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 THIS SAME JESUS
 
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 THIS SAME JESUS: 
 
 MEDITATIONS ON 
 
 THE MANIFESTATIONS OF 
 
 CHRIST TO-DAY 
 
 RY 
 
 ROBERT KEABLE 
 
 Zondon 
 NISBET & CO., LTD., 
 
 22 BERNERS STREET, 
 W.
 
 First Published in 1918
 
 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 MEDITATIONS written throughout a year 
 with no more precise object than that 
 indicated by the words of their original title, 
 Pro Salute Animce, may or may not be worthy 
 of reproduction. Probably they are usually not. 
 Yet such reprinting is what I have done in 
 this little volume, although I may perhaps add 
 that it is in response to many requests. These 
 have reached me from various quarters, but each 
 suggests that the short chapters might make a 
 volume because of a certain characteristic of them 
 all. Should this seem to be so to others, I shall 
 be very glad that I have here selected, revised, 
 and published them. 
 
 That the chapters have something in common 
 may well be the case, for they were written under 
 circumstances likely to conduce to that end. 
 True, some were written in Basutoland; others, 
 while in khaki, in Cape Town and in France. 
 But all were written with the War dominant in 
 my mind, and while what I believe to be one of 
 its great lessons was being hammered into my 
 consciousness. In Basutoland, as in Cape Town
 
 vi FOREWORD 
 
 and in France, a priest cannot but be aware that 
 men are everywhere becoming increasingly in- 
 different to former authorities in religion, whether, 
 as in my parish, because they are living a free 
 life largely uninfluenced by public opinion or the 
 world of books and men, or, as in France and 
 to a great extent in England, because all con- 
 ventionalities have been stript away, and nothing 
 matters but the naked facts of life. In our time, 
 then, the power of our Faith to-day to grip the 
 soul is the supreme question. A man is little 
 likely to be religious because his fathers were 
 before him. or because the Church once had 
 might to conquer Rome, or because it is written 
 in the Bible much as these things may mean to 
 us. And personally I confess I am glad of it. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that the living JESUS, as 
 an appreciable reality, must be more than ever 
 our message, and that to preach Him so, all 
 finesse, all latituclinarianism, all mere sentiment, 
 must go. We professed Christians are obscuring 
 the Christ we worship and seek to serve, because 
 we allow ourselves to temporise, to dally with 
 past quarrels, to waver, and to fear. True, to do 
 otherwise might well tumble into ruin much that 
 we love and would fain save ; but as in this War, 
 no work of art, no personal consideration, no 
 earthly gain can be allowed to come between us 
 and the Liberty for which we fight, so in religion, 
 neither endowment nor establishment, neither
 
 FOREWORD vii 
 
 friendship nor ease, neither peace nor place must 
 be allowed to separate us from Christ, and in 
 consequence Christ from the world. For it is 
 Almighty God's plan that the world should see 
 Christ in us or not see Him at all. 
 
 Not particularly, but generally, these chapters 
 point this out. I publish them because I believe 
 that the final witness to our living Lord lies in 
 the fact that He can be found to-day as truly as 
 He was once to be found in the fashion of a man, 
 and because I am convinced that if we Christians 
 only acted on our faith and went straight ahead, 
 without prejudice and without (above all) re- 
 crimination, we should achieve at once greater 
 unities, and still turn the world upside down as 
 the Apostles did. If it is true that these papers 
 point in that direction, I very gladly see them 
 brought together, and pray that God the Holy 
 Ghost will overrule their many weaknesses to 
 the greater glory of the Father and of the 
 Virgin-born. 
 
 I have to acknowledge the kindness of the 
 editor of The Church Chronicle, the provincial 
 newspaper of the Church of the Province of 
 South Africa, in offering these meditations to 
 those especially whom that paper does not reach. 
 
 R K.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 FOREWORD ..... r 
 
 I. MANIFESTATION ..... 1 
 
 II. CANDLEMAS . . . . .5 
 
 III. PARDON AND PENITENCE . . . 9 
 
 IV. SAINTS PERPETTJA, FELICITAS, AND THEIR 
 
 COMPANIONS . . . . .13 
 
 V. HANDMAID AND MOTHER . . .17 
 
 VI. THE FULFILMENT OF THE PASSOVER . . 21 
 
 VII. THE HIDDEN WITNESS . . . .26 
 
 VIII. THE INVENTION OF THE HOLY CROSS . . 31 
 
 IX. THE EXPEDIENT ASCENSION . . .36 
 
 X. THE COMFORTER . . . .41 
 
 XI. THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS . . .48 
 
 XII. SAINTS PETER AND PAUL . . .51 
 
 XIII. THE RELIGION OF COMMON THINGS . . 58 
 
 XIV. THE PATIENCE OF GOD . . . .62 
 XV. THE HOLY NAME . . . .67 
 
 XVI. KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE . . . .71 
 
 XVII. "LIKE A FLINT" . . . .76 
 
 XVIII. OF THE ANGELS . . . . .80 
 
 XIX. REMEMBER .... . . . .85 
 
 XX. VOCATION . . . . .90 
 
 XXI. ALL SAINTS . . . . .94 
 
 XXII. UNITY ...... 99 
 
 XXIII. ADVENT . . . . . .104 
 
 XXIV. CHRISTMAS . . . . .109 
 
 be
 
 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 MANIFESTATION 
 
 (Sx. MATTHEW ii. 1-12) 
 
 IT is little wonder that the coming of the kings 
 to worship the King has taken such hold on 
 the Christian imagination. They were Easterns, 
 to begin with, and the East has always been a 
 mystery. Then they came from the unknown, 
 and they went back to the unknown they with 
 their scarlet and silver, with their rich trappings 
 on camel and slave ; and they left there at His 
 feet gold that the King was never to wear, incense 
 that the Priest was never to offer, and myrrh that 
 was to anoint the Body of the Holy One only in 
 death. 
 
 But there is in the story a deeper subject for 
 meditation than any of these things. What we 
 may well ask ourselves, wonderingly, is : Wherein 
 lay that "Manifestation" by which the Church 
 has named their coming ? It is one of the things
 
 2 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 we too easily pass over. There was certainly no 
 pomp, either earthly or unearthly, about the house 
 that the carpenter had hired, when Bethlehem 
 became less crowded, to house the peasant girl 
 and her Son. If Jerusalem were ignorant, cer- 
 tainly that little village did not know the identity 
 of its guests. True, there had been stir in the 
 royal city when the request of the Wise Men 
 had been made known, but that could have done 
 nothing to disillusion them from what had been 
 their first mistake the expectation that a palace 
 and pageantry would have pointed Him out. 
 Then the star could have been no pre&ise guide, 
 and like many other stars of that sort, the garish 
 days eclipsed it. Or Mary may have expected 
 their coming and told them; doubtless she was 
 versed in the Scriptures; but I doubt it. It is 
 not her way to say much who even then kept all 
 these things and pondered them in her heart. 
 
 The fact is that this, like every other mani- 
 festation of JESUS to every other heart, was a 
 thing ultimately outside the world's order. There 
 are always stars things beyond our ordering, and 
 divine that wise men know must be reckoned 
 with, and that point the way to JESUS ; but they 
 never by themselves bring men farther than the 
 House in which He dwells. Thy Word blazoned 
 in Church and Book is a lantern unto my path ; 
 but many see the light who never worship the 
 Light-giver. More is needed. There is a secret
 
 MANIFESTATION 3 
 
 appeal about JESUS, of the heart and not of the 
 mind, that is the final test where He is concerned. 
 
 So it is in silence that JESUS always finally, 
 and sometimes altogether, converts. " Behold ! " 
 -cried John, and that sight was all that made the 
 first two disciples follow. JESUS turned and 
 looked on Peter and, for no other reason, he went 
 out and wept bitterly. Our Lord's silent majesty, 
 white and red, converted the penitent thief. 
 And the silent Victim of the Sacrifice converts 
 more men to-day than books or sermons. 
 
 So it was with the much-travelled kings. 
 They had seen many a babe and many a mother ; 
 they could not, perhaps, have told you wherein 
 the outward peculiarity of these lay ; but heart 
 spoke to heart ; something in the simplicity and 
 majesty of these two leapt earthly reasoning ; and 
 when they saw the young Child with Mary His 
 Mother, they fell down and worshipped Him. 
 Grant to us, Lord, that vision. 
 
 For it is one of the mysteries and tragedies of 
 religion that from this test lies no appeal. It 
 perplexes us, at times, why this and that person 
 finds nothing in the Faith, and goes his way 
 unheeding, and we do right, of course, to keep a 
 watchful eye upon our methods and our standards ; 
 but something deeper lies behind all these. There 
 are those who look on JESUS and see no beauty 
 that they should desire Him. There are some 
 He came not to call. In the Gospels we read of
 
 4 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 men who actually heard His word and saw His 
 deeds, and then besought Him to depart out of 
 their coasts. And the greatest tragedy is that 
 He just went. The scourge of small cords was 
 better than that. 
 
