing, which one is 
 asked to assume, but if assumed at all is done reluctantly. 
 This also finds expression in Christian song. 
 
 "Thou say'st. Take up thy cross, 
 O man, and follow me; 
 The night is black, the feet are slake 
 Yet we would follow Thee.' " 
 
 There is a third meaning which Christianity has put into 
 the word, but which is understood as yet only by the 
 few, but destined in the future to be one of the chief facts 
 
192 "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI "—WATTS 
 
 fn Christian experience, symbolized by the cross. The 
 fact referred to is, that every cross willingly borne is 
 forthwith transmuted into joy; is, indeed, the only means 
 of securing the joy which is the real riches. Goethe 
 called Christianity the "deification of sorrow." But 
 the great German never entered the New Testament's 
 sanctuary of sorrow enough to understand its teaching, 
 that sorrov/ and joy were not enemies, but friends; or 
 to see that it emphasized sorrow only as a means of the 
 truest joy. The New Testament is constantly speaking 
 of tribulation and triumph ; of suffering and the glory that 
 follows. It weds the two ideas of cross-bearing and true 
 joy, which Goethe, and the man in Watts' picture thought 
 were incompatible, but which are, in fact, riveted together 
 as cause and effect. 
 
 Watts' picture says that human experience verifies 
 the New Testament teaching, for the man in the picture 
 vindicates its truth by showing the effect of its absence 
 in his life. The happy people in life are not such as he, 
 but those who are crucified with Christ. This is a spiritual 
 principle exemplified in human life every day and hour; 
 a principle so vital and so apparent, that it is a matter 
 of surprise that the number of men, like the one in Watts' 
 picture, who do not see it, is so large. Jesus said that 
 those that mourn are to be accounted happy, for by 
 means of their cross-bearing they are made strong. 
 
A DISAPPOINTED MAN 193 
 
 "When pain ends gain ends, too." The men least 
 disappointed are the cross bearers. 
 
 Was Paul an anxious, depressed, unhappy man? 
 Was he not exultantly glad in all that he endured? It is 
 unexpected but not surprising, that the best hymns of 
 hope and courage have been written by great sufferers, 
 Baxter, Miss Elliott, Miss Havergal and Mrs. Browning. 
 The latter in her poem, "The Musical Instrument," has 
 told us why this is so. The great god Pan goes down to 
 the river and rends and wounds the reeds and golden 
 lilies. He tears out a reed from the deep cool bed of the 
 river. He hacks and hews it, draws out its pith like the 
 heart of a man, notches the poor dry empty thing with 
 holes, and thus from it makes music. We may mourn 
 for the reed that will grow nevermore with the reeds in 
 the river, yet this is the only way since the world began, 
 that sweet music can be made. 
 
 Everything which is noblest in human character has 
 its roots in the mystery of pain. It is related of a famous 
 naturalist that one day he was studying a cocoon, in which 
 a butterfly was struggling to be free. He heard it beat- 
 ing against the sides of its little prison. His heart pitied 
 the helpless creature, so with a tiny lancet he cut away the 
 fragile walls and released the captive. To his amazement 
 it lay struggling upon the table, and never was able to fly. 
 In the place of the gorgeously colored wings he had 
 
 13 
 
194 "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI"— WATT 
 
 expected to see, were weak, shriveled members. The 
 obstacle had been removed before the butterfly had been 
 made sufficiently strong, through struggle, to be ready for 
 its glorious flight into the sunshine among the flowers. 
 The naturalist's act was mistaken kindness. 
 
 What Christianity did was not to deify sorrow or 
 hardship as an end in itself, but it took this great natural 
 law and extended its application to the spiritual world, 
 and demonstrated that cross-bearing is God's minister to 
 manhood. Its unique message is that life is glorious, not 
 in spite of the crosses, but is glorious because of them. It is 
 just as true in the spiritual world as it is in the natural world, 
 that "all sunshine makes the desert." The heart of the man 
 in the picture is a desert land because he had been pamper- 
 ed by too much sunshine. He lacks wings in his spiritual 
 outfit, because he refused to use the means of their develop- 
 ment. He who violates this natural law is certain to be a 
 disappointed man. This is what Watts' picture says. If 
 the man in the picture could now speak, he would say to 
 his fellows what indeed Watts' picture of him does say, — 
 
 "Then welcome each rebuff, 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough. 
 Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go; 
 Be our joys three-parts pain; 
 Strive and hold cheap the strain: 
 Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge 
 the throe." 
 
XIV 
 Christ and The Fishermen 
 
 From a painting by Ernst Zimmermann 
 
CHRISr ATO THE FISHERMEN 
 By Ernsi Zim^.rmann 
 
 snr Hanfseaengl, New York 
 
XIV 
 
 Interpretation 
 They Who Trust us Educate us 
 
"He needed not that any should bear witness concerning 
 man, for He himself knew what was in man. " 
 
 John. 
 
 "Be noble! and the nobleness that lies 
 In other men, sleeping, but never dead, 
 Will rise in majesty to meet thine own. " 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 "It is the merit and preservation of friendship, that it takes 
 place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties 
 would seem to warrant. " 
 
 Thoreau. 
 
 "Love is not blind. The nearer the intimacy, the more 
 cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those we love. If 
 you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They 
 will not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the magnani- 
 mous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without 
 change. " 
 
 Stevenson. 
 
 "At the call of love men and women constantly show them- 
 selves ready to re-fashion their lives, to part with habits as dear 
 to them as their own flesh, to open their hearts to an entirely 
 novel set of sensations, to adopt a kind of life, the very laws of 
 which have been hitherto unknown to them. If you can create 
 a noble attachment between a good man and a man far from 
 good, that attachment will prove the salvation of the weaker 
 man. He will learn to live his whole life with constant reference 
 to the approval of his friend. " 
 
 W. J. Dawson. 
 
 (200) 
 
THEY WHO TRUST US EDUCATE US 
 
 When Dr. Arnold went to Rugby, he found on the 
 walls of the schoolroom, placards containing certain 
 prohibitions. He immediately removed them and said to 
 the students, "Young gentlemen, I trust you. I expect 
 you to be gentlemen." When he went to Rugby, 
 lying was considered very good morals in the public 
 schools. He always met a boy's assertion with the 
 statement, "If you say so, that is enough for me; of 
 course, I can take your word." The feeling was soon 
 developed among the students, that it was a shame to 
 tell Dr. Arnold a lie, because, said the boys, he always 
 believes what you say. By trusting the boys. Dr. Arnold 
 educated them out of lying into frankness. The tradition 
 of the school was revolutionized. 
 
 Dr. Arnold's attitude toward his students illustrates 
 a marked habit of Jesus. And Jesus' habit was never 
 better illustrated than in the incident on the Sea of 
 Galilee, which Zimmermann has embodied in his picture. 
 It was after the great draft of fishes, and the disciples 
 had recovered from their excitement and eaten together 
 on the shore. The moment so simply and sincerely 
 
 (201) 
 
202 "CHRIST AND THE FISHERMEN" 
 
 represented in the picture is the moment, when, to Peter, 
 "all dripping still, shivering, and amazed; and having 
 had no word once changed with him by his Master since 
 that look of His," — to him, so amazed, comes the question, 
 "Simon, lovest thou me?" 
 
 The artist has put a look of sadness into Peter's 
 strong, earnest face, because he was hurt at Jesus' 
 doubt of his love; a doubt suggested by the repetition of 
 the question, and also by the change in the form of the 
 question. There are two words for love in the New 
 Testament. Agape means love without desire; love 
 that is willing to suflfer. Philia means a selfish love that 
 looks for return. Jesus twice asked whether Peter loved 
 him on the higher plane (Agape). Peter, remembering 
 his recent denial, answered that he loved Him on the 
 lower plane (Philia). He could go that far. Then 
 Jesus changed the question, and asked whether he was 
 sure he loved Him even on that lower plane (Philia). 
 
 Jesus had good reason to mistrust Peter. In spite of 
 that. He put implicit confidence in him, and, as the pic- 
 ture represents Him, He tenderly clasped the rough brown 
 hands of the old fisherman, while He entrusted to Him 
 His great message to the world. Then He immediately 
 predicted Peter's fidelity, and Peter proved true to the 
 trust. Jesus always trusted men, and expected the best 
 from them, not because He did not know men, but because 
 
THEY WHO TRUST US EDUCATE US 20.3 
 
 He did. He deliberately refused to look at what He did 
 not like. In His best known sermon He did not say, 
 cursed are the proud, the luxurious, the corrupt in heart; 
 but blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the pure in 
 heart. He assumed that such qualities existed and sought 
 to educate them by trusting them. 
 
 This habit of Jesus is one of great educational value. 
 George Matheson reminds us, that we learn our first 
 lesson in morality, not from the good we do, but from 
 the good we receive. We learn the beauty of justice, not 
 by doing a just action, but by having a just action done 
 to us. The attitude of others to us is our first great 
 teacher. Sociologists tell us that expectation was the 
 earliest form of law. Before any rule of action was 
 formulated, the expectation of a decision in accordance 
 with the community's sense of right, was the earliest 
 legal code. The people's expectation of the best from 
 their rulers and judges, educated the rulers into 
 giving it. 
 
 Our trust in man's better nature, on the whole is not 
 disappointed. The band of men on whom Jesus depended 
 at first, were, all in all, no wiser or nobler, and not even 
 including Judas, more worldly or cowardly than twelve 
 average Christians to-day. His trust in them miscarried 
 only in one out of twelve. Dr. Arnold's success was 
 equally as great. For a good man to expect the best of 
 
204 "CHRIST AND THE FISHERMEN" 
 
 others is an invitation to them to stand on his plane. 
 Most will accept it. 
 
 This principle succeeds with men, among whom its 
 success might naturally be least expected. The head of 
 a state reformatory once devised a unique method of 
 trusting the men under his care. He drafted a "bond of 
 trust," in quasi-legal form, neatly printed and with a 
 large gold seal. He selected a few with the best record, 
 and entrusted to them exceptional missions, without 
 putting them under guard. 
 
 But who should sign the bond ? Who should take 
 the responsibility for their escape ? As each bond was 
 issued, the superintendent said, "It is no fiction which 
 joins my name with yours. This plan is an experiment. 
 If it fails, it will bring me under criticism. I must hold 
 my assistant harmless, if you escape. No one can share 
 the risk with you but myself. All I have to secure my 
 reputation is your word of honor." 
 
 The "bond of trust" has been issued to forty men, 
 who prize it beyond gold. It gives them the joy of 
 being trusted, and the chance to play the man and the 
 good citizen. Not one of the forty has broken his bond. 
 Speaking of his success one day, the superintendent said, 
 you remember that the Lord Jesus trusted the whole 
 future of his gospel to twelve men. They all ran away 
 once, and one of them never came back. He underwrites 
 
THEY WHO TRUST US EDUCATE US 205 
 
 our feeble efforts to do good. In the long run, His way 
 succeeds. We are just trying to apply his method here 
 as nearly as we can. Judge Ben B. Lindsey also has 
 applied the same principle, with such notable success in 
 his treatment of boys, that the wisdom of Jesus' method 
 becomes daily more apparent. 
 