 And why all this ? I am not sure that I 
 know, but perhaps faith is, after all, God's gift, 
 and there are souls too busy, too self-centred, too 
 clever, too proud, too brave to ask for it. It is 
 in His saddest voice that JESUS says : Si scires 
 donum Dei. . . . 
 
 That is why, seeing, we should pray to see.
 
 II 
 
 CANDLEMAS 
 
 (Sr. LUKE ii. 22-38) 
 
 THE amazing thing about the little drama of 
 the Presentation is that neither of the two 
 principal actors in it has the least need for purifi- 
 cation. One comes to be purified who has known 
 no other spouse than God the Holy Ghost, the 
 Other to be redeemed who is the author of Re- 
 demption. As far as Christ is concerned, the 
 incident is on a parallel with His Baptism. / 
 have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou 
 to me ? cried the burdened John. He is made 
 obedient to the law for man, Who Himself was the 
 lawgiver that men might learn obedience to Him. 
 On the other hand, of those who received the 
 gifts of Mary that day, the priest was probably 
 no better and no worse than those of the Den of 
 Thieves with which our Lord dealt so scathingly 
 all His days. Old Simeon was worn out with 
 waiting a weary term of years for one sight of the 
 Saviour to Whom the Virgin Mother had for 
 months been source of life ; and as likely as not
 
 6 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Joseph and she were merely two of a little stream 
 of tired peasantry that waited, as in one of our 
 big churches, for their turn. It was the beginning 
 of that dispensation which turns the world up- 
 side down. 
 
 Our thought is led instantly to the sacraments, 
 and pre-eminently to the Sacrament of the Altar. 
 How true it is that JESUS is the same, yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever ! There cannot surely be one 
 of us who takes part in the adorable sacrifice who 
 does not often marvel at the inversion of things 
 that is there. I should be victim ! I should be 
 passive, silent, obedient ! I deserve humiliation, 
 insult, forgetfulness ! I, in the wonderfully 
 beautiful mediaeval language, should be remade 
 who make Him ! Who am I to be priest, guardian, 
 minister, arbiter of His mercies, I in whose hands 
 He lies whose garment's fringe I am not worthy 
 to touch ! Yet, in due time, it was not the ungodly 
 but the Christ who died, and not unfallen angels 
 but men must shew the Lord's death, till He come. 
 
 Thus, then, do.es JESUS say daily, I have given you 
 an example that ye should do as 1 have done to you. 
 Bernard Partridge made an admirable cartoon, 
 but not the Kaiser only need look in wonder and 
 astonishment at the Crucifix. The Cross stands 
 for the great inversion. It is not by insistence 
 on rights, privileges, positions, wisdom, common 
 sense, that the world is won : it is by the sacrifice 
 of these. We have all to learn that.
 
 CANDLEMAS 7 
 
 The difficulty lies in the fact that these things 
 are our rights and privileges undoubtedly. So it 
 was with Christ : Ye, call Me Master and Lord, 
 and ye do well, for so I am. We are, some of us, 
 white men, and lords of Christ's heritage, and 
 people entitled to a certain amount of pleasure 
 and rest, and we must be sensible and keep our 
 supremacy and pass on the culture that the 
 world needs ! And some are none of these things, 
 and are not worthy of them, and would not know 
 what to do with them if they had them. Yet it 
 is they we have to save. So St. Peter hated the 
 confession involved in having his feet washed, and 
 that night, in the courtyard of the High Priest's 
 house, even Christ's cleansing seemed to have done 
 him little good. 
 
 Now conversion to Christ's point of view en- 
 tirely depends upon what is one's object. Some 
 French labourers once came to Talleyrand and 
 said, as a final argument, " We must live ! " 
 " Eeally ? " said the cynical Minister, " I do not 
 see the necessity ! " But in the long-run it was 
 that attitude of the Minister which led the 
 labourers to throw away that which they had 
 counted a necessity. Without that sacrifice their 
 sons had not enjoyed the right to live that their 
 fathers forfeited. Do we value then, living, or 
 Life ? our honouring, or Honour ? that we be 
 wise, or Wisdom ? 
 
 Pray God we light our candles bravely at
 
 8 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Candlemas ! The candles of the shrine of Mary 
 and her Son do not shine with the light that the 
 men of our time understand, although, as the 
 dumb humble things of this world often try to 
 teach, they burn in sacrifice ; but from that 
 shrine, which indeed needs no candle, neither light 
 of the sun, streams out the Light of the World.
 
 Ill 
 
 PARDON AND PENITENCE 
 
 (ST. LTJKB vii. 36-50) 
 
 IT has always seemed to me a strange thing 
 that people do not commonly perceive the 
 extraordinary difficulty of our Blessed Lord's 
 teaching about Forgiveness. He always said or 
 did in this regard the least expected thing. 
 There is scarcely an instance to the contrary, 
 So, for example, to the woman taken in adultery, 
 He said, Neither do I condemn thee, apparently 
 because every one else was convicted ly their own 
 conscience as if two blacks make one white. He 
 talks to that other and possibly worse woman of 
 Samaria, and there is not a word of penitence 
 from beginning to end only a great deal about 
 thirst. He pleaded for the men who crucified 
 Him for the reason you would think they did not 
 require forgiveness : they know not what they do. 
 A parable like that of the Prodigal may seem 
 easy, but there is always the Elder Brother 
 difficulty. One is reminded a little of the Phari- 
 sees who had not had sin if our Lord had not 
 
 9
 
 io THIS SAME JfiSUS 
 
 come ; yet JESUS surely came to put away sins. 
 The story of the woman of Simon's house may 
 touch our hearts, but what is the end, if we 
 accept, deliberately, the dictum that much love 
 balances much sin? And in the Model Prayer, 
 the sole plea that we are taught to make for for- 
 giveness is, for we forgive them that trespass against 
 us. This, with its parallel passages, is the most 
 startling thing of all. 
 
 Now there is a certain simplicity about the 
 Gospels that is a danger ; a superficial reader may 
 fail to see the hidden depths. It seems to me to 
 be so here. The more one ponders, the more one 
 wonders. Imagine, for instance, a modern priest 
 in the various situations that befell our Lord. 
 Making every allowance, there is hardly one of us 
 who would do as He did, or say what He said, or 
 let slip the opportunities that He (as we should 
 say) let slip. And if we did as He did and said 
 as He said, I am certain that our world's common 
 sense and decency would be outraged as His was. 
 
 It is impossible, here, to elaborate points, but 
 meditation would make plain, I think, that JESUS 
 never meant by forgiveness the little that we 
 mostly mean, and that the penitence which He 
 desires to see in us is one that we all too incom- 
 pletely visualise. 
 
 As JESUS looked at man, He saw that forgive- 
 ness was not only His divine act (although of 
 course it was that) but a process which must
 
 PARDON AND PENITENCE 11 
 
 proceed within the man himself. As He looked 
 at the Father, He knew that forgiveness was not 
 a change of mind which man had to constrain 
 Him to make, but a perpetual attitude instantly 
 made visible to the penitent who showed the 
 least possibility of true penance. The poor 
 woman, crouching on the ground with no cloak 
 for her sin, was as God would have a penitent be ; 
 instantly, therefore, she sees that His Face is 
 Forgiveness, and she must go and work out her 
 salvation. The woman of Samaria showed an 
 unsatisfied, desiring, weary heart, which is what 
 God wants to see in a penitent ; instantly, there- 
 fore, she sees that His Face is Forgiveness, and 
 she must go and drink deeply of the water that 
 satisfies till she is satisfiable and satisfied. The 
 soldiers knew not what they did, and until a 
 sinner realises a little what he does, he cannot see 
 what is written on the Face of the Father. Of 
 the Prodigal and the Elder Son, the Prodigal saw 
 most of the Father's love because he had come to 
 learn the value of the robe and the ring, and 
 would go on humbly using them as the Elder 
 Brother had never begun to do. The man who 
 forgives his injurer, is the man in whose heart is 
 written deeply the knowledge of his own un- 
 worthiness and of his own need. It is he, and 
 he alone, who may perchance be one day satisfied, 
 and in that day he will find he has become changed 
 into the likeness of Christ and made worthy.
 
 12 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 There remains the Pharisee. He had seen a 
 vision of God; for him the Old Testament had 
 been lived, and of his race God had taken this 
 and that to prepare a body and to make mani- 
 festation. He had both seen and heard the works 
 of God the Son. He had seen more, because he 
 had understood more, than either the publicans 
 or the sinners or the disciples. And and here 
 is the incomprehensible tragedy he did not want 
 what he saw. He was satisfied with himself; 
 there was no ground for penance in him ; and he 
 preferred his rights to their sacrifice, and logic to 
 love. So he chose deliberately what he had 
 never known he had been steadily choosing 
 all along, the very antithesis to God. 
 
 Almighty God, . . . create and make in us 
 new and contrite hearts, that we, . . . worthily 
 acknowledging our wretchedness, may find of Thee 
 . . . perfect forgiveness, for JESUS Christ's sake.
 
 IV 
 
 SAINTS PERPETUA, FELICITAS, 
 AND THEIR COMPANIONS 
 
 (HBBEEWS xi. 86-40) 
 
 F whom the world was not worthy but it was 
 a very worthy world. Its cities were clean 
 and white and well-builded ; its roads ran like a 
 die east and west and north and south, and 
 down them tramped the legionaries, and many a 
 provincial, as he heard them go in the dark night, 
 drew closer to the fire and thanked his gods that 
 the days of raid and famine were past and gone. 
 Its law did justice between man and man; its 
 Emperor wrote his Meditations; its wise men 
 had leisure to do wise things; and its solid 
 frontiers, compacted of heroism and self-sacrifice, 
 kept back for many a day the Huns of North 
 and East that Europe was to dread. We have 
 forgotten the glory of Eome; and that for a 
 thousand years after she was really broken and 
 gone, hers was the ideal that illumined like a 
 star the mind of priest and king. 
 
 Yet in the blazing sun of a hot afternoon in
 
 14 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 the Province of North Africa a brilliant throng 
 looked out at a group which represented to them 
 the most regrettable cause in civilisation. A 
 young wife forgetful of her sex, and deaf to the 
 reasonable entreaty of her father's grey hairs, 
 and a handful of brown-skinned, self-opinionated 
 slaves fortunately the evil was not yet wide- 
 spread ! The more tender steeled themselves to 
 the spectacle by the remembrance that such im- 
 piety and lack of patriotism were a social evil ; 
 the more brutal were glad of such excuse ; and so 
 it was done. The red blood of SS. Perpetua, 
 Felicitas, and their companions stained the circus 
 gold, and the attendants sanded it quickly over. 
 
 The world was not worthy so thus it signed 
 not Perpetua's but its own doom. That is the 
 irrevocable law. The fittest survives, not always 
 of the individual, but always of the ideal, and 
 of associations that strive for that ideal. The 
 unworthy goes down in the end. 
 
 The ships of Tyre, and the carricks of Portugal ; 
 the lines of the Pharaohs and of the Zulu kings ; 
 the rule of Mahommed and the regime of bullet 
 and whip-lash of the old South African days 
 where are these ? And none were wise in their 
 generation and knew that the doom was on them 
 and their kings. 
 
 The world never grows wise; it is only the 
 inevitable law that is wise. There may be causes 
 among us, yes, though they be to-day but voiced
 
 SAINT PERPETUA 15 
 
 by brown-skinned slaves, of which perhaps we are 
 not worthy. In the bars of Johannesburg, what of 
 the natives in the mines ; in the markets of Natal, 
 what of Indian citizenship ; in the Synods of the 
 Churches, what of the union of Christ's mystical 
 Body and of the salvation of souls ? And not 
 only in these places ; louder still and louder, from 
 where the wind is dusting over the new-poured 
 blood on the fields of Flanders and of France, 
 comes the question : What of the honest, and the 
 lovely, and the true ? Are ye worthy ? 
 
 Yet God has provided some letter thing for us. 
 The harvest is nobler than the seed-sowing. The 
 harvester brings to a crown the labour of the 
 sower. Without the one, the labour of the other 
 would be a poor and wasted thing, but the 
 harvester harvests more manfully if the union 
 between him and the sower be a perfect union, 
 and he be conscious that it was his own seed that 
 was sown. It is for us to prove our union with 
 the Church of St. Perpetua by harvesting what 
 she sowed in our own time and way. 
 
 But that is not all, for it is one of the wonders 
 of the universe that God was content to leave the 
 perfecting of His work to men. Even He chose 
 not to be made perfect without us. I can never 
 get out of my head the American story of 
 questioning, wondering Gabriel and of the Son of 
 God. "And if they should get tired, or forget, 
 down there, what then ? "
 
 16 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 And Jesus made answer : " I've no other plan. 
 Fm counting on them." 
 
 Counting on us that the vision be brought to 
 the blind, that the lame in the social march learn 
 to walk, that the world's outcasts are cleansed, 
 that the money-deadened hear, that the dead in 
 lust are raised up, and that the poor have the 
 gospel preached to them! Counting on us that 
 the satisfaction of His travail be full and free ! 
 Counting on us that His Kingdom come and His 
 Will be done ! And more : Who is it that goes 
 naked and hungry and poor in the person of His 
 little ones, and peers out so eagerly through the 
 prison bars counting on us ? 
 
 Who is sufficient for these things? But God 
 hath chosen the weak things of the world, and 
 things which are despised, to bring to nought things 
 that are. 
 
 Sancta Perpetua, ora pro nobis.
 
 V 
 HANDMAID AND MOTHER 
 
 (Sx. LUKE i. 26-38) 
 
 rpRADITIONALLY a garden, a spotless maid, 
 -*- a supernatural visitor, a question concerning 
 the Will of God and Eve has answered in the 
 negative and is the mother of the Fallen Eace. 
 Traditionally a garden, a spotless maid, a super- 
 natural visitor, a question concerning the Will of 
 God and Mary has answered in the affirmative 
 and is the Mother of the Eedeemed. The story 
 of sorrow and ruin and death unfolds from Eve ; 
 that of joy and gain and life from Mary. And 
 the turning-point for each is the same : The Will 
 of God. 
 
 So it was that when a woman in the crowd, 
 moved by our Lord's words and deeds, cried out 
 that His Mother must be blessed above women, 
 He answered : Yes, but still more blessed they 
 wlw hear the Word of God and keep it. She, 
 therefore, whom the Archangel saluted as Blessed, 
 and who also foretold the fact that all generations 
 should call her Blessed, was more blessed on the
 
 1 8 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Day of Annunciation than even on the Day of 
 Nativity. The latter saw her the Mother indeed, 
 but the former saw her the Handmaid of the Lord, 
 which is the greater of the two. 
 
 We whom the voices of Catholic experience, of 
 Catholic theology, and of Catholic mysticism, 
 assure beyond all question of the pre-eminence 
 and the prerogatives of Saint Mary among the 
 whole company of heaven, should do well to 
 remember this. It may be easier to win souls to 
 her love along the human line that the Son would 
 have His Mother near Him, that she can never be 
 deposed from her rightful relation to His Person, 
 and /that they who love the Son will love the 
 Mother also ; but this was not the way upon 
 which Christ our Lord laid stress. Her natural 
 Motherhood, indeed, was enough to crown her with 
 the stars, and robe her with the sun, and set the 
 moon beneath her feet ; but it is her supreme and 
 unique obedience to the Holy Will of God that 
 has added to her a spiritual Motherhood surpass- 
 ing even this in glory. The countless thankful 
 hearts, enriched by her ministry of mercy, that 
 call her Blessed, crown her more queenly than the 
 stars. 
 
 Consider, then, this Will of God. It is the 
 road to Knowledge ; If any man will do His Will, 
 he shall know of the doctrine. It is the road to 
 Strength ; My meat is to do the Will of Him that 
 sent Me. It is the road to the Joy of Friendship ;
 
 HANDMAID AND MOTHER 19 
 
 Ye are My friends if ye do whatsoever I command 
 you. It is the road, also, to a ministry of Service, 
 for he who has the right of entry because of 
 relationship, can alone bid authoritatively to the 
 house. And He that doeth the Will of My Father, 
 the same is My mother and sister and brother. 
 
 Knowledge, Strength, Joy, Service all these, 
 then, are at our refusal, for the Will of God 
 demands, chiefly, the response of our own will. 
 Almighty God willingly abdicated His right of 
 compulsion when He made man. Ten thousand 
 countless forms of life move solely and unthink- 
 ingly towards one goal at the impulse of His Will, 
 but of man He asks voluntary service. He asks 
 the hardest that He may get the Best, and Saint 
 Mary, if no other, proves His wisdom. Alone 
 among created earthly orders, mankind could 
 supply the perfect Mother, because alone it could 
 offer the surrendered will. 
 
 This demand of God is what one might have 
 expected of Him : it is such a wise demand. It 
 is at once within the compass of the poorest, 
 and the greatest offering of the most rich. 
 Sanctity does not require any peculiar talent or 
 set of talents, and it does not consist in the attain- 
 ment, in a sense, of any standard of excellence. 
 We must beware lest we think to attain by 
 imitation of the peculiar graces of some one saint, 
 for in every one the rich Will of God has its own 
 perfect work.
 
 20 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 So Julian remained in her anchorage, but not 
 in seclusion would Catherine of Siena, who 
 guided kings, have found her perfection ; so the 
 Cure" d'Ars remained in his parish, but not in any 
 one parish would Francis Xavier have reached his 
 crown. I am to practise the presence of God, 
 but not the cooking of Brother Laurence, and no 
 more of necessity the poverty of Francis of Assisi, 
 although I am to surrender all to God. There is no 
 common manifestation of the working of the Will 
 of God ; yet all the saints have that in common 
 which bids the Church Universal, in heaven and 
 in earth, name the Handmaid " Mother." 
 