 The desire for goodness in human hearts is a plant, 
 which, to grow, needs watering from the outside. Our 
 trust in it is the irrigation which helps it break out into 
 bloom. One of the best services a man can render his 
 fellows is to irrigate this side of their nature by trusting 
 it. One of the most subtle temptations of life is to reg- 
 ulate our dealings with others, not by our own conviction 
 of the best thing to do, but by our opinion of the people 
 with whom we deal. To treat small people on their 
 own low plane is always a blunder. The wisest way is 
 to fight meanness, not with meanness, but with goodness. 
 We do not fight fire with fire; we fight it with water. To 
 expect the best from others as Jesus did from Peter, even 
 if it does not succeed in enabling them to meet our ex- 
 pectation, as it did with Peter, at least it supplies one of 
 the strongest incentives for them to try to do so. 
 
 In Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice's book, "Lovey Mary," 
 Mary says to Mrs. Wiggs, as they part, "I could never 
 forget you all, wherever I went. I was awful mean, when 
 I came to the Cabbage Patch. Somehow you all Just 
 
?o6 "CHRIST AND THE IISHERMEN" 
 
 bluffed me into being better. I wasn't used to being 
 bragged on, and it made me want to be good more than 
 anything in the world." 
 
XV 
 
 St. Michael and the Dragon 
 
 From a painting by Guido Reni 
 
^T MICHAEL AND THE DRAGON 
 By Guido Reni 
 
 The original of this picture is in the Church of the Capu- 
 chins, Rome. The reproduction is from a photograph by Alinari, 
 Florence. The dragon is a generally accepted emblem in art 
 of the principle of evil. Michael, whose name means "like 
 unto God," was looked on in Hebrew legend as the Captain- 
 General of the heavenly host, and the guardian of souls. His 
 attribute is sometimes the sword, as in this picture, and sometimes 
 the scales, as in a poem by James Russell Lowell, called "St. 
 Michael, the Weigher." 
 
XV 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Human Heart a Battle- Field 
 
"I do not understand what I am working out in my life. 
 For I do not practice what I have purposed ; and I hate what I 
 produce. " 
 
 Paul. 
 
 "In man there's failure, only since he left the lower and 
 unconscious forms of life. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a 
 city. " 
 
 Proverbs. 
 
 "When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth some- 
 thing. 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "No religion, so far as I know, has dwelt like Christianity 
 with such profound earnestness on the bisection of man — on the 
 distinction within him, vital to the very last degree, between 
 the higher and the lower, heaven and hell. " 
 
 Mark Rutherford. 
 
 "Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a war-- 
 fare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through 
 fragrant orange groves and green fiowerj'' spaces, waited on by 
 the choral muses and the rosy hours; it is a stem pilgrimage 
 through the rough, burning, sandy solitudes, through regions of 
 thick-ribbed ice. " 
 
 Carlyle. 
 
 "Ever since the Epistle to the Romans was written, it has 
 become a Christian commonplace that, in all moral experience, 
 I am divided against myself ; inwardly identified with a superior 
 call that beckons me; outwardly liable to take my lot with the 
 inferior inclination that clings to me. " 
 
 Martineau. 
 
 (212) 
 
 i 
 
THE HUMAN HEART A BATTLE-FIELD 
 
 Plato describes man as a creature who is like a chari- 
 oteer driving two headstrong steeds. The names of the 
 steeds are Appetite and Spirit. The name of the driver 
 is Reason. This description is true to the universal 
 moral experience of men. For the one supreme conflict 
 of life arises from the effort to control these fiery horses, 
 to make them work in harmony, and to adjust and sub- 
 ordinate them both to reason. Conflict with an outside 
 foe is simple, but when the man is divided against himself, 
 the warfare is complicated. The midnight struggle of 
 Jean Val Jean in Hugo's "Les Miserables," over two 
 proposed courses of action, made every other conflict 
 of his life seem unimportant in comparison. 
 
 The conflict on the unseen battle-field of the hefert is 
 so universal and vital, that it is reflected in art and poetry 
 and legend more than any other subject. It is hinted at 
 in the Laocoon. It is represented in all pictures of the 
 battle between St. George and the dragon, and St, Michael 
 and the dragon. It is embodied in all legends of good 
 and bad angels, contending for the possession of dead men. 
 The most extensive use of the myth is in Goethe's "Faust," 
 
 (213) 
 
214 "ST. MICHAEL AND THE DRAGON"— RENI 
 
 where celestial and infernal cohorts battle for Faust's 
 immortal portion. It is the subject of all such stories 
 as "Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde;" a story that 
 gained immense popularity, not only because it was a 
 masterly work of dramatic art, but also and chiefly 
 because it appealed to an experience universally known. 
 
 Of all the literature on the subject, the classic por- 
 trayal of this inner conflict is the seventh and eighth 
 chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans, classic, not only 
 because it vividly describes the conflict, but also because 
 it states the cause of it, and points the way to victory in it. 
 Paul describes it at once as his own and as a generic uni- 
 versal experience. So real is it to him, that he describes 
 it as waged between two distinct and different characters. 
 The lower nature is like a robber in a house, like a man 
 lying in ambush ready to spring up and slay his better 
 nature as he passes. 
 
 Guido Reni's picture makes vivid on canvas what 
 Paul says in words, that the two sides of man's nature are 
 an actual dual man, that these are distinctly at war with 
 each other, and that through life it is an unsettled con- 
 flict. Not that a man does not grow better through the 
 years, but the conflict may not grow less severe, for each 
 stage of life has its own peculiar dangers. After years of 
 moral victories the conflict may be just as severe, but the 
 battle is fought on a different and a higher plane, that is 
 
THE HUMAN HEART A BATTLE-FIELD 215 
 
 alL The conflict is not always vehement, for life is like 
 an ocean voyage. To-day the sea is glass; to-morrow it 
 is lashed into fury by a cyclone. But the possibility of 
 storm is always present, as Paul so keenly felt. 
 
 The conflict is caused, Paul says, by the introduction 
 into man's life of a good and a better law than he has 
 known. It awakens his higher nature and gives him a 
 vision of what he might become. Not that the appetites 
 of the man, who has now become his lower nature, are bad 
 in themselves, for no elemental appetite or passion in man 
 is intrinsically bad. It is too seldom remembered that 
 the body itself can never commit a sin, unless the will 
 consents and the soul goads it on. The appetites are bad 
 only when they refuse to be subordinate and to be driven 
 by the charioteer, the new master who has come into the 
 man's life. 
 
 Paul's thought, as a great writer points out, is that 
 the drama of the Garden of Eden is repeated in the life of 
 every child. His first state is that of innocence, having 
 neither virtue nor vice. Very soon, obeying a natural 
 impulse, he assays to do an injurious act. His mother 
 checks him. He repeats it. She forbids him again, 
 and at last taps his hand, not enough to hurt it, but 
 just enough to enforce the law. Then a new look of 
 wonder comes into baby's eyes, which the mother will 
 never forget. It is the new, strange consciousness of a 
 
2i6 "ST. MICHAEL AND THE DRAGON"— REN I 
 
 higher law than his own impulse, which is dawning on 
 baby's soul, a law which calls him to a higher life than 
 that of a mere animal, in that moment begins a conflict 
 between the natural man with his impulses, and the new 
 law, which develops virtue out of innocence through strife, 
 a conflict which will not end so long as life lasts. 
 
 The coming of the higher law into man's life produces 
 the conflict, not only because it shows him what he might 
 become, but also because for the first time it makes sin 
 and failure to be possible. If there had been no law, there 
 had been no sin. For sin is the perception of an absent 
 good, and until we are made capable of desiring that good, 
 its absence is no evil. There is no law in the pig against 
 gluttony, and gluttony in the pig is no sin. The sin was 
 occasioned by the higher life. If there is no higher life, 
 there is no revolt against it, and if no revolt against it, 
 then no sin. It is this double progress upward from inno- 
 cence to virtue, or downward from innocence to sin, both' 
 made possible by the coming of the new law, which has 
 led to confusion, and makes men either optimists or pessi- 
 mists, according as they look on one or the other of the 
 two results of the law. 
 
 Guido Reni's picture is not entirely free from this 
 sense of confusion and discouragement. In the arch- 
 angel's face there is a degree of pain, trouble, and disquiet 
 at being brought into contact with sin, even for the purpose 
 
THE HUMAN HEART A BATTLE-FIELD 217 
 
 of quelling it. The attitude which regrets the presence of 
 the conflict and seeks to withdraw from it is very common. 
 Rousseau expresses it in his dream of a return to the 
 simplicity of nature. Emerson expresses it in his poem 
 of the Sphinx. Hawthorne represents it in the character 
 of the Faun, with his power to enjoy the warm, sensuous 
 earthy side of nature, reveling in the merriment of woods 
 and streams, with no conscience, no remorse, no burden on 
 his heart. Even if it had been possible to remain in the 
 state of innocence, before the vision of a higher life came 
 to disturb our peace, it is not possible to do so now. Man 
 cannot return to the Garden of Eden. The angel with a 
 flaming sword ever stands ready to guard against a re- 
 entrance. Man has seen the vision of something better 
 than the Garden of Eden, and he can never forget that he 
 has seen it. 
 
 The chief value of Guido Reni's picture is, that it 
 represents the only sane attitude towards a battle, from 
 which there is no escape, unless one is either a child or a 
 volunteer prisoner of the enemy, and that is, to arm for 
 the conflict and from it wrest a victory, as St. Michael 
 has done. Plato and Paul agree as to the nature of the 
 conflict and the attitude to be taken to it, but Plato was 
 not sure of the victory, represented in Guido Reni's picture, 
 as Paul was. For Paul's charioteer had an unseen com- 
 panion, the Lord Christ, ever in the chariot with him. 
 
2i8 "ST. MICHAEL AND THE DRAGON"— RENl 
 
 who did most of the driving for him, and ever whispered 
 to him instructions and words of cheer. The eighth 
 chapter of Paul's letter is not a song of victory sung after 
 the battle, but the description of a good soldier in the 
 battle. It narrates what the good soldier in the battle 
 learns from his unseen companion, by means of which he 
 becomes victor. He learns that it is no sin to be in the 
 fight. The only sin is not to fight. The fight itself is 
 good. The wounds he receives will not dismay him, for he 
 sees that the design of the conflict is to develop in his soul 
 sinews of steel. Victory and wounds must needs go to- 
 gether. Neither is possible except as both are possible. 
 He may make mistakes, but he is not sinful; he need 
 have no remorse; he is under no condemnation, if only he 
 is willing to fight on the right side. For "God measures 
 men, not by their actions, but by their endeavors; not by 
 what they are, but by what they are striving to become; 
 not by the place they occupy, but by the direction in 
 which they are moving." 
 
 In Dante's account of the contest between the good 
 and bad angels over Buonconte, the bad angel was de- 
 feated, he says, through one little tear of penitence from 
 the man. His willingness to assist the better nature in 
 him turned the balance on that side. The one condition 
 of victory which Paul and Guido Reni's picture insist upon 
 is, that a man make an honest effort to help the better 
 
THE HUMAN HEART A BATTLE-FIELD 219 
 
 nature in him to win, and botii the picture and Paul 
 predict victory to such honest effort. 
 