 And the very universality of that Motherhood 
 bids us remember that this demand of God is a 
 universal demand. Be ye perfect as I am perfect, 
 said JESUS. We are all called to be saints. We 
 do right to differentiate those who so splendidly 
 overcome on earth; but nothing less than the 
 perfect can enter heaven. So that completes the 
 circle. If I but will to deepen my longing for 
 the vision of His love, I set out upon the pathway 
 of the Handmaid of the Lord.
 
 VI 
 
 THE FULFILMENT OF THE PASSOVER 
 
 (ST. LXJKE xxii. 14-21) 
 
 ~TX7ITH desire have I desired to eat this Passover 
 with you before I suffer. So our Lord had 
 been looking forward to, and planning for, that 
 wonderful Maundy Thursday, for who dare say 
 how long ? The beginning of the end, the end of 
 the beginning, it was both these things; but it 
 was more, it was the beginning of that which is to 
 have no end. For I say unto you, I will not any 
 more eat thereof until it (the Passover) be fulfilled 
 in the Kingdom of God. And of His Kingdom 
 there shall ~be no end. It was for this reason, then, 
 that He most welcomed it. It was the night of 
 the Bridegroom before the Feast. It was the 
 night for which God had planned since out of 
 Egypt He had first called His Son. It was the 
 last night of the " straitening " of Him Who was 
 thereafter to know no earthly restriction to the 
 passion of His love. 
 
 He was therein to fulfil the type of the Pass- 
 over. His new Israel was to be stained with the
 
 22 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 new Blood of the new Lamb for its passage out of 
 servitude into the glorious liberty of the children of 
 God. Moreover, the Passover was thus to beful- 
 filled in the Kingdom of God, fulfilled, that is, in 
 that Kingdom that knows no bound of time or 
 place or colour. It was to be fulfilled once for all, 
 that that new Blood-marking might be available 
 for every day of man's need. It was to be fulfilled 
 that every land might find the Token of Salvation 
 wherever altar might be set up. It was to be 
 fulfilled, widened, enriched, deepened, that hence- 
 forth there should be about that Table neither Jew 
 nor Greek, neither bond nor free, but Christ's, and 
 heirs according to the promise. 
 
 Now, this was the great desire of our Lord. It 
 is another illustration of the fact that, to our 
 Lord, the earthly ministry in Palestine was but 
 the necessary stage upon which might be set in 
 order His preparations for a world-wide ministry. 
 He conceived of no act of His, done there, as 
 complete in itself, except in so far as it was the 
 complete and perfect initiation of His further 
 plans. Thus the greatest of all His acts, and in 
 some sense the sum of them all, the making 
 possible, that is, of reconciliation between God 
 and man, was not so much completed in Palestine, 
 as commenced. The steps necessary for the work- 
 ing out of such reconciliation were completed, but 
 the reconciliation itself needed not the straitened 
 life of the Man of Sorrows, but the resurrection
 
 FULFILMENT OF THE PASSOVER 23 
 
 life of the Son of God. It was that era of the 
 Kingdom, in which He, the King, would know no 
 bound to His saving power, for which He passion- 
 ately longed. 
 
 The Eucharist was His own divine plan for the 
 processes of world-wide reconciliation. Here, He 
 was to be eternally lifted up, to draw all men 
 to Him ; here, His death was to be continually 
 observed as the sacrifice of redemption; here, 
 sinners were to be made one with Him, to find, 
 that is, the single method of atonement by which 
 man can come back to God. And in its nature 
 the Eucharist could be limited only by that which 
 God permits to limit Him perpetually, man's own 
 free will. Should the members of His Church 
 but make that surrender of their wills to Him, 
 then there would never be lack of a priesthood, 
 nor fortress unstormed by the soldiers of God. 
 
 Thus we should set ourselves to ask how far 
 that fulfilled Passover of the Eucharist finds ful- 
 filment in ourselves. The Passover is indeed 
 fulfilled, but do we enter into such a sense of 
 what that fulfilment means that we are worthy 
 to drink of His cup ? 
 
 Consider three types from among those who sat 
 with Him that first night. There was St. John, 
 close on the Master's breast. He figures so com- 
 paratively little in the rest of the story that it is 
 only his own writings which show how clearly 
 he entered into the Fulfilment. He alone of the
 
 24 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Twelve could brave, and could endure, St. Mary's 
 own station by the Cross. He alone seems not to 
 have expected a rifled tomb, and it was he who 
 found the traces of that noble, unhurried, resist- 
 less resurrection. So it is he whose Gospel and 
 Epistles are stamped with the certainty of what 
 the Fulfilment means. He knew no half -beliefs ; 
 his words are as incisive as those of his Master. 
 It is from them that the Church draws her creeds. 
 It is in them that she finds her great incentive 
 for her primary work of foreign missions. 
 
 There was St. Peter. How much has been 
 written of him ! the so-human apostle, type of 
 the majority of us, but pre-eminent example of 
 the triumph of grace. True, God used him as 
 He used no other, perhaps could so use him just 
 because he was so human ; but it was a battle 
 all along. From the washing of the feet until the 
 turning back on the Flaminian Way that eve of 
 martyrdom, St. Peter was always finding the 
 conception of Fulfilment hard. Yet, step by step, 
 sometimes stumbling but always advancing again, 
 he came into it. In the end his stone of the 
 Twelve Foundations was of the texture of the 
 very Wall itself, and its light that of the City 
 having the glory of God (Eev. xxi., vers. 14, 19, 
 18, 11). 
 
 And there was Judas. There is no need to 
 speculate as to the wherefore of his fall ; it is writ- 
 ten as plainly as can be. He alone who gathered
 
 FULFILMENT OF THE PASSOVER 25 
 
 round the board of Fulfilment entered not at all 
 into the appreciation of what that Fulfilment 
 meant. Yet he was there. That is the solemn 
 fact. Such is the wonder of God's humility that 
 it is possible for a traitor's hand to be with Him 
 on the Table. 
 
 Therefore I ask myself, as I think of the 
 mornings when I too take my place at the Table 
 of Fulfilment, how far do I understand, with 
 John; how far do I strive to understand, with 
 Peter; or how far do I fail to understand, with 
 Iscariot ?
 
 VII 
 
 THE HIDDEN WITNESS 
 
 (1 ST. JOHN v. 9-13) 
 
 UE is risen ! Well, if He is, the thing will 
 *"' prove itself: that is the point that every 
 Christian soul ought to make. He that believeth 
 on the Son of G-od hath the, witness in himself, says 
 St. John, and it is one of those sayings of his that 
 is manifestly plain, one of the many that shoot 
 across the night of our childish bewilderment like 
 the dazzling gleam of the search-light. It is 
 amazing that we ever forget it, but how many of 
 us do ! We have all of us, to some degree, got 
 into the habit of treating religion as a thing apart, 
 as a thing removed from the standards and logic 
 of everyday life, and consequently as something 
 artificial. Well, there are religions that have to 
 be treated so, but the necessity for such treatment 
 is the sure test of a false religion. 
 
 The fact, then, is, that JESUS Christ being alivt 
 for evermore, my soul will know it within herself, in 
 addition to Biblical, or historical, or philosophical 
 
 proofs. Come unto Me and I ivill give you rest 
 36
 
 THE HIDDEN WITNESS 27 
 
 well, if He is alive, I can come and find rest. 
 Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
 the world well, if He is alive, I shall be able then 
 to find Him. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh 
 My Hood, dwelleth in Me and I in him, and he shall 
 live by Me well, if He is alive, there is new life 
 for my soul. It is so elementary, and so for- 
 gotten. If Matthew Arnold's Syrian Grave and 
 Dust were thought to be found to-morrow, it 
 could make no difference. The truth of the risen 
 Saviour does not rest on archaeology. 
 
 It is worth remarking, by the way, that neglect 
 of this elementary fact about the Christian 
 religion is responsible for the greater part of 
 modern unbelief. Nowadays there happens to 
 be a Science of Psychology, but nine out of ten 
 people do not seem to realise it. But the fact is 
 that no modern scientist of position dreams of 
 disputing that Psychology is as real a thing as, 
 let us say, Inorganic Chemistry, and the greater 
 number of men who count are beginning seriously 
 to ask if it is not very considerably more impor- 
 tant. In short, it is admitted that the fact that 
 I have what we agree to call a soul is as impor- 
 tant and as real as that I have a body, and 
 consequently the spiritual senses are as good 
 evidence of value as the physical. That a man 
 loves is as true as that he smells or touches or 
 hears or sees ; and as a matter of experience, it is 
 the first fact and not the second series of facts
 
 28 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 that has dictated the course of the world's history. 
 Moreover and this is the great point most of 
 the world's tragedies have come about because 
 politicians or rulers have commonly denied the 
 first since it cannot be proved by the same canons 
 as the second. " Why should they love ? " 
 liberty, faith, a lost cause, whatever it may be ; 
 " There is nothing therein to appeal to their 
 senses " ; " They do not love " ; " Let us act as if 
 they do not love " that is the series of proposi- 
 tions which, acted upon by those in authority, led 
 men finally to set the Cross above the Eagle, to 
 dethrone the Kings of France, and to liberate the 
 slave to take but three illustrations. 
 
 All this is of genuine importance in Easter- 
 time. There are tens of thousands who demand 
 of Christ that He convince their senses, and who 
 reject Him because, very truly, His Kingdom is 
 not of this world of sense. Mr. Blatchford, for 
 example, sets a modern Christian in the witness- 
 box, and rejects his evidence because he cannot 
 produce the signatures of the Apostles. It 
 would be foolish if it were not a matter of life and 
 death. It is as foolish, to take an illustration 
 from the sermons of a late world-renowned 
 preacher, as if a man refused to believe in the 
 beauty of a picture because it did not taste sweet, 
 or the music of a violin because it did not smell. 
 The things of the spirit are to be spiritually dis- 
 cerned. But this is why the Way is narrow :
 
 THE HIDDEN WITNESS 29 
 
 Ye search the Scripture, but ye will not come to Me 
 that ye may have life. Men are too proud to bow 
 their heads to the tests of Faith. Only in the 
 last resource, when broken-hearted, or dying, or 
 up against the shock of ideals in unquestioned 
 conflict, will they heed. 
 
 The shock of ideals in unquestioned conflict 
 that is what we Christians ought to be showing 
 the world, and what we do not show. Here, too, 
 is the greatest of all such conflicts, the belief in 
 the risen JESUS overruling every single dictate 
 that the world accepts. Nero's palace garden was 
 one such battlefield ; France, when the Anti-clerical 
 laws left the Church utterly ruined and contemned 
 just before the War, was another; and there is 
 that in the British Empire which would make it 
 as good a field as either of these. But can we 
 say the battle is set ? 
 
 And why not ? Every Sunday is a commemora- 
 tion of Easter. The Sunday Eucharist is the time 
 to question the soul as to how far the voice of the 
 living JESUS rings through the silence of the tomb, 
 as to how far the glory of the Face of JESUS shines 
 through the fog and the gloom. In His Sacra- 
 mental Presence, ask yourself, What is He to 
 me ? Let it be in a time of silence ; let it be 
 when honest recognition is given to the demands 
 of the soul for expression in effort, in fasting, in 
 prayer ; and let it be while the wondrous story of 
 His claim to offer realities surpassing those of
 
 30 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 earth and the body, rings fresh in the ears. Then 
 will there be only one answer. I count all things 
 but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 
 JESUS my Lord. For I am persuaded that neither 
 death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
 things present, nor things to come, shall be able to 
 separate me from the love of God which is in Christ 
 JESUS.
 
 VIII 
 THE INVENTION OF THE HOLY CROSS 
 
 (ST. MATTHEW xvi. 21-28) 
 
 THE story of the Finding of the Cross is a great 
 subject for mystical meditation, which is a 
 thing we do far too little. The early Church de- 
 lighted in it. There is a certain artlessness about, 
 for example, the mystic parallels which Eufinus 
 finds in the Old Testament when he writes about 
 the Creed ; and it is like our practical foolishness 
 that we rarely discern the love behind them that 
 is their beauty. Also such mysticism has a value 
 all its own. It makes windows for the inner 
 light to flood the soul. 
 
 So, first, I notice in this connection the significant 
 fact that the Cross can be lost. Christianity was 
 to consist chiefly in the finding of the Cross ; but 
 our religious history has become very largely the 
 story of the losing of it. Christ's religion began 
 by being the consummation of a personal union 
 with Him in the Apostolic Fellowship which was 
 His own true Body at work in the world ; it has 
 very often become a system of ethics, or a logical
 
 32 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 proposition, or an artistic dream. There are some 
 who would say, " Yes, and a Creed too, which it 
 was never meant to be " ; but I notice that such 
 voices come from those who have themselves lost 
 those songs of passionate triumph which afford us 
 such expression for our love. Yet whose is the 
 blame ? We ourselves have too often lost the 
 Cross from the Creed, and the Creed is singularly 
 un-Christian then. 
 
 For, secondly, what does the Cross mean ? The 
 Cross was the world's rejection of the claim of 
 Christ ; yes, it was the world's futile antithesis to 
 the gospel that He preached. It was its final 
 foolishness. " You teach a gospel that would rob 
 us of our pleasure and our gain and our reality : 
 very well, now for the nails and the lance! -Are 
 they unreal ? If you despise our pleasure and 
 our profit, can you despise our pain ? " The 
 world's voice rang triumphant, but its echo died 
 out in amaze ! The answer of Christ and His 
 martyrs was its final disillusionment : " I can ! " 
 That is, at least, how 1 understand the Crucifixion, 
 and the defeat of Caesar. 
 
 In one way, therefore, our Blessed Lord did not 
 seek the Cross, but that which the Son of God 
 had ever known, grew, within the human limita- 
 tions of the Son of Man to a sense that the World 
 could not be convinced without the Cross, and 
 that the malice of sin had made the world's 
 nature so antithetical to the Gospel that the Cross
 
 INVENTION OF THE HOLY CROSS 33 
 
 would become inevitable to any follower of the 
 Gospel. It is like that other grim necessity. A 
 man thinks Hell impossible until he realises that 
 the malice of sin is so great that it can set a 
 man's will in infinite antagonism to God. That 
 malice makes possible an " eternal sin " (Mark iii. 
 29, K.V.) ; it also makes the Cross essential, until 
 earth pass away. 
 
 Thirdly, then, I see now how the Church in any 
 age can come to lose sight of the Cross: it can 
 think the world conquered, or it can think it 
 knows a better way to conquer. The first is the 
 common historical explanation of much that 
 happened after the battle of Saxa Eubra and the 
 Edict of Milan, but it is at least as good an ex- 
 planation of much in Christendom to-day. We 
 think the world conquered. In a broad toler- 
 ance we do not insist upon that which we 
 ourselves believe, in faith and practice, because 
 we feel convinced that the other man is a 
 true Christian enough though he does not think 
 with us. The Eeformation made that sort of 
 tolerance seem inevitable, and it is worth con- 
 sidering that, curiously enough, it is since then 
 that the Cross has largely disappeared from 
 Christendom. 
 
 Or, again, we refuse to believe the evidence 
 of our eyes and ears in politics and social 
 conditions. It is axiomatic with us that Christ 
 has conquered the world, and when we find 
 
 3
 
 34 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 that He has no place in Parliament Houses, 
 or on Boards of Directors, we can hardly bring 
 ourselves to believe that nothing short of con- 
 quest has to be begun again, and to be under- 
 taken with so bloody a weapon as the Cross. 
 And we hesitate, too, for another reason. It is 
 essential to the warfare of Christ that not the 
 blood of His enemies, but our own, should stain 
 that weapon. 
 
 Then the Church often lets the Cross drop out 
 of sight because it thinks it knows a better way 
 to conquer. That, also, is often the explana- 
 tion given of much in the Church of the early 
 centuries : that it preferred adaptation and com- 
 promise to crucifixion. Some rude pagan image 
 would be painted anew for a figure of the 
 Blessed Mother; maybe, and would to God, 
 our compromises stopped at the painting of 
 images ! It is so hard to draw the line, we 
 say. I wonder if it is ? It is remarkably hard 
 to draw the line when you want to win the 
 battle without the Cross, but if the Cross is 
 easily lost, it is still more easily found. It lies 
 right in the road of every soul that goes out 
 honestly to seek it. 
 
 May 3rd is the Feast of the Finding of the 
 Cross, and our brethren in the Roman Catholic 
 Church have another Feast on May 4th. It is 
 that of the English Martyrs. I confess that I 
 wish we kept that Feast too, perhaps with a wider
 
 INVENTION OF THE HOLY CROSS 35 
 
 significance, for Ridley and Laud as well as for 
 Fisher and More. At least they all sought and 
 found the Cross. And one thing I know: the 
 martyrology of England will begin to grow 
 again when Englishmen begin again to seek it.
 
 IX 
 
 THE EXPEDIENT ASCENSION 
 
 (Sr. JOHN xvi. 5-7, 13-22) 
 
 THE thoughts of children are often more valu- 
 able than we are inclined to believe, for a 
 child, although his thinking may be superficial, 
 thinks what he does think without prejudice to the 
 host of conventions that make it hard for many 
 of us to think at all especially in religion. And 
 there is a child's thought about the Ascension 
 that it would do us good to consider more often 
 than we do. 
 
 " It is eyypedient for you that I go away." " But 
 what did our Lord mean by that ? " says the 
 child I know. " I would much rather have Him 
 on earth. Things would be so much more real if 
 He were on earth, and I might even understand 
 the Bible if He were here to explain it. And 
 grown-ups think so ! They wrote the hymn 
 which says : 
 
 I think, when I read that sweet story of old, 
 
 When JESUS was here among men, 
 How He called little children as lambs to His fold ; 
 
 I should like to have been with Him then ! 
 36
 
 THE EXPEDIENT ASCENSION 37 
 
 I wish that His hands had been placed on my head, 
 That His arms had been thrown around me, 
 
 And that I might have seen His kind look when He said : 
 ' Let the little ones come unto Me ' ! 
 
 No, I don't think it was expedient for Him to 
 go away ! I wish He were here now." 
 