 "Honest work for the day, 
 Honest hope for the morrow. 
 Are these worth nothing 
 More than the hands they make weary. 
 The hearts they leave dreary? 
 Hush — the seven-fold Heavens 
 Repeat — He that overcometh 
 Shall all things inherit." 
 
XVI 
 Ecce Homo 
 
 From a painting by Professor Antonio Ciseri 
 
"ECCE HOMO!" 
 By Antonio Ciseri 
 
 The foreground of this picture represents the entrance to 
 Pilate's Praetorium, which was probably the summer palace 
 of Herod, on the north side of Mount Zion, overlooking the 
 temple enclosure. The Temple, is seen in the background. 
 The two buildings repres;ent the two brutal forces, by the collision 
 of which Jesus was destroyed. The Jewish priests and mob 
 are on the outside. They would not enter the Praetorium, 
 for they felt defiled by contact with Rome. They refused to 
 plead in the hall of judgment. Pilate, in order to speak to them, 
 had to go out, as the picture represents him as doing. On the 
 right is Pilate's wife with troubled face, who, because of a dream, 
 had sent word ,to her husband to have no part in the condemna- 
 tion of th'- nri^rmf-r The picture i'i in rh^- National Gallery, 
 Rome.' 
 
\ 
 
XVI 
 
 Interpretation 
 An Unavoidable Question 
 
"What then shall I do unto Jesus, who is called Christ?" 
 
 Pilate. 
 
 "The man faithful to principle is never cruel; the victim of 
 expediency always is. " 
 
 Fairbairn. 
 
 "Pilate went out again and saith unto them, Behold, I 
 bring him out to you, that ye may know that I find no crime in 
 him. Jesus therefore came out wearing the crown of thorns, 
 and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them. Behold the 
 man! " 
 
 John. 
 
 "What is Pilate? A Pilate is one of those courtly gentle- 
 men, polished, tasteful, expert, who is not disturbed nor warped 
 by convictions in over measure; who looks upon all moral 
 qualities as a gambler looks upon cards, which he shuffles, and 
 pla3''s according to the exigency of his game, — and one just as 
 easy as another. A Pilate is a man who believes in letting 
 things have their own way. 'Do not sarcifice yourself. Do 
 not get in the way of a movement. And, whatever comes, see 
 that you come out uppermost. Preserve your balance. See 
 that you keep your eye on the chances. If they go this way, 
 you go with them far enough to reap them. If they go the 
 other way, go with them. Do not be too scrupulous. Be just 
 enough so to gain your ends. Use men, use events, use every- 
 thing that is profitable. Do not use your conscience too much! ' 
 This is the language of the Pilates of our day. Those men who 
 are poUshed, cold, calculating, speculating, — these are the 
 Pirates, — the Pilates, I mean I It was a blunder of the lip, after 
 all, it hit right. " 
 
 Beecher. 
 
 
 (226) 
 
AN UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION 
 
 Sometimes the names of historical events come to 
 stand for spiritual facts. "Crossing the Rubicon" 
 means an irrevocable decision, "Waterloo," an over- 
 whelming defeat. The one represents the decisive event 
 in the life of Caesar, the other, in the life of Napoleon. In 
 like manner, the question, "What then shall I do with 
 Jesus?" stands for the central event in Pilate's life, and 
 it has come to stand also for a spiritual fact. The real 
 nature of Pilate's character was revealed, and his place 
 in history fixed, by the answer he made to it. Professor 
 Ciseri in his picture has, with clear insight, represented 
 the most dramatic and critical moment in the tragedy 
 of Christ's trial, and Pilate's part in it; the moment of 
 Pilate's contest with the Jewish mob in his effort to do 
 with Jesus, what he had the power to do, and what his 
 wife requested him to do, and what he believed he ought 
 to do, that is, refuse to be a party to His condemnation. 
 
 The question which Pilate asked the mob was simple 
 and natural, and necessary to the narration of his attempt 
 to escape responsibility. It was an appeal to the Jews' 
 patriotism* "What shall I then do with Jesus, who is 
 
 (2 2 7) 
 
2 28 "ECCE HOMO"— ANTONIO CISERI 
 
 called Christ; who is your King and Messiah?" It is 
 evident that Pilate struggled hard to save Jesus, because 
 he did not believe in his guilt; but believed he was the 
 victim of unjust hate. The picture shows the cruel ex- 
 pedient he tried in this effort. It represents Pilate show- 
 ing Jesus to the mob after he had been scourged and clad 
 in the symbols of mock royality, bleeding and humiliated, 
 as a spectacle which he thought, would be calculated to 
 awaken pity and satisfy the mob's desire for revenge. 
 
 The picture appropriately emphasizes Pilate's act 
 of appealing to the crowd. For by that appeal the con- 
 trol of events passed from his hands. He allowed the 
 crowd to determine what he should do with Jesus. By 
 his surrender to the mob, Pilate turned his back upon 
 Jesus, and upon his clearly perceived duty as well. By 
 washing his hands of responsibility, he had answered the 
 very question he sought to avoid. His answer was fatal 
 both to him and to the mob. With a just and divine 
 irony, the crucifixion which the Jews demanded to be 
 inflicted on Jesus, was inflicted on myriads of Jews during 
 the siege of Jerusalem, and they were sold as slaves in 
 great numbers for less than thirty pieces of silver. 
 
 More significant still is the fate of the individuals 
 most prominent in the murder of Jesus. "Before the 
 dread sacrifice was consummated, Judas died in the hor- 
 rors of a loathsome suicide. Caiaphas was deposed the 
 
AN UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION 229 
 
 year following. Herod died in infamy and exile. Pilate, 
 wearied with misfortunes, died a suicide and in banish- 
 ment, leaving behind him an execrated name. The 
 house of Annas was destroyed a generation later, and his 
 son was dragged through the streets and scourged to his 
 place of murder. " The tragic story is a parable in action. 
 Because men who turn their backs on the truth, when 
 they once see it, comm.it moral suicide. 
 
 Pilate's question, simple and natural at the first, gains 
 new meaning in the light of his fruitless attempt to avoid 
 what proved to be an unavoidable question. But the 
 question is strangely pregnant with a deeper meaning than 
 Pilate ever gave it. It has ceased to apply only to Pilate, 
 and has come to represent a universal experience. W. J. 
 Dawson suggests that every incident in the life of Jesus, 
 and every phrase in its record, have become so familiar, 
 because the life of Jesus is the most representative of all 
 lives. It represents our hopes and inward struggles and 
 the secret biography of our own spirits. Pilate's question 
 is pregnant with meaning because it represents a universal 
 spiritual experience. It is an unavoidable question for 
 every man, because Jesus is the most unescapable char- 
 acter of history. Every path leads to Him. "Where 
 love is, there is Christ. Where the poor are, there is the 
 Divine poor man. So interwoven is His story with 
 human though L that where childhood is, there is Bethle- 
 
830 "ECCE HOMO"— ANTONIO CISERI 
 
 hem; where sorrow is, there is Gethsemane; where death 
 is, there is Calvary." It is not possible to think of any 
 salient aspect of human life without thinking of Him, 
 
 Pilate's question is unavoidable, not only because 
 Jesus has interwoven Himself with the very fibers of 
 human life, but also because He compels men to answer 
 it and to take some moral attitude towards Him. Ciseri's 
 picture is symbolic, as well as historical, for the man who 
 looks at it, instinctively feels that he is standing in Pilate's 
 place, and Jesus is standing before the bar of each man's 
 private judgment and awaiting a verdict at his hands as 
 he once awaited it at Pilate's. In Pilate's private inter- 
 view with Jesus, before he brought Him out to the crowd, 
 Pilate began to examine Jesus and soon found to his 
 amazement that the roles were changed between them, 
 and that Jesus was examining him. This is a singular 
 phenomenon in spiritual experience. One may study 
 Plato and be intellectually inspired. One who studies 
 Jesus, is spiritually disturbed. One may accept the 
 teachings of Socrates without knowing or caring much 
 about Socrates himself; one cannot study Jesus with 
 moral neutrality. If one begins with the non-committal 
 question, "What think ye of Christ?", he finds himself 
 compelled to answer the practical moral question of Pilate. 
 "What shall I then do with Him?" 
 
 This question once asked always has its answer. 
 
AN UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION 231 
 
 Even the attempt to ignore it, is an answer as real as any 
 other. For to do nothing with Jesus, or to do without 
 Him, has its result. Its result is despair. The life of 
 such a man as Carlyle is the result. To know the sin and 
 not to know the sin Bearer, to know the burden and not 
 to know the burden Bearer, to load one's heart with the 
 burdens of men, is to live a life which may be sublime, but 
 must be full of anguish. Carlyle confessed that to carry 
 on one's conscience the sins of his age and his own imper- 
 fect life, makes life seared and stern. Pilate's question is 
 in truth unavoidable, and Ciseri's picture is a vivid pre- 
 sentation of that fact. The picture centers attention on 
 the chief point of Pilate's part in the tragedy, and makes 
 his attempt to avoid his own question appear, what it in 
 fact was, most pathetic. 
 
XVII 
 The Temptation in the Wilderness 
 
 From a painting by William Dyce, R. A. 
 
THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 The original of thii picture has been for thirty years in the 
 private collection of the late James Henry Stock of White Hall, 
 Tarperley, England. It was first reproduced in William Sanday's 
 "Life of Christ." All other artists, Holbein, Durer, Scheffer 
 and even Tissot, to a degree, in treating the temptation, make use 
 'A the Conventional symbolism of Satan, which was prominent 
 in the thought of the Middle Ages. This picture dispenses with 
 all external machinery and represents the modern conception 
 of the temptation in contrast to the ancient or mediaeval, and 
 as such it is a truer presentation of the deep spiritual meaning 
 of that event. 
 

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XVII 
 
 Interpretation 
 Temptation as Opportunity 
 
"Count it all joy when ye fall into manifold temptation. " 
 
 James. 
 
 "Lead us not into temptation. " 
 
 Jesus. 
 
 " 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to 
 fall.' " 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 "There hath no temptation taken you, but such as men can 
 bear. " 
 
 Paul. 
 
 "Held, we fall to rise; arc baffled to fight better; Sleep to 
 wake. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "It was my duty to have loved the highest: 
 It surely was my profit had I known: 
 It would have been my pleasure had I seen: 
 We needs must love the highest when we see it. 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 "On whatsoever lines the world may be framed, there 
 must be distinction, differeitce, a higher and a lower; and the 
 lower, relative to the higher, must always be an evil. The 
 scale upon which the higher and lower both are, makes no differ- 
 ence. Perfectly uninterrupted, infinite light, without shadow, 
 is a physical absurdity. I see a thing because it is lighted, but 
 also because of the differences of light, or, in other words, because 
 of shade, and without shade the universe would be objectless 
 and in fact invisible. Mankind may be improved, and the 
 improvement maybe infinite and yet good and evil must exist." 
 
 Mark Rutherford. 
 