 Now what is our honest reply to that ? I con- 
 fess that for years I personally knew that I had 
 none. I said to myself that the conditions of the 
 earth-life of the Son of Mary could not have 
 continued for ever, and that if they had I should 
 never probably have been able to visit Him in 
 Palestine ; and I said that His spiritual Presence 
 was as real as His physical, and better for us, 
 since it knew no limitation of time or space. 
 But that was pure convention. Underneath, all 
 the time, ran the child's wistful refrain : " I 
 should like to have been with Him then." / 
 should like. Surely, said my rebellious heart, it 
 were happier for me individually. The Master 
 therefore never used these words of His to me. 
 They were a part of the Holy Scriptures from 
 which I drew no help. Joy at the real vision of 
 Him was something I hoped from the future. 
 But then came the slow dawning of what He 
 meant, and with it the dawning of a greater joy 
 than I had thought possible. I went about 
 almost bewildered by the vision. Can it be true ? 
 I said ; can it be really true ? and then the 
 certainty that this and this alone could explain
 
 38 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 His words ; that thus, and thus alone, could His 
 promises ring true ; that the proof lay in the very 
 fact that such an explanation alone met my 
 heart's need these things swept the barriers 
 away. I echoed the words of St. Thomas ; David's 
 song became mine for Ascension Day : 
 
 God is gone up with a merry noise ; 
 And the Lord with the sound of the trump. 
 sing praises, sing praises unto our God : 
 Sing ye praises with understanding. 
 
 The steps to right faith in the Ascension are, I 
 think, these : 
 
 (1) A sense that Ascension does not stand for 
 withdrawal. I had always thought that it did. 
 I thought He had ascended up into heaven and 
 thereby left the earth ; and no wonder I thought 
 so. The voice of the Church was silent in my 
 part of the world, and it had never explained what 
 it meant by the use of Ptolemaic cosmology. 
 But St. Paul gave me the clue. " Into the 
 heavenlies" was what he was always saying, not 
 into heaven. What JESUS did, then, was not so 
 much to change His place as to change His mode 
 of existence. He lived before in the earthlies ; 
 He lives now " in the heavenlies " that is all. 
 And yet I was not very much happier. True, at 
 times the veil between that land and this is thin, 
 but perhaps when it is thinnest one realises that 
 it is all but impenetrable from this side. 
 
 So it was that (2) I experienced a real revo-
 
 THE EXPEDIENT ASCENSION 39 
 
 lution in thought when it dawned on me that 
 JESUS Himself had made a plan for the continual 
 penetration of that invisible curtain, so thin and 
 yet so strong. There were places where those 
 worlds met seven places. The Sacraments ! I 
 had always thought them occasional means of 
 grace comparable to, and perhaps a little greater 
 but for all that much less frequently used than 
 prayer and Bible-reading. 
 
 Now I saw that they were unique ; that they 
 were the modes of the expression of His activity 
 still upon earth. It was my own fault if I did 
 not, for example, daily touch my Lord. 
 
 And then (3) the vision of that of which the 
 Sacraments were the activities began to dawn. 
 Christ had ascended up into heaven only that He 
 might begin to live in a new body of power and 
 might, His own Fulness. The Church and He 
 had been always two distinct entities in my mind, 
 .and the Church had meant little more than the 
 Church of England. What if it was something 
 infinitely greater ? What if the persistence of 
 the Faith, despite opposition and apparent defeat, 
 spelt the sign of the prophet Jonas ? What if the 
 Church were something more than the aggregate 
 of its members, something with a living Mind 
 that planned and thought and willed so that the 
 members were swept along by it ? What if there 
 might be a truce of all these hopeless academic 
 speculations as to what was done in 300 A.D. or
 
 40 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 what the Eeformers meant twelve hundred years 
 later ? What if the experience of the Saints in 
 every century pointed to a living JESUS ascended 
 into His mystical Body of the Catholic Church, 
 teaching me through that Body, bearing me, 
 leading me, assuring me ? Could so golden a 
 vision have substance on earth ? " Tolle ! Lege ! " 
 And the Book spoke : 
 
 Ye are come unto the City . . . the Church . . . 
 
 JESUS. 
 
 1 read once, I think of St. Catherine of Genoa, 
 that when some one questioned her about the 
 Faith she could hardly reply for laughter and 
 tears. And the questioner was a little scandal- 
 ised, and asked why ? " Oh," she said (or words 
 to this effect), " it is so wonderful, so lovely, and 
 so plain. I must needs laugh, for the voice of my 
 Lord is music ; and weep, for my ears are not fit 
 to hear." 
 
 It is expedient for you that I go o.way. " I 
 
 ( must needs laugh, for the voice of my Lord is 
 
 music; and weep, for my ears are not fit to hear."
 
 THE COMFORTER 
 
 (ROMANS vii. and viii.) 
 
 IT is perhaps hardly to be denied that comfort 
 is not the first thought with which we 
 associate' the office of the Holy Spirit, and yet 
 " The Comforter " seems to have been our Lord's 
 favourite term for Him. Incidentally this is a 
 proof of what we were thinking in our last chapter. 
 Within the Catholic Church dwells the ascended 
 JESUS, and there He may be found and loved 
 this day. But the Holy Ghost is the means 
 whereby the Church is knit into one Body for 
 this great office. Just as JESUS was conceived 
 by the Holy Ghost for His birth of the Virgin 
 Mary, so the Holy Ghost is the Agent whereby 
 our Lord entered, and dwells in, His new Body 
 of the Catholic Church. That Spirit, then, 
 Who first gave us our Lord and to Whom we 
 owe His continual Presence, is indeed our 
 Comforter. But for His aid, we had been 
 without Christ in the world. 
 
 It is interesting to see how this is brought
 
 42 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 out in the Acts of the Apostles. JESUS Christ 
 ascends into heaven, and His going leaves the 
 disciples fearful and lonely. They go back to 
 Jerusalem and lock all the doors. Then at Pen- 
 tecost, signed by the rocking of the house, and 
 the fire and the wind, that Divine Spirit comes 
 of whom they have been advertised. Instantly 
 they are changed. They go out to witness, 
 burning words on their tongues, power in their 
 hands, joy on their faces. And when the people 
 question them, when they gaze with awe on 
 their faces, what is the secret that those apostles 
 confess ? By the name of JESUS doth this man 
 stand before you whole. And people took know- 
 ledge of them that they had been with JESUS. The 
 coming of the Spirit brought JESUS back to them. 
 Well then was He named the Comforter ! 
 
 They were beautiful words, then, of our Lord : 
 Howbeit, when He the Spirit of Truth is come . . . 
 He shall not speak Himself . . . He shall glorify 
 Me, and they were literally fulfilled. The Book of 
 the Acts has been called the Acts of the Holy 
 Ghost, but if so, nothing could show more plainly 
 the relation of those two Divine Persons. At 
 every turn we read, full of the Holy Ghost, or by the 
 Spirit, or the Holy Ghost fell on them, but always 
 as a kind of interjection ; the end of the story is, 
 I see . . . the Son of Man, or Preached unto him 
 JESUS, or Then remembered I the word of the 
 Lord. The Spirit never speaks of Himself. He
 
 THE COMFORTER 43 
 
 always points to JESUS. It is extraordinarily 
 beautiful. 
 
 Now the reverse of the picture is shown us in 
 the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. 
 There it is not so much " in the Spirit JESUS," 
 but "in Christ JESUS the Spirit." In Christ 
 JESUS, the Spirit hath made me free, shall quicken 
 your mortal bodies, helpeth our infirmities, and so 
 on. It is all one picture. The Holy Spirit 
 descends on the Body, and it becomes at once 
 instinct with the life and power of JESUS. It is 
 His fulness. Therefore in Him in, that is to 
 say, the Body which is He the individual finds 
 himself under the control of the Divine Spirit. 
 And if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, 
 he is none of His. 
 
 The seventh chapter of St. Paul's epistle, then, 
 puts finely the conflict that arises in the indi- 
 vidual soul. Any one of us outside the Church 
 is under a hard law. The Law of God, the 
 natural law, holds true ; excess shall be punished : 
 Thou shalt not covet. But ah ! how we covet ! 
 The very thing that we know is against the Law, 
 that we wish to do. You can see it in heathen- 
 ism every day, and there is small hope of escape 
 for the heathen man. But we enter the Body 
 of Christ. Instantly by the Body of Christ we 
 become dead to the Law freed from it that we 
 should be married to another, even to Him that is 
 raised from the dead. Henceforth a new spirit
 
 44 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 enters into us, the Spirit of the Body of JESUS. 
 Given full control, that Spirit will supersede our 
 old passions, and become a new passion for 
 righteousness such as we see in the lives of the 
 saints, and such as men saw in the Son of Mary. 
 We are dead then to the Law. The old Thou 
 shalt not does not matter to us : we do not want 
 the thing it forbids. Thou shalt alone matters 
 to us now Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
 all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself. 
 
 And yet, even to a St. Paul, what I hate, that I 
 do. For I delight in the law of God after the 
 inward man, but I see another, warring, and bring- 
 ing me into captivity. . . . 
 
 Now what is the escape from this? Unques- 
 tionably, humanly speaking, it is for the soul to 
 assert the truth of Eom. vii. 17 : It is no more 
 I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. People 
 are sometimes frightened of that text, and indeed 
 it has led to the excesses of Antinomianism in 
 the history of the Church. But every truth 
 has been abused, and the remedy does not lie in 
 forgetting the truth. And the truth is that the 
 devil will blind our eyes to the fact the solid, 
 unalterable fact, which, acted upon, means life 
 the fact, that is, that the Holy Spirit is within 
 us, and that we have an inner man who does 
 delight in the Law of God. Baptism is not for 
 nothing. There is an inner man, perhaps the 
 subconscious self of the Psychologists, in every
 
 THE COMFORTER 45 
 
 Christian that is "born again" after the Spirit. 
 Satan will try to din into our outward ears that 
 our very true self is not there at all ; but it is one 
 of his lies, and the first step to conquest is to nail 
 it well, in this case, to the Cross. 
 
 Here, then, is a spiritual exercise for the heavy- 
 laden. Go into church, and kneel down, and read 
 over Rom. viii. 35-39, and ask yourself if that 
 is not, at deep bottom, the cry of your own heart. 
 And then get up and praise God the Holy Ghost, 
 the Comforter.
 
 XI 
 
 THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS 
 
 (Si. MATTHEW xi. 28-30) 
 
 pOKPUS CHRISTI and the Feast of the Sacred 
 ^ Heart, these are both commemorations that 
 are finding increasing recognition among our- 
 selves. I do not know if there were any deliberate 
 intention in the placing of them so close together, 
 but if so, it was well done. Only a Heart so 
 loving and so tender as that of JESUS Christ could 
 have devised that adorable mystery of love and 
 tenderness that we call the Blessed Sacrament. 
 
 " / am meek and lowly of Heart true, most 
 lowly JESUS, for Thou wouldest not otherwise 
 condescend to the Sacrament of the Altar. Thou 
 wouldest not otherwise suffer it to be possible still 
 for men to mishandle Thee, knowing not what 
 they do, or for men to reject Thee, because Thou 
 art not what they expect Thee to be. Nor 
 wouldest Thou otherwise care enough for me as 
 to enter daily a place more unfitted for Thee than 
 even Bethlehem's stable." 
 
 But let us think more particularly of the latter 
 46
 
 THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS 47 
 
 Feast. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is a thing 
 we little understand for the most part, and the 
 majority of us are offended by the images and 
 pictures that piety makes to express this devotion. 
 Off-hand, English Churchmen are inclined to say 
 that it is Eoman Catholic, and to let it go at that. 
 
 Now if one could only consider it quietly, this 
 indicates a singular frame of mind. In the first 
 place, I notice that it is a frame of mind peculiarly 
 remote from that of early Christendom. True, 
 devotion to the Sacred Heart may be a " late " 
 cult as late as the Eeformation, but before that 
 there was an equally tender devotion to the Five 
 Wounds, or the Sacred Face, or the Infant JESUS. 
 Moreover, there is a great deal more about the 
 Sacred Heart in mediaeval devotion than one 
 might perhaps expect to find. 
 
 Secondly, I notice that it is a peculiarly over- 
 bearing frame of mind. There is no sort of 
 question that Our Lord had a human Heart that 
 was pierced by love and anguish (and not only on 
 Calvary), and even the Black Rubric assures us 
 that that Heart is in heaven. Moreover, He 
 Himself condescended to the colloquialism of such 
 phraseology as " a tender heart " ; and therefore it 
 is wrong that we should be discontented with 
 those who still find help in such language, and 
 also are inclined to picture a profoundly real 
 spiritual fact in a (to us) almost absurd image. 
 
 I venture to think, then, that it all points to a
 
 48 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 salient fact about our Church life as a whole, 
 which is this, that we have lost a simple faith, or 
 better still, faith and simplicity. 
 
 Faith. The secret of devotion to the physical 
 person of JESUS is nothing but this. The English- 
 man is the tenderest person in the world to physical 
 pain in others, and he is just as shameless about 
 it in the trenches as the Frenchman. But the 
 physical pain of JESUS Christ leaves him untouched 
 to an extraordinary degree. But it leaves him 
 not quite unmoved either. A priest friend of 
 mine writes of taking a party of Tommies to see 
 a strangely-preserved and lifelike crucifix in a 
 Belgian ruined church. The men, he said, stood 
 about and looked uncomfortable. The moment 
 they were outside they were overwhelmingly 
 merry, and every one of the party, he added, had 
 been to him secretly since, for a talk about it. 
 Why ? I think it is difficult to escape from the 
 conclusion our Saviour is not quite real to 
 them ; but what I feel so much is that He is not 
 quite real to so many of us. That wounded 
 Heart ! In truth, in literal, actual fact, it beat so 
 slowly down the Via Dolorosa ; it throbbed, it 
 anguished, as they nailed Him to the Tree; it 
 was pierced by the lance for me. The image is 
 crude ? Maybe, but it is not for me to say so 
 who know that it is as true a picture as can be 
 made of what took place for me. 
 
 Simplicity. " Of what took place," I wrote,
 
 THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS 49 
 
 But is it past ? The actual Cross and Spear, 
 yes, but the anguish of that Sacred Heart, is it 
 past ? This is where simplicity comes in. " He 
 ascended into heaven, and sat down on the right 
 hand of God, the Father Almighty ; from thence 
 He shall come to judge the quick and the dead." 
 True, infinitely true, but your little child knows 
 more. " Yes, but, Mummy, He's just the same, 
 isn't He, underneath the Crown and all the 
 Angels ? " so I heard that a little child put it. 
 And yet we teach children to say, "Pity rny 
 simplicity " ! It is not the child, surely, that the 
 Father pities ! Francis Thompson expressed better 
 what the Father thinks, in his prayer about the 
 Infant JESUS : 
 
 And He will smile that children's tongue 
 Has not changed since Thou wast young ! 
 
 No. There is a story of Coulson Kernahan 
 somewhere in which the world is surprised to find 
 that God on His Throne was not the remote and 
 unmoved Potentate they had imagined. But I 
 cannot understand how the worshippers of JESUS 
 should be so surprised. / know in Whom I have 
 believed. I know that every sin of mine is as 
 another stab into that Sacred Heart. I know 
 that every joy of mine brings a smile to that 
 Sacred Face. I know that every ambition of 
 mine is to tell the love and minister the Blood 
 that wells, drop by drop, from that Sacred Heart. 
 4
 
 50 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 And I know that I am very tender with those 
 poor images. Child of mine should love one, and 
 I wish I too were more of a child. 
 
 But what about Theology ? Well, in its youth, 
 Catholic Theology learned not to try to pour the 
 sea into a child's hole in the sand. As it grew a 
 bit older, it found that it had a great deal to learn 
 from devotion. Somewhere about middle age, it 
 discovered the danger of attempting to define too 
 closely the mysteries of God. And so to-day it 
 does its honest duty when, on the one hand, it 
 insists that I recite my three Creeds with single- 
 ness of mind, and on the other, permits me to 
 love, very tenderly, the sacred Heart of JESUS.
 
 XII 
 
 SAINTS PETER AND PAUL 
 
 "Let us set before our eyes the good Apostles, the greatest 
 and most righteous pillars of the Church." ST. CLEMENT OK 
 ROME. 
 
 (Sx. LUKE ix. 23-25) 
 
 I WANT to make a personal confession about 
 this chapter, for it has been suggested to me 
 in a way that would scarcely have been possible 
 before the War. And the way was as follows : 
 
 I sat down at my desk, pen in hand, and as I 
 did so glanced at the Kalendar before me. June 
 29, it read, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. 
 So I said to myself with confidence that I would 
 write about those Saints. I headed a paper with 
 St. Clement's words at once, and then I sat back 
 for an inspiration. But an inspiration would not 
 come. My thought wandered off in one direction, 
 it is true, but it did not seem satisfactory. And 
 so I waited an hour or more, 
 
 Then my normal work claimed me : it was 
 time to start on a week's round of out-station 
 visiting. As I often do, I wrapped up my bread 
 and cheese (to be absolutely honest) in copies of
 
 52 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 the Literary Supplement of The Times, which is 
 admirable and condensed reading on the out- 
 stations. And so it came about that that 
 night my meditation on Peter and Paul was 
 supplied. 
 
 I found myself with the issue of the 28th of 
 December, and with a leader headed " A National 
 Lent." And as I read, I wondered, until in the 
 end I put it down, to thank God that such a 
 leader in such a paper should have become 
 possible. 
 
 The writer began by pointing out that nothing 
 is stranger in the nature of men than their 
 willingness to sacrifice their lives compared with 
 their unwillingness to sacrifice other things. A 
 father will heroically give up his son, but he 
 finds it all but impossible to give up his whisky. 
 It is harder for the nation to give up its luxuries, 
 indulgencies, elegancies, than it is for it to give 
 up 5,000,000 of its men. And the reason is that 
 it is easier to make one great act of renuncia- 
 tion like a soldier, like a monk and step out 
 into the new life, than it is to renounce day by 
 day our whole world of conventionalities. 
 