 (238) 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 
 
 A man, said Frederick D. Maurice, must have great 
 leisure or be very youthful, who would occupy himself in 
 discussing the origin of evil. Temptation, however, to 
 which evil subjects men, is a different question, a question 
 with which all men must occupy themselves whether they 
 wish to do so or not. To take some attitude towards it is 
 an imperative necessity. It is because temptation is an 
 unescapable experience, that the temptation of Jesus, as 
 the representative man, is a subject of fascinating interest. 
 Mr. Dyce's picture of Jesus' experience emphasizes a 
 fact about temptation, not infrequently overlooked, but of 
 great practical value to a problem manifestly perplexing. 
 
 Is Temptation a good or a bad element in life? James 
 says it is a fact to be rejoiced over. Jesus, although he 
 frequently illustrated its divine uses, nevertheless taught 
 His disciples, in the model prayer, to ask that they might 
 be delivered from it. Any picture of Jesus being tempted 
 is a forceful reminder of the fact that temptation is a uni- 
 versal experience from which even He could not escape, 
 much less others. The prayer, "Lead us not into temp- 
 tation," has never yet been answered to the extent, that 
 
 (239) 
 
240 "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 any man is entirely free from it. This petition is im- 
 mediately followed by a prayer for victory in tempta- 
 tion, which is thus assumed to be unescapable. What 
 is universal need not be wholly good, but it may safely 
 be said, that what is universal must have a good side 
 to it. What is temptation's good side? 
 
 If temptation is not only universal, but good, as 
 Jesus and James both believed, why pray to be kept from 
 it? It is some answer to the question to notice that the 
 Greek word translated "temptation" has in the New 
 Testament two distinct meanings. It means trial or test. 
 It also means solicitation to evil. The one Greek word 
 has become two words in English, and needs both to 
 adequately translate it. James evidently uses the word 
 in the sense of trial. If Jesus used it in the sense of 
 solicitation to evil, it is a strange prayer to ask God not 
 to solicit us to evil, as if God could ever solicit men to 
 evil! God can be said to tempt men only in the sense 
 that He presents to them a moral crisis, in which there 
 is possibility of failure. 
 
 If Jesus meant solicitation to evil, the prayer might 
 mean that the material gifts, such as bread, and the 
 spiritual gifts, such as forgiveness of sins, which are asked 
 for in the preceding petition, — that these material and 
 spiritual gifts may not become our temptation by leading 
 us into selfishness. It is quite true that God's material 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 241 
 
 and spiritual gifts do present to men real temptations. 
 It is a most needful and beautiful suggestion that men 
 ought to pray that none of God's gifts may dull their 
 consciences. This interpretation, however, is too subtle 
 to be read into the otherwise simple and practical 
 "Lord's Prayer." 
 
 Whenever we touch upon the question of evil we 
 may expect to fmd in it the element of unsolved mystery. 
 It is so here. The two meanings of the word "tempta- 
 tion" do not solve the puzzle; for, as a matter of fact, 
 solicitation to evil is the form, which a man's trial does 
 most frequently assume, and it certainly constitutes a 
 large element in every man's testing, which Jesus says 
 is a good thing. The fact that we have come to think of 
 temptation chiefly as solicitation to evil, instead of the 
 trial of a man's strength, is sufficient evidence of this 
 statement. 
 
 The apparent contradiction between Jesus and 
 James, is an illuminating contradiction. It emphasizes 
 two sides of a question, both of which are true, although 
 they may be opposite. This at least is clear. The 
 prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," expresses the 
 natural shrinking from a contest which may have fatal 
 results. This natural feeling must become a settled 
 attitude, if a man is not to underrate his foe, or think the 
 contest he faces is a May-day game. No wise man 
 
242 "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 underrates his enemy. To get good out of temptation, 
 he must take this attitude; for the contest is beneficial 
 in proportion as a man appreciates its intensity and its 
 dangers. The prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," 
 means that possible fatal results are to be feared. It 
 means, that whatever helpful use temptation may have, 
 it is not a thing to be invited. Gunpowder has its uses, 
 but the wise man does not keep barrels of it in his chim- 
 ney corner. 
 
 While it is true that temptation is not to be invited, 
 it is equally true that it is not to be avoided. The impor- 
 tant distinction to be kept in mind is, that the possible 
 fatal results of temptation are to be intelligently dreaded, 
 but not the trial itself. The trial is wholly good. Only 
 by such test is manhood developed. Soldiers are made 
 by battle, not by dress parade. Until the will is solicited 
 to evil, its fidelity to righteousness cannot be established. 
 Only so can innocence be transformed into holiness, as 
 Shakespeare has well illustrated in his "Measure for 
 Measure. " " Unbreathed Virtue, " to use Milton's phrase, 
 that is, virtue untried by temptation, is no virtue at all. 
 It is not vice, but it is not virtue. This is why Jesus could 
 not escape temptation. Dr. Dyce's picture represents a 
 generic experience of Jesus, true of all other men. 
 
 The manifest purpose of temptation being to develop 
 virtue in a man, the scene of such trial must of necessity 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 243 
 
 be in each man's heart. The distinct contribution which 
 Dr. Dyce's picture makes is the emphasis which it lays 
 upon this fact. No one was present with Jesus in His 
 experience. He, himself, therefore must have reported 
 it to His disciples. In His report He used the symbolic 
 language of His day, because it would be understood. 
 Dr. Dyce is the first artist, so far as I know, to record on 
 canvas his conviction, that Jesus' language was purely 
 conventional, and that no personal embodiment of evil 
 was present with Him. The picture says that whether 
 or not any personal devil was present with Jesus, is a 
 question of secondary importance. 
 
 It is most significant that the principle of evil has 
 been personified in the past either as an explanation of a 
 difficult fact, or for purposes of literary art. That this 
 is so is seen by looking at any of the classical portraits of 
 Satan. In Job, he is represented as entirely submissive 
 to God, but the enemy of man, working only on the out- 
 ward events of men's lives. In Milton he is represented 
 as rebellious, independent, self-sufficient, a ruined arch- 
 angel, with so little emphasis on the ruined and so much 
 on the archangel, that he becomes the real hero of Para- 
 dise Lost. In Dante's " Hell' ' he is represented as Lucifer, 
 who is cruel and essentially contemptible, whom none 
 could be tempted to admire. In Goethe's Faust, he is 
 represented in Mephistopheles, cunning, subtle, intellec- 
 
244 "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 tual, able to make black appear white, presenting a case 
 as plausible as that presented to Christ in the desert. 
 Here are four studies in an attempt to explain a fact. 
 They do not represent the fact itself. " Finding in their 
 souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness, 
 whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies, 
 calling them to a higher life, soon to be overpowered 
 by the clamors of the brute, our ancestors could not refrain 
 from seeking the explanation of this duel. They found 
 it in the conflict of the demons with God." 
 
 It is a great gain to truth when we are able to dis- 
 tinguish between the fact itself and the explanation of it. 
 Men have dwelt on the explanation because the fact is of 
 the utmost importance, and because they have never 
 been quite willing to believe that man alone is responsible 
 for all the moral disaster in human life. They have 
 believed that an external principle of evil is partly respon- 
 sible for it. But it is no real explanation of evil to refer 
 it to the devil. To do so just traces it one step farther 
 back and leaves it as much a mystery as before. The 
 duel in man's heart remains just the same with or with- 
 out our explanations. The point to be noted is, that 
 whatever external factors there may or may not be in 
 any man's temptation, the scene of the real conflict is 
 always in each man's own heart. This is the ultimate 
 fact in Christ's temptation, and in every other man's. 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 245 
 
 Dr. Dyce's picture does a real service by laying aside ail 
 mechanical externals and centering our attention on the 
 fact itself. 
 
 The impressive feature of the picture is the loneli- 
 ness of Jesus. The scene of the temptation, identified 
 as a certain hill called "Quarantania," rising from the 
 Judean plain, only serves to increase the sense of loneli- 
 ness. "These scarred and frowning rocks, this bloomless 
 waste, this gloomy illimitable plain" overwhelm the spirit. 
 The element of loneliness is common to all temptation. 
 Every man must enter it absolutely alone. As a young 
 man on the threshold of His life-work, Jesus goes apart to 
 fight out this battle alone. Lowell portrays Columbus 
 on the verge of his discovery brooding apart from his 
 crew. 
 
 " If the chosen soul could never be alone 
 In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, 
 No greatness ever had been dreamed or done; 
 Among dull hearts a prophet never grew; 
 The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude." 
 
 The picture represents Jesus seated upon a stone, with 
 hands clasped, and an expression of intense thought on 
 His face. The conflict is a real one to Him. A temptation 
 by its very terms involves the risk of failure. If there 
 were no possibility of Jesus' failure, then the story of 
 
246 "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 His temptation is a farce and an insincere fable. Jesus 
 did nothing with design, or for show. The picture correctly 
 represents Him agonizing in a struggle, the issue of which 
 is not a foregone conclusion. 
 
 The question which constituted His temptation is one 
 which He could have answered in either of two ways. 
 It was His exceptional opportunity, His exceptional 
 life-work and His exceptional endowments, which occa- 
 sioned His temptation. It came from His desire to do 
 right — but what means shall He use? Two paths 
 stretched before Him. One, a straight road with no 
 compromises, but rough and rugged that led to suffering 
 and apparent defeat. The other, a broad, winding road 
 that led to immediate victory. If He would only lower 
 His standard a little, yield a little to the nation's preju- 
 dices and expectations, compromise with the priestly 
 aristocracy, join forces with Csesar, use force as Alexander 
 and other conquerors had done, adopt the policy of 
 expediency. He could reach His goal more easily. 
 
 The suggestion sounds plausible. If there were 
 nothing plausible in this, it would not be a temptation. 
 There is no temptation where there is no desire. This 
 principle is self-evident and axiomatic. In a word, Jesus 
 was tempted to follow a lower in the presence of a higher 
 course, — "To take the lower for the higher good, the 
 immediate for the final victory, the material for the 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 247 
 
 spiritual conquest." Whatever interpretation is given 
 to the three forms in which the temptation of Jesus is 
 described, this is the moral core of it. It is the generic 
 element in His temptation. This is the heart of all 
 temptation; it is a call to choose between a higher and a 
 lower; and sin is just following the lower in the presence 
 of the higher, doing that which is easy instead of that 
 which is right. 
 
 If this is the essential nature of all temptation, then 
 it follows that every temptation is an opportunity, for 
 it is as much a call to the higher, as it is an allurement to 
 the lower. Temptation is never mere solicitation to evil. 
 No moral crisis ever allured a man to the evil, which does 
 not at the same time invite him to the good. The picture 
 of Jesus' temptation is the picture of His greatest oppor- 
 tunity and His greatest victory. It was His opportunity 
 to choose the highest. His victory was that he chose the 
 near defeat and the far success, rather than the near 
 success and the far defeat. 
 
 In the spiritual history of man there is no more 
 impressive scene than this. "The fate of a soul, of a career, 
 of a service unparalleled, of a pouring out of lo\e which 
 has run like a tide over a sorrowful earth, was at stake." 
 It was a crisis not only for Christ, but for all men. This 
 is what makes the victory He won so .significant. For 
 this reason Milton finishes his "Paradise Regained" at 
 
248 "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 this point. The victory that Jesus won in His temptation 
 is this: — that he was crowned king over Himself. In 
 that victory all men may share, for every temptation 
 presents to every other man the same opportunity. At 
 the top of the " Mount of Struggle " Virgil said to Dante, — 
 
 " Expect no more, or word or sign from me; 
 Free and upright and sound is thy free will 
 And error were it not to do its bidding; 
 Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre." 
 
 Every temptation, every chance to use the will in choosing 
 the highest is an opportunity to become king over one's 
 self. 
 
 To regard temptation as opportunity furnishes the 
 key to victory over it. Jesus met the solicitation to evil 
 by an assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual over the 
 material in "A ringing statement of one of those truths 
 which shine like stars above the confusion of the world, 
 'Man shall not live by bread alone.' " If temptation is 
 to be used to develop spiritual manhood, the method 
 to be used is not to run away from it. To put one's self 
 out of the world by running away from its dangers is one 
 way of saving the soul, perhaps, but it is also the means 
 of so starving the soul that it becomes hardly worth the 
 saving. The secret of victory over solicitation to evil 
 is never a frontal attack upon it, but an exercise of the 
 
TEMPTATION AS OPPORTUNITY 249 
 
 spiritual resources of one's own manhood, the develop- 
 ment of which the temptation is designed to furnish. 
 
 Very beautifully does the old Greek story of the sirens 
 illustrate the method of safety in all temptation. Both 
 Ulysses and Orpheus passed the sirens: both escaped 
 falling victims to the allurements of evil, but by very 
 different means. When Ulysses realized that he was near 
 the sirens, he had the ears of his sailors stopped, and 
 caused himself to be bound to the mast. When he came 
 within hearing of the siren-music, he was charmed with 
 it and struggled to free himself, calling loudly to the 
 sailors to release him. The sailors not hearing, were 
 untempted, and they rowed him by. That is all one can 
 say. "It was small credit to the character of Ulysses, 
 though much to his prudential foresight." But when 
 Orpheus came within hearing of the siren-music, he 
 played so sweetly upon the instruments he had invented, 
 that he triumphed over the temptation to leave the ship, 
 as did also his comrades. Some external mechanical 
 device may succeed in saving a man from defeat to-day, 
 but such a victory can secure him no immunity to-morrow. 
 The only safety is an internal refuge. The music Jesus 
 made in His own heart by the choice of the highest, was 
 His sure antidote to the siren song of evil. 
 
 It was Orpheus and not Ulysses, who so used the 
 opportunity which temptation presented to him, as to 
 
2SO "TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS" 
 
 develop strength of manhood for the next experience. 
 Every temptation may be either a tragedy or an oppor- 
 tunity. Every temptation sets the gate of sin ajar; 
 every resistance opens the gate to purity and strength. 
 The moment of a man's danger is always the moment of 
 his possible victory; to turn away from the tempter is to 
 open the gate of blessedness; therefore it is written that 
 when Christ had resisted the tempter, on the instant 
 angels ministered unto Him. It is only to the men who 
 meet temptation as Jesus and Orpheus did, that angels 
 minister. When the fight begins within himself a man's 
 opportunity has come, the opportunity to acquire king- 
 ship over himself, and only when a man is king over him- 
 self is he worth something to the world. Every tempta- 
 tion squarely faced is an opportunity to make a new 
 music, acquire a new power, win a new triumph. 
 
 "Why comes temptation, but for man to meet 
 And master and make crouch beneath his feet. 
 And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray, 
 'Lead us into no such temptation, Lord !' 
 Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold. 
 Lead such temptations by the head and hair. 
 Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
 That so he may do battle and have praise!" 
 
XVIII 
 The Angels' Kitchen 
 
 From a painting by Murillo 
 
THE ANGELS' KITCHEN 
 By Murillo 
 
 This picture is one of a series of eleven scenes from the 
 life of San Diego, with which Murillo decorated the walls of a 
 Franciscan convent in Seville. It was taken from Seville by 
 Marshal Soult, and acquired in 1858 by the Louvre at Paris, 
 where it now is. The original is five feet eleven inches by 
 fourteen feet nine inches. The picture contains Murillo's two 
 well-known conceptions of angels. The tall ones he used as 
 messengers dispatched to earth on active errands. The baby 
 angels he regarded as the "multitude of the heavenly host," 
 whose presence gives joy, and there is almost no religious picture 
 by Murillo in which their sweet faces do not appear. It was 
 story-telling pictures like this one, which helped to make Murillo 
 the "people's painter" and an idol of his own generation. 
 

 
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XVIII 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Commonplace Made Uncommon 
 
"What God hath cleansed, make not thou common." 
 
 From Peter's Vision. 
 
 "All service is the same with God, 
 With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we; there is no last nor first. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "The best perfection of a religious man is to do common 
 things in a perfect manner. " 
 
 BONAVENTURA. 
 
 "Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as 
 the wings of a dove, covered with silver and her feathers with 
 yellow gold. " 
 
 David. 
 
 "Your America is here or nowhere. The situation that has 
 not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, 
 here in thie poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, 
 wherein even now thou standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; 
 work it out therefrom, and working, believe, live, be free. " 
 
 Carlyle. 
 
 "What is the common process of love's enlargement? 
 Take a human love; take what we generally term romantic love. 
 What are the stages through which it is wont to pass? I think 
 there are four. At first it is a hope — somethmg to be realized 
 to-morrow. Then it is a present possession, but reserved as yet 
 only for garden hours when we are free from the bustle of the 
 crowd. By and by its range is widened — it becomes a stimulus 
 for the great duties of life ; it comes out from the garden into the 
 city; it nerves to do and to bear. At last it reaches its climax — 
 it comes down to trifles. It glorifies the commonplace. " 
 
 George Matheson. 
 
 (256) 
 
THE COMMONPLACE MADE UNCOMMON 
 
 Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" has always been loved. 
 His "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" was greeted with 
 a storm of abuse, especially in America. That the two 
 poems met such different receptions shows how prevalent 
 is the disease, which the first poem fostered, and which 
 the second poem sought to correct. 
 
 The young man of the first poem is inspired with a 
 large ideal, but he is in the midst of petty and dishearten- 
 ing things which pain him. He cannot work out his 
 ideal, while bound to these clogging and hateful experiences. 
 The world has a few good people in it, but they are in the 
 "foremost ranks of time," so he must get rid of the 
 present with its social lies and its sickly forms. He is 
 ashamed that he has ever loved so slight a thing as a 
 flesh and blood woman who cannot understand him. 
 He must get rid of the present, and go on knightly wan- 
 derings. He is not sure where to go, he is only sure that 
 if he can get far enough away from where he now is, he 
 will find his ideal, which is not to be caught in a common- 
 place way. 
 
 In the second poem, this youth, now an old man, 
 
 17 (257) 
 
258 "THE ANGEL'S KITCHEN"— MURILLO 
 
 comes back to the home soil to learn, that from it the very 
 best life grows. He has learned that the very best things 
 from which to work out one's ideals are those very 
 relationships he had once despised. The old squire had 
 died the day before. He was here in time for the funeral. 
 He pours his apology into the deaf ears. 
 
 "Worthier soul was he than I am, 
 Sound and honest rustic squire," 
 
 Leonard, the grandson of the new poem, is bidden to 
 follow the example, not of himself, but of the old squire — 
 
 "You, my Leonard, use and not abuse your day, 
 
 Move among your people, know them, 
 
 Follow, him who led the way. 
 
 Strove for sixty widowed years 
 
 To help his homelier brother men 
 
 Served the poor and built the cottage 
 
 Raised the school, and trained the men." 
 
 The second poem is the truly optimistic poem, for it 
 expresses the belief that the commonplace has a value 
 and a charm, that the present concrete world is not a 
 thing to be run away from, but to be lived with, that if 
 God is not here, it is not certain He is anywhere else. 
 
 Murillo's "Angels' Kitchen" is sufficiently described 
 by saying that it is Tennyson's secor '. "Locksley Hall" 
 put upon canvas. The story Murillo uses to express the 
 
THE COMMONPLACE MADE UNCOMMON 259 
 
 same truth is simply and clearly portrayed. A name 
 famous in the annals of Spain for two hundred years before 
 Murillo's day was Diego, a man who was a lay brother 
 in a Franciscan convent. He was the convent porter 
 who prepared the frugal meals for the brotherhood, a 
 plain man, but faithful in his daily tasks. He worked as 
 Gareth worked in King Arthur's kitchen, who wrought 
 
 "All kind of service with a noble ease 
 That graced the lowliest act in doing it." 
 
 One day the story goes, a marvel befell him. When 
 busy with his cooking, he is raised in a heavenly ecstasy, 
 as the picture represents him, while angels fill the room 
 and do his work. One of them goes to draw water, one 
 attends to the meat, and a third is busy with mortar and 
 pestle. Frolicsome baby angels are on the floor busy 
 with the vegetables, and turning work into play. On 
 the left of the picture three men enter a door and pause 
 in astonishment. It ought not to be astonishing that an 
 exalted motive is able to transform the most commonplace 
 task and make it uncommon. 
 
 The error which Tennyson's poem and Murillo's 
 picture seek to correct is the oldest and commonest of 
 mistakes; the mistake of taking the great for the 
 little and the little for the great; a theme which our 
 poets and teachers have never ceased to write about 
 
26o "THE ANGEL'S KITCHEN"— MURILLO 
 
 since the time when the Man of Nazareth touched such 
 common things as stables and shepherds and work-benches 
 with a new beauty and meaning, and made them the sym- 
 bols of a new day for the world. When Thor went to 
 Utgard, the land of the giants, according to the Norse 
 legend, he was asked to take part in the games. They 
 handed him a drinking-horn. It was a common feat, they 
 said, to drink this at one draught. Fiercely did Thor 
 drink, but hardly made an impression. "You are a 
 weak child," they said, "can you lift that cat you see 
 there?" Small as it seemed, Thor with all his strength 
 only bent up the creature's back, but could not raise its 
 feet off the ground. " You are no man," said the Utgard 
 people. "This old woman here will wrestle with you." 
 Heartily ashamed, Thor seized the haggard woman but 
 could not throw her. Jotun, the chief, escorting Thor 
 a little way as he left, said to him, " You are beaten, then, 
 but do not be too much ashamed, for there was illusion 
 in the games. The horn you tried to drink was the Sea. 
 You did make it ebb more than anyone else. The Cat 
 you would have lifted is the Great-World-Serpent. And 
 the old woman is Time, Old-Age. With her who can 
 wrestle?" 
 
 This is a legend's picturesque way of expressing the 
 simple truth that a deception usually blinds men's eyes 
 to the real significance of commonplace tasks. Most men 
 
THE COMMONPLACE MADE UNCOMMON 26 r 
 
 see their significance, as Thor did, when they get some 
 distance away from them. At the time of the Crimean 
 War the two generals, Lord Raglan and General Todle- 
 ben, who commanded the opposing forces, loomed 
 large in the world's eye, but to-day their names sound 
 strangely unfamiliar, whilst that of Florence Nightingale 
 is a household word. The perspective which distance 
 gives has given the true value to Florence Nightingale 
 and her commonplace work of giving cups of water to 
 dying soldiers. 
 