 But the writer goes on to show that a second 
 difficulty in such sacrifice is that we do not want 
 to renounce our conventionalities, we do not want 
 our freedom. " Lights and wine, furs and silks, 
 ease and swiftness of travel, the quiet deference 
 paid to the rich everywhere ; the gloss, the high
 
 SAINTS PETER AND PAUL 53 
 
 finish and delicacy of all our possessions, the 
 smoothness and precision and spaciousness of our 
 homes : all these things make a heaven of this 
 world." And freedom means "discomfort in a 
 world where men aim at comfort above all things ; 
 it means oddity where they made it a point of 
 honour not to be odd; it looks like a proof of 
 worldly failure where they long for the praise of 
 worldly success." And so we had quieted our 
 instincts and deadened our souls until we had 
 grown so used to the old life that " we did not 
 know it had to be paid for." 
 
 Well, we know now that it has to be paid for. 
 And why ? because we realise the unity of the 
 nation. We used, for example, to defend our 
 luxuries on the ground that they gave employ- 
 ment ; but the nation cannot now afford that 
 labour. Every individual has got to standardise 
 himself and the nation; and my writer quotes 
 a British Minister " It is not what a nation 
 gains, it is what a nation gives that makes it 
 great." 
 
 Every individual, too, has to ask what was 
 the honour and the glory of the nation in the 
 past, and what it will be in the future. And 
 Past and Future are seen to mean not " that 
 warm, well-finished life of worldly success, but 
 the labour and sweat of great deeds, and the 
 solitary passion of great thoughts ; not pleasure, 
 but the high quality of joy or of sorrow; not
 
 54 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 prettiness, but the fierce austerity of beauty ; not 
 the palaces, but the cottages and village churches 
 of the past." 
 
 " And they mean more of all these things to be, 
 when we have leisure to make our purged country 
 worthy of all those who died for it." 
 
 So, says my writer, the great lesson is that 
 " only through austerity can men come to joy and 
 beauty." We had forgotten that. "Austerity 
 meant nothing to us except the lack of that 
 which we wanted ; and we wanted all we could 
 get." "The world of the rich (before the War) 
 became more and more one huge ugly toyshop 
 and nursery, littered with novel trash that quickly 
 lost its novelty ; and for the poor there were only 
 imitations of that trash, uglier still." 
 
 " So " and this is how he concludes " think 
 what Christmas meant to us before the War. It 
 meant shops crowded and houses littered with 
 glittering trash that we bought and gave to each 
 other as if we were hypnotised. No one wished to 
 buy it, and no one wished to make it ; yet it was 
 bought as mechanically as it was made. Think 
 of our restaurant dinners with their noisy bands ; 
 and then think of the first Christmas: the 
 shepherds startled by music in the night, the 
 Wise Men travelling far, and the birth that was 
 to change the world among the beasts in the 
 stable. There was a deeper unfaith in our
 
 SAINTS PETER AND PAUL 55 
 
 manner of celebrating that than any disbelief in 
 the story. 
 
 "We had forgotten what the story meant, 
 forgotten the humble piercing beauty of it and 
 the truth that all beauty which pierces to the 
 heart is born in humility. Our ignorant fore- 
 fathers knew that well enough and had the secret 
 of that beauty ; they lacked our science and all 
 the trash it gives us, but they had the science to 
 build the churches like heaven and to make 
 hymns that angels might sing. 
 
 " We have lost the power of making songs like 
 that we do not even sing them; and we shall 
 not recover the power except through austerity 
 not for the sake of winning the War, but for the 
 sake of brotherhood, that there may be no more 
 leading into captivity in our streets ; for the sake 
 of beauty, that it may be shared and understood 
 of all; for the sake of God, that we may no 
 no longer hide the light of His countenance 
 from us." 
 
 Do you wonder that when I read that, in my 
 rondhavel on a slope of the Malutis by the light 
 of a candle in an old sardine tin, I wondered ? It 
 was the exact answer to my musings over the 
 day of Saints Peter and Paul. Why is it, I had 
 been asking myself, that their very names conjure 
 up a vision of a kind of fabulous age of Faith ? 
 They taught " righteousness unto the whole
 
 56 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 world"; they turned it upside down; their 
 heroism, their valour, their love glow like a glory 
 in the Past. But why iu the Past ? Why not 
 such saintship now ? The same Lord, the same 
 faith, and after all very much the same world, 
 but why not the same enthusiasm and heroic joy ? 
 What is the matter with us all that Peter and 
 Paul should seem a golden dream ? 
 
 And I got my answer. Freedom for saintship 
 like that means " oddity where they make it a 
 point of honour not to be odd " how the words 
 bite in ! It means not an individual love of that 
 " warm well-finished life of worldly success," but 
 " the labour and sweat of great deeds and the 
 solitary passion of great thoughts " how cruelly 
 true the indictment is ! And " power through 
 austerity," not for the sake of winning the War, 
 but " for the sake of brotherhood and for the sake 
 of God" that is the secret of Peter and Paul 
 and of those grand days of Rome. And it is the 
 Literary Times that preaches the sermon to a 
 congregation of 50,000 subscribers with the words 
 of Mr. Lloyd George for its text. 
 
 But how is it that it is so ! The Church in 
 England has preached Lent for 1500 years, but 
 it takes a Chancellor of the Exchequer to institute 
 it. He that findeth his life shall lose it ; he that 
 loseth his life shall find it. " It is not what a 
 nation gains, it is what a nation gives, that makes 
 it great." What are these but the same words ?
 
 SAINTS PETER AND PAUL 57 
 
 but it is Mr. Lloyd George and not the Lord JESUS 
 Christ who moves the press to quotation. And it is 
 the battle of the Kaiser and not the battle of the 
 Lord that calls men to such apostleship to-day. 
 Not quite true ? Maybe not, but there is enough 
 of truth in it to urge on us the advice of Clement 
 of which I thought before I up-saddled for the 
 Malutis.
 
 XIII 
 
 THE RELIGION OF COMMON THINGS 
 
 (Sr. MATTHEW vi. 26-34) 
 
 THE Christian Year falls into two clear halves 
 as I suppose most preachers know acutely 
 Advent to Trinity, and the long Trinity season. 
 The first offers us a round of feasts presenting the 
 dogmas of the Faith ; the second is, on the whole, 
 a rather colourless half-year of which one tends to 
 get a little tired. And yet it is not colourless, for 
 the Church wears green an interesting symbol. 
 I am not sure that green is not more significant 
 than even the martyr's royal red, or flaming white 
 and gold, or the Church's own majestic purple, for 
 it stands for the common things. It is the basal 
 colour of the mantle that God wears in this world 
 that and blue, which is another story, perhaps 
 not so fanciful as one might think either. But 
 let us consider green, the colour of common 
 things. 
 
 Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of 
 common things, the religion of everyday life, and it 
 
 loses its power and its glory the moment that that is 
 
 58
 
 THE RELIGION OF COMMON THINGS 59 
 
 forgotten. Treat religion as one only of the many 
 activities of life ; regard the holy day of religion 
 as exclusively Sunday ; magnify the festivals and 
 forget the daily sacrifice ; and Religion becomes 
 a religion. And I very much doubt if a religion 
 is worth having at all. 
 
 To begin with, this transmutation of the value 
 of common things was the unique characteristic 
 of the Christianity of the first centuries. The 
 Sermon on the Mount is sometimes spoken of as 
 if it were startling because preached as an attack 
 on sacramental religion, but it can only be so 
 regarded if it is lifted clean out of its own atmo- 
 sphere. The Jew, to whom it was preached, was 
 a sacramentalist if ever there was one, and so 
 were the early Christians, with their daily Break- 
 ing of the Bread, their insistence on Baptism and 
 the Laying on of Hands, their use of what were 
 perilously near relics (Acts xix. 12), and their 
 manifold signing with the Cross (Tertullian) ; but 
 the Jew had forgotten the common things God's 
 Fatherhood, Man's Brotherhood, and the religion 
 of common sense. It was these that the Sermon 
 on the Mount insisted upon, and it was the 
 practical acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount 
 that was the strength of early Christianity. 
 
 It was for this reason that the Roman world 
 found it so impossible to understand the Christian 
 and the Christian martyr and there were few of 
 the first that were not of the second. The world
 
 60 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 was too complex to understand the simplicity of 
 Christianity. The man who was content with the 
 vocation ivlierein he was called, and therein abode 
 with God\ the man who took no particularly 
 (motions thought even when the next day might 
 bring him to Nero's palace gardens ; the man who 
 frankly flung away the earth because he considered 
 it unreal by the side of heaven ; and still more 
 the man or it might be the girl in her teens 
 who could see nothing but the simplest possible 
 course of conduct when those little difficulties of 
 life arose which are caused by the clashing of the 
 laws of God and the conventions of men ; such a 
 man was more than the world could understand. 
 He was too simple to understand its wisdom, and 
 it was too wise to understand his simplicity