 The greatness of Florence Nightingale and San Diego 
 lies in the fact, that they saw the charm of the common- 
 place while they were close to it. If the illusion, that 
 hangs over the commonplace, is ever pierced it can be 
 done only by working, as they worked, from a high motive; 
 by believing, as they believed, that the appointed task 
 is worth while; by seeing, as they saw, that it is not what 
 one does, but the way one does it, that counts most; 
 by learning, as they learned, that "messages from God 
 are not to be read through the envelope in which they 
 are enclosed." Antonio Stradivarius, sitting at his 
 bench day after day in the little Italian town, Cremona, 
 making violins, seems commonplace employment; but 
 his violins have immortalized their maker's nam^e, because 
 he worked under the spell of a vision which he said daily 
 whispered in his ear, "God could not make Antonio 
 
262 "THE ANGEL'S KITCHEN"— MURILLO 
 
 Stradivarius' violins without Antonio. " This conviction 
 not only made his work enduring, but also robbed it of the 
 commonplace, even while he did it. 
 
 The truth embodied in Murillo's picture is common- 
 place enough, but it is vital to any true living. To the 
 mind of Jonathan Edwards the very essence of true 
 religion was the recognition of great things as great, and 
 small things as small, and acting on that knowledge. 
 The truth embodied in Murillo's picture is the truth ex- 
 pressed in the wise saying of Edmund Burke, — "If you 
 want to go anywhere, you have to start from where you 
 are." 
 
XIX 
 Christ Bound to the Column 
 
 From a painting by II Sodoma (Brazzi) 
 
CHRIST BOUND TO THE COLUMN 
 By II Sodoma 
 
 This picture is Sodoma's masterpiece. It was originally 
 part of a larger fresco in the cloister of San Francesco at Siena. 
 The fresco represented the "Judgment of Pilate," in which was 
 seen the Hebrew judicial court, with Pilate surrounded by a 
 number of angry Jews, and at one side the figure of the bound 
 and buffeted Christ. The painting suffered so much from the 
 damp that, in 1842, the figure of Christ was sawed away from 
 the wall and taken to the public gallery, where it now is. It is 
 four feet seven inches high by three feet four inches wide. From 
 the standpoint of art it is notable for the combination of the per- 
 fect technique of Greek art with the new sense of spiritual inten- 
 sity. 
 
XIX 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Invulnerable Man 
 
"Then the soldiers took Jesus into the palace and gathered 
 unto him the whole cohort. And they stripped him and put 
 on a scarlet robe. They plaited a crown of thorns and put it 
 upon his head, and a reed in his right hand; and they spat upon 
 him, and took the reed and smote him on the head. " 
 
 M.^TTHEW. 
 
 "In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good 
 cheer. I have overcome the world. " 
 
 Jesus. 
 
 "After all, the kind of world one carries about in one's self 
 is the important thing, and the world outside takes all its grace, 
 color, and value from that. " 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 "Therefore, great heart, bear up! Thou art but the type 
 Of what all lofty spirits endure, that fain 
 Would win men back to strength and peace through love; 
 Each hath his lonely peak, and on each heart 
 Envy or scorn or hatred, tears lifelong 
 With vulture beak; yet the high soul is left. " 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet 
 with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, 
 unsocial; all these happen to them by reason of their ignorance 
 of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the 
 good, that it is beautiful, and of the bad, that it is ugly, and the 
 nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only 
 of the same blood, but that it participates in the same intelligence 
 and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by 
 any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I 
 be angry with my kinsman nor hate him. " 
 
 Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 (268) 
 
THE INVULNERABLE MAN 
 
 Among the most pathetic facts of Hfe is the fact that 
 superiority of any kind, and especially moral excellence, 
 exasperates others and provokes their envy. "Mine 
 heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; the birds round 
 about are against her." The bird adorned with color, for 
 that reason, invites attack from the others. To be hated, 
 persecuted, misunderstood, while they live; to be praised, 
 rem.embered, worshiped, after they die, has not been an 
 uncommon fate for great men. Socrates was the first 
 citizen of Athens, yet his fellow citizens put him to death. 
 Dante, the father of Italian literature, will keep green the 
 memory of Florence wherever books are known, yet he 
 died in exile from his native city, which banished the living 
 Dante, and then begged for his dead body. Joseph is 
 typical of a long list of men through the centuries, who 
 have duplicated his experience. "Joseph is a fruitful 
 bough, a fruitful bough by a fountain; his branches run 
 over the wall. The archers have sorely grieved him, and 
 shot at him and persecuted him." 
 
 Jesus was no stranger to this experience, but rather 
 its best illustration. He deserved the crown of a king. 
 
 (269) 
 
270 "CHRIST BOUND TO THE COLUMN" 
 
 He received the crown of thorns. To deserve the best 
 and to receive the worst at the hands of one's fellov/s, is 
 calculated to create a doubt of the very foundations on 
 which the world is built. Therefore, it is an achievement 
 of the deepest significance, if a man, in the face of this 
 experience, can still believe that goodness and not blind 
 chance is at the heart of things. Burne-Jones wrote on 
 his mosaic of "Christ on the Tree of Life" his favorite 
 text in the words of the vulgate, "hi mundo pressuram 
 hahehitis, sed confidite; ego vici mundum." This seemed 
 to him to express the burden and pressure of life, and it 
 summed up for him the heart of the Christian faith, — "I 
 have overcome the world with its pressure." Burne- 
 Jones saw clearly that, if Jesus made that word good, then 
 He is the Christ. Since the time that Jesus prayed for 
 His murderers, the world has not been nor can ever be the 
 same world. 
 
 It is this notable achievement of Jesus, which So- 
 doma's picture embodies and makes more real than a mul- 
 titude of words could do. The picture represents Jesus 
 clean forspent with weariness and shame at the cruel and 
 inhuman treatment He received from the soldiers. It is 
 inexpressibly pathetic. So weary and utterly worn out 
 with agony is the master, that His lips have fallen apart 
 from mere exhaustion, and He is kept from sinking down 
 upon the ground only by the cords that bind Him. Great 
 
THE INVULNERABLE MAN 271 
 
 drops of blood are on the brow, where the thorny crown 
 has been pressed. The intellectual suffering is even 
 more apparent than the physical. The chief effect pro- 
 duced by the picture on the mind of Hawthorne was the 
 sense of loneliness. It is the universal sorrow that all 
 prophets feel. To the oriental mind, premature sickness 
 and the miscarriage of justice were the two classic forms 
 of individual suffering. It is for this reason that Isaiah, 
 in his matchless picture of the Great Sufferer, represents 
 him interchangeably, now as a sick man, and now as a 
 convict. Both of these elements are well embodied in 
 Sodoma's picture, which represents the hero tortured 
 with a sense of unjust treatment and suffering from pre- 
 mature physical weariness, which made him seem to the 
 Jews a man fifty years old, when in fact he had only 
 turned thirty. 
 
 The point in the picture to be noted is, that in spite of 
 the physical and mental suffering, the artist, in some 
 wonderful way, has succeeded in representing Jesus not 
 as an object of pity, but as master of Himself. Even in 
 this extremity, fainting and bleeding, He is seen still to be 
 the King. From His tortured face the high soul is made 
 to shine forth with serene beauty and courage. While 
 a mob clamors with clenched fists for this blood "Christ 
 stood unmoved, as the sunlit mountain top, by the storm 
 that beats upon its base." Only the outposts of His life 
 
2,72 "CHRIST BOUND TO THE COLUMN" 
 
 were captured; the citadel remained intact. His heart 
 was fed by a secret stream of oil, like the fire in Bunyan's 
 House of the Interpreter, The man who has such an 
 internal resource, which a Hebrew poet called "the secret 
 place of the Most High," is invulnerable. This is the fact 
 for which Sodoma's picture stands. 
 
 Such a triumph over evil can be achieved only by the 
 method adopted by Jesus, that is, by transcending the 
 evil. George Matheson thinks, and rightly so, that the 
 net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird, not because 
 of the bird's superior wisdom, but because of its method. 
 Its method is flight. It escapes entanglement, not by 
 flying through the net, but by taking the road through the 
 upper air. The method of the wing is the only way to 
 transcend the nets of evil and calamity. With this 
 method in mind the puzzling statement of the poet in the 
 ninety-first Psalm becomes clear, "Thou shalt not be 
 afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that 
 flieth by day, nor for the pestilence that walketh in 
 darkness; a thousand shall fall by thy side, but it shall 
 not come nigh thee." Does the poet mean t© say that 
 piety is a protection against small-pox? That pestilence 
 and destruction do not enter the homes of the good as 
 well as those of the bad? No, he means to say that the 
 man who lives in the secret place of the most High is an 
 invulnerable man, that the city of his mind has not been 
 
THE INVULNERABLE MAN 273 
 
 invaded, that the real man remains undaunted. His 
 life is like the picture of a cottage on a sea-coast, during 
 a storm. "The mountains come down behind it and the 
 storm breaks overhead. The waves are thundering on the 
 shore, the trees groaning and sighing in the wilderness 
 around, the rains descending and beating upon the win- 
 dows, while all the convulsions, — the darkness, the mid- 
 night, the waves, the tempests and the scowling sky- 
 make the brightness of the heart more bright and the 
 burning fire more pleasant and the happy circle around it 
 more blissful." Sodoma represents the inside of Jesus' 
 life to be like the inside of this cottage. That is why 
 He was invulnerable. 
 
 The truth embodied in the picture makes apparent 
 the philosophy of all true courage. Physical suflfering 
 borne with calmness was constantly represented by 
 Greek artists. It was stoical indifference to pain. In 
 Sodoma's picture we have something very different. 
 The great merit of his artistic achievement is the com- 
 bination of agonizing susceptibility to pain and serene 
 triumph over it. This is true courage. Indeed there can 
 be no true courage without fear. It is, of course, possible 
 for a man to be without fear, who has no secret source of 
 strength to overcome it, as Jesus had. In "Old Mor- 
 tality," for example, when Bothwell is slain by Balfour 
 of Burley — "Die! wretch! die! cried the convenanter. 
 
274 "CHRIST BOUND TO THE COLUMN" 
 
 die like the beasts that perish, hoping nothing, believing 
 nothing, — and fearing nothing," replied the dying man. 
 This was a coarse-fibered defiance of fate, but it was not 
 courage. To be conscious of the danger and fear the pain, 
 and notwithstanding the fear, to face the danger, that is 
 courage. "Heroism is not the absence of fear, but the 
 conquest of it." 
 
 Such triumph and courage come only when a man's 
 spirit, like that of Jesus, is God-sheltered. The only way 
 to be immune against dangers and vexations is to trans- 
 scend them, is to live on the top floor, as Henry Drum- 
 mond loved to put it. To be inspired by a divine enthu- 
 siasm makes a man invulnerable against the wounds of 
 outward calamity. He is like the boy who brought the 
 message to Napoleon. Dying of wounds received while 
 planting the flag over the market-place at Ratisbon, the 
 soldier, nevertheless, riding at full speed, succeeds in 
 reaching the Emperor. 
 
 "Well," cried he, "Emperor, by God's grace 
 
 "We've got you Ratisbon ! 
 "The ' marshal's ' in the market-place, 
 
 "And you'll be there anon. " 
 
 Borne up and absorbed by the passion of his heart, he is 
 impervious and superior even to death wounds. 
 
THE INVULNERABLE MAN 275 
 
 'The chief's eye flashed; but presently 
 Softened itself, as sheathes 
 A film the mother-eagle's eye 
 When her bruised eaglet breathes: 
 'You're wounded!' 'Nay,' the soldier's pride 
 Touched to the quick, he said: 
 'I'm killed, Sire!' and his chief beside 
 Smiling, the boy fell dead." 
 

XX 
 
 Destiny and Humanity 
 
 From a painting by Jef. Leempoels 
 

 i 
 
DESTINY AND HUMANITY 
 By Jef. Leempoels 
 
 mta! ■ . !'"""""■ '" ■'O^-"-"' -e m.er„a,i„„a, con,- 
 
 ss,onal arfse. A g„at European pai.,er said ,ha. .he hisLy 
 o pa.„„„g wouM have ,„s, something if ,his picure had „ vlr 
 been pa.n,ed. I, has equally appealed ,o people „i.h no "ch 
 n.ca .nowledge o, an.- The people a. S,. LoL cailed i. "he 
 M Le'eJ ," '" """" """ '■°'""-"' '=«'"" '»' '"is name, 
 ■n 8,4. Each hand was painted from a separate model. The 
 
 ';:";: "t,,"" ""•" '-^"^^ "«" ^^ "■- '«> - '-ches 
 
 " Coel! '^ ""°"'"' ""' ^^ •"' -- ~- - 
 
XX 
 
 Interpretation 
 The Inspiration of the Imperfect 
 
"Every attainment is only a camp for the night." 
 
 Markham. 
 
 "Not that I have already obtained or am already made per- 
 fect, but 1 press on toward the upward calling of God. " 
 
 Paul. 
 
 "A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven 
 for?" 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "Better have failed in the high aim, as I, 
 Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 Sees it and does it: 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 Dies ere he knows it. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "Then life is, — to wake, not sleep 
 Rise and not rest, but press 
 From earth's level where blindly creep 
 
 Things perfected, more or less 
 To the heaven's height, far and steep. " 
 
 Browning. 
 
 "O heavenly power of human wishes! 
 For as wings to birds, and as fins to fishes, 
 Are a man's desires to the soul of a man, 
 'Tis by these and by these alone, it can 
 Wander at will through its native sphere. 
 Where the beauty that's far is the bliss that is near. " 
 
 Owen Meredith. 
 
 (282) 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE IMPERFECT 
 
 Shelley, shortly before he died, had a curious dream, 
 in which he saw his spectral self coming toward his 
 conscious self. It lifted the hood from the brow and 
 said to the conscious self — "Art thou satisfied?" "Art 
 thou satisfied?" All normal men have had the same 
 dream. Unfulfilled longing is a human characteristic. 
 In every human eye there is a look of expectancy. Nov- 
 alis once began to write the story of man's search for 
 perfection and happiness. The first book he called 
 "Expectancy." The second book he called "Fulfill- 
 ment," but in the middle of the second volume he laid 
 down his pen, and never finished it. Dr. Van Dyke, who 
 has recently called attention to it, has himself added a 
 chapter to the book in his "Blue Flower," but the book 
 is still incomplete and must remain so, until man arri\-es 
 at the point of fulfilled desire. 
 
 It is this fact, universally true, of man's yearning 
 and searching after something he does not now have, 
 which is embodied in Leempoel's picture, "The Hands," 
 a truth which, so far as I am aware, has never been 
 represented in any other picture. In the center of the 
 
 (283) 
 
284 "DESTINY AND HUMANITY"— LEEMPOELS 
 
 picture two red-gloved hands hold aloft the crozier and 
 crucifix, a white-gloved hand holds the scepter, symbols 
 of the church and state, the two institutions among men, 
 through which they are best working out their desires and 
 which represent their best ideals. Around these are 
 grouped all kinds of uplifted hands, reaching out for 
 something they desire but have not. There are the 
 weather-beaten hands of the toiler, and the delicately- 
 shaped fingers of refined women. Sick hands hold 
 up a box of jewels, a gift freely offered for lost health. 
 Manacled hands reach out for freedom. One hand is 
 putting on another a wedding ring, thinking in wedded 
 love to find the desired goal. A veiled hand of mourning is 
 pleading for comfort. 
 
 On the left side of the picture are Buddha, Vishnu, 
 and the imaged gods of Egypt, with palms and smoke 
 of incense, symbols of an aspiration, however faint or 
 blind, for human betterment. On the picture's right 
 are the hands which represent the destructive forces of 
 human society. The hands of the assassin hold high the 
 hatchet, revolver and knife. They, too, lift asking hands 
 to Fate. They, too, aspire, but aspire negatively, hoping 
 to reach their goal by pulling down, rather than building 
 up. The tragedy of man's search for his desired good, 
 does not lie in the fact that his search is never wholly 
 successful, but in the fact that many do not know what 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE IMPERFECT 285 
 
 they ought to seek. By the striking symbol of upHfted 
 hands the picture embodies the universal truth that in 
 every human heart is an illimitable longing, never sat- 
 isfied, and that every man searches unceasingly for some- 
 thing he never possesses. 
 
 The artist has represented Fate, or Destiny, or the 
 Over-Heart, or God, in the mysterious face, which looks 
 out of the picture, as from the center of a sun, a face 
 conscious of man's striving; a face burdened and seamed 
 by the knowledge of his unsatisfied yearning, but still 
 inscrutable. The eyes are piercing, but neither soft nor 
 stern. Carlyle asks why does the Over-Heart "answer 
 never a word?" The picture does not say that Destiny 
 makes no answer at all, for the sunlight falls on the cen- 
 tral group of uplifted hands, but the answer is not com- 
 plete enough to prevent the hands from still pleading. It 
 seems to be the clear intention that men should not now 
 reach their goal. "There is indeed one element in human 
 destiny," says Stevenson, "that not blindness itself can 
 controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are 
 not intended to succeed. Failure is the fate allotted." 
 
 Jesus presented to His followers an unattainable 
 ideal; "Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is per- 
 fect." When Wu Ting Fang was in America he criti- 
 cised Christianity by comparing it with Confucianism. In 
 his judgment it was an advantage that the ideals of Confu- 
 
286 "DESTINY AND HUMANITY"— LEEMPOELS 
 
 danism were human attainments. But Christianity, he 
 thought, made the stupendous blunder of presenting to 
 men an impracticable ideal. So far as the fact itself is 
 concerned, Wu Ting Fang saw clearly what is the funda- 
 mental distinction between the Christian view of life and 
 every other view. Christianity spoiled the peace of the 
 world by causing men to aspire for the unattainable. 
 
 To rule human life, not by what is easy of attain- 
 ment, but by what is impossible of attainment, is not only 
 not a stupendous blunder, but the highest wisdom. For 
 whenever a man is satisfied with any achievement, he 
 makes that achievement his ideal for the future, and 
 never goes beyond it. His ideal has dwindled down to the 
 measure of his present power to perform. It was this 
 danger of which Mazzini was thinking when he said — 
 "The morrow of victory is more perilous than its eve." 
 To reach one's ideal is a personal calamity. It ought 
 to be too high for attainment. 
 
 Every true man leads a pilgrim life. "As a pil- 
 grim," said Dante, "who goes along a path where he 
 never journeyed before, may believe every house that he 
 sees in the distance to be his inn, and, not finding it to be 
 so, may direct his belief to the next, and so travel on 
 from house to house until he reach the inn, even so our 
 Soul, as soon as it enters the untrodden path of this life, 
 directs its eyes to its supreme good, the sum of its day's 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE IMPERFECT 287 
 
 travel to good; and therefore whatever thing it sees, which 
 seems to have in itself some goodness, it thinks to be its 
 supreme good. And because its knowledge at first is 
 imperfect, owing to want of experience and want of in- 
 struction, good things that are but little appear great 
 to it; and therefore in the first place it begins to desire 
 those. So we see little children desire above all things 
 an apple; and then, growing older, they desire a little 
 bird, and then, being older, desire a beautiful garment; 
 and then a horse, and then a wife, and then moderate 
 wealth, and then greater wealth, and then still more. 
 And this happens because in none of these things is 
 found that for which search is made, and as we live on, 
 we seek further." 
 
 "Though I do my best I shall scarce suceed. 
 But what if 1 fail of my purpose here? 
 It is but to keep the nerves at strain, 
 To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. 
 And baffled, get up and begin again, — 
 So the chase takes up one's life, that's all." 
 
 Men are intended always to fail, in order that their 
 nerves might be kept at strain in their pursuit of the best, 
 which is ever just beyond them. Paul said the mark 
 he set himself was the prize of the upward calling of God. 
 The call was a continuous process. His goal was never 
 stationary. The best man, be he even a Paul, finds him- 
 
288 "DESTINY AND HUMANITY"— LEEMPOFXS 
 
 self always a failure, for when bethinks he has reached his 
 goal, he discovers that it is not there, but has moved just 
 ahead of him, beckoning him ever upward and on. This 
 is the great truth of Leempoel's picture. Unique as is 
 the impression which the hands make on one, and haunting 
 as is the face, a face never to be forgotten ; yet when one 
 looks at the picture as a whole the thing, which stands out 
 chiefly; the thing which constitutes the eye of the picture, 
 is the radiant light on the distant horizon, placed there by 
 design, far away from where men are lifting unavailing 
 hands, in order to allure them from where they now are 
 and encourage them to press on. 
 
 To place before men an unattainable ideal is not a 
 legitimate cause for discouragement, but the very 
 opposite. It is the greatest inspiration for noble effort. 
 In the Christian view, not failure but low aim is crime. 
 Paul says, " I am glad I am a failure, glad I have not reach- 
 ed the end of my ideals, glad the best is yet before me." 
 
 "For thence — a paradox 
 Which comforts while it mocks, — 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 
 What I aspired to be 
 And was not, comforts me." 
 
 The desire to be what one is not, brings comfort, 
 because it inspires. Whatever temporary expression has 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE IMPERFECT 289 
 
 been given to the hope of a millennium, the inspiration 
 of it in all noble hearts is their inability to concur in the 
 present condition of things. Healthy discontent with 
 things as they are, breeds hope of better things and inspires 
 the effort to work for them. "So many promising 
 youths," said Emerson, "but never a perfect man," 
 not because the man did not do well, but because the 
 youth's promise was too large for the man's peformance. 
 Does man's inability to express his love show what a 
 poor, weak thing love is? It shows just the opposite. 
 It is not love's poverty but love's riches, that make it 
 incapable of perfect expression. The greater the passion 
 of love, the greater is the failure to express it. 
 
 This is the inspiration of the imperfect. A man's 
 success is not to be measured by his achievement, but 
 by his striving, even his unsuccessful striving. Robert 
 E. Speer says that hundreds of men in India write their 
 names, "Failed, B. A." "Failed, M. A." That means 
 they tried for the degree of Bachelor, or Master of Arts, 
 but did not get it. They count it an honor, however, 
 even to have honestly tried. Failure is never a disgrace, 
 if it be faithful failure. The fitting epitaph for such men 
 was once written by Stevenson — "Here lies one who 
 meant well, tried a little, failed much — an epitaph," 
 he adds, "of which no man need be ashamed." He 
 need not be ashamed, because such failure is due to the 
 
 19 
 
290 "DESTINY AND HUMANITY"— LEEMPOELS 
 
 fact that he has the desire of an angel, but only the 
 strength of a man. To have had desires of such propor- 
 tions, that there is neither time nor room here to fulfil 
 them, is itself a pledge of their immortality and their 
 ultimate fulfillment. 
 
 "The high that proved too high. 
 The heroic for earth too hard, 
 Are music sent up to God 
 By the lover and the bard; 
 Enough that he heard it once 
 We shall hear it by and by." 
 
Index 
 
I 
 
INDEX 
 
 "Angels ' Kitchen " 
 
 picture of, 253. 
 
 interpretation of, 257. 
 Angelo's "Last Judgment," 
 
 140. 
 Appreciation, principle of, 89. 
 Apple blossoms, color of, 22. 
 Arnold of Rugby, 201. 
 Art, an interpreter, 19. 
 Art and religion, 29. 
 Art does not preach, 26. 
 "Art for art's sake, " 23, 28. 
 Art is prophetic, 24. 
 Art, the use of, 21, 22. 
 Atonement, Day of, 121. 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 268. 
 
 Beauty, a moral necessity, 
 24, 25. 
 
 Beauty, universal love of, 25. 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, 226. 
 
 Bible, the, why called eternal 
 literature, 30. 
 
 Bond of trust, a, 204. 
 
 Bona Ventura, 256. 
 
 Browning, Mrs. E. B., 193 
 
 Browning, Robert, 22, 36, 48, 
 49, 88, 96, 99, 120, 141, 
 155. 194, 212, 238, 250, 
 256, 275, 282, 287, 288, 
 290. 
 
 Bunyan, John, 39, 272. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 262. 
 
 Bume-Jones, 270. 
 
 Burns, Robert, 72, 100, 162, 
 
 164. 
 Bushnell, Horace, 134. 
 
 C 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 134, 162, 212, 
 
 256, 285. 
 Carlyle's confession, 231. 
 Character not transferable, 50. 
 "Christ in Gethseniane" 
 
 picture of, 171. 
 
 interpretation of, 175. 
 ' ' Christ hound to the column " 
 
 picture of, 265. 
 
 interpretation of, 269. 
 "Christ and the Fishermen" 
 
 picture of, 197. 
 
 interpretation of, 201 . 
 Christians, Chinese, 91. 
 Christianity's high ideal, 286. 
 Church, a patron of art, 16. 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18. 
 Commonplace made uncom- 
 mon, the 257. 
 Confucianism, 285. 
 "Coniston, " Churchill's, 86. 
 Conflicts, cause of, 215. 
 Courage, Greek and Christian, 
 
 273- 
 Critical moment, the real, 52. 
 "Crossing the Rubicon," 49, 
 
 227. 
 
 (293) 
 
a 94 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cross, meanings of the, 191, 
 
 192. 
 Culture and the cross, 190. 
 
 D 
 
 Dante, 96, 120, 148, 189, 218, 
 
 248, 286. 
 Dante and Beatrice, 113. 
 Dante's one Smile, 189. 
 "David and Saul" 
 
 picture of, 93. 
 
 interpretation of, 95. 
 Dawson, Dr. J. W., 200. 
 Death, an advantage, 112. 
 Death, a mere incident, 149. 
 Death, as a private tutor, 109. 
 "Death staying hand of sculp- 
 tor" 
 
 picture of, 145. 
 
 interpretation of, 149. 
 
 symbolism of, 151. 
 Death, why woman is symbol 
 
 of, 153- 
 Death, why Bible never asso- 
 ciates prophets with, 
 
 154. 
 Deliverance through love, 85. 
 "Destiny and Humanity" 
 
 picture of, 279. 
 
 interpretation of 281. 
 Dickens, Charles, 41. 
 ' ' Dream of Gerontius, " 179. 
 Dreams, the use of, 135. 
 
 Jacob's, 137, 139. ^ 
 
 warning of, 136. 
 
 Bible's use of, sane, 131 
 "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," 
 214. 
 
 E 
 " Ecce Homo " 
 
 picture of, 223. 
 
 interpretation of, 225. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 262. 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 289. 
 Emerson's "Sphinx, " 217. 
 Emerson and Longfellow, loi. 
 Enemy of himself, an, 121. 
 Energy of position, 65. 
 Envy, fruit of, 269. 
 Epictetus, 60. 
 Epicurean apathy, 166. 
 Expectation, as a law, 203. 
 Eyes of the heart, 63. 
 
 F 
 
 Face, the language of the, 97. 
 Failure, the value of, 286. 
 Fairbaim, Dr. A. M., 174, 176, 
 
 226. 
 Faith in human nature, 203. 
 "Finding Christ in the Tem- 
 ple, " 22. 
 Fiske, John, 153. 
 Forgiveness, object of, 126. 
 
 something better than, 
 126. 
 
 problem of, 177. 
 Fox, George, 76. 
 Forsyth, Principal, 14, 108. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 148. 
 
 G 
 
 Goethe, J. W. Von, 163, 192. 
 Goethe's "Faust, " 213. 
 Great men, fate of, 269. 
 
 H 
 
 Hall, G. Stanley, 8, 28. 
 Happiness, a by-product, 163. 
 Happy men, who are the, 193. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 217. 
 Hero, loneliness of a, 178. 
 Heroism of Jesus, the, 175. 
 
INDEX 
 
 '95 
 
 Holy Grail, the, 6i. 
 "Hope" 
 
 picture of, 33. 
 
 interpretation of, 37. 
 
 indestructible, 37. 
 
 its function, 38. 
 Hugo, Victor, 77, 100, 148 
 
 155. 213. 
 Hume, David, 36, 
 Human heart, a battle-field, 
 
 213. 
 Hunt, Holman, 22. 
 Hyde, William DeWitt, 167. 
 
 "In Memoriam, " Tennyson's, 
 
 ISO- 
 Inspiration of the imperfect, 
 
 283. 
 "Incident of the French 
 
 Camp," 274. 
 
 "Jacob's Ladder" 
 
 picture of, 131. 
 
 interpretation of, 133. 
 James, William, 188. 
 Jesus, a disturber, 230. 
 Jesus, facing death, 175. 
 Jesus, temptation of, 245. 
 Job, 134. 
 
 Job's comfort, 151. 
 Johnson's "Rasselas, " 165. 
 Judges, English, 77. 
 Judgment, limited, 76. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney, 174. 
 "La Saisiaz, " Browning's, 150. 
 "Legend of Jubal, " the, 112. 
 "Letter to the Romans," the, 
 214. 
 
 "Lewis Rand, "Johnston's, 88. 
 Lindsey, Judge, 205. 
 "Locksley Hall," Tennyson's, 
 
 257- 
 Logic of the heart, the, 154. 
 "Love and Death" 
 
 picture of, 105. 
 
 interpretation of, 107. 
 
 origin of picture, no. 
 Love, creative power of, 88. 
 
 is not blind, 89. 
 
 vicarious, 99. 
 Love, the sin against, 125. 
 Love, two Greek words for, 202. 
 Lowell, James Russell, 53, no. 
 
 M 
 
 Machiavelli, 41. 
 ' ' Magdalene, The " 
 
 picture of, 79. 
 
 interpretation of, 83. 
 Man, the invulnerable, 269. 
 Man, a disappointed, 189. 
 Markham, Edwin, 188, 282. 
 Martineau, James, 25, 108, 
 
 212. 
 Marys, the two, 85, 86. 
 Maurice, F. D., 239. 
 Matheson, George, 72, 203, 
 
 256, 272. 
 Mazzini, 288. 
 Meredith, Owen, 220, 282, 
 Milmore, Martin, 145. 
 Milton, John, 243, 247. 
 Miser, the, i66. 
 "Moly, " the flower, 66. 
 "Musical instruments," 193. 
 Mystery, a comfort, 151. 
 
 N 
 
 Nightingale, Florence, 261. 
 Norse legend, a, 260. 
 
296 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Novalis, 283. 
 Noyes, 10. 
 
 O 
 
 Omar Khayyam, 120, 164. 
 
 Painting, different from a 
 
 photograph, 18. 
 Pastime, meaning of, 164. 
 Pericles, 149. 
 
 Philemon, Paul's letter to, 25. 
 Pictures, need of the best, 17. 
 Pictures, time savers, 15. 
 Pictures, two elements in, 18. 
 Pilate, his fate, 229. 
 
 his character, 226. 
 Plato, 213. 
 
 Plato's good juror. 63. 
 Poetry, Greek, 109. 
 Pope, Alexander, 36. 
 Punishment, a novelist's view 
 
 of, 124. 
 ' ' Pursuit of Pleasure " 
 
 picture of, 159. 
 
 interpretation of, 163. 
 
 R 
 
 "Ratisbon, " 274. 
 Rehgion of to-morrow morn- 
 ing, the, 37. 
 Rembrandt, two portraits of, 
 
 123. 
 Rice, Mrs. Alice Hegan, 205. 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 163. 
 Rivers of the Inferno, the, 189. 
 Robertson, F. D., 174. 
 "Ruins, The" 
 
 picture of, 67. 
 
 interpretation of, 71. 
 Ruskin, John, 148, 180, 188. 
 
 Rutherford, Mark, 25, 86, 162, 
 212, 238. 
 
 San Diego, 259. 
 
 Satan, portraits of, 243. 
 
 the use of, 244. 
 Saul, " Browning's, 98. 
 "Scapegoat, The" 
 
 picture of, 117. 
 
 interpretation of 119. 
 
 only one of its kind, 116. 
 
 symbolism of, 122. 
 Sermon on the Mount, the, 
 
 203. 
 Shakespeare, William, 238, 
 
 242. 
 Shelley, 283. 
 "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi " 
 
 picture of, 185. 
 
 interpretation of, 189. 
 "Sir Galahad" 
 
 picture of, 57. 
 
 interpretation of 61. 
 "St. Michael and the Dragon" 
 
 picture of, 209. 
 
 interpretation of, 211. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 200, 
 
 285. 
 Stradivarius, Antonio, 261. 
 Sympathy, the measure of, 73 
 
 an act of imagination, 75, 
 
 ' ' Temptation in the wilderness " 
 
 picture of, 235. 
 
 interpretation of, 237. 
 Temptation as opportunity, 
 
 239- 
 Temptation, meanings of, 240. 
 Temptation, the use of, 248. 
 Tennyson, 20, 48, 60, 127, 257. 
 
INDEX 
 
 297 
 
 They who trust us educate us, 
 
 201. 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 200. 
 Tissot, James, 73. 
 
 U 
 
 Ulysses and Orpheus, 249. 
 Unavoidable question, an, 227. 
 
 V 
 VanDyke's ' ' Blue Flower, "283 
 
 W 
 
 Watts, George F., 30. 
 Webster's Reply to Hayne, 52. 
 Whittier, John G., 84. 
 ' ' Wise and Foolish Virgins " 
 
 picture of, 45. 
 
 interpretation of, 49. 
 Wise man, the good man is the, 
 
 64. 
 Wu Ting Fang, his view of 
 Christianity, 285. 
 

 
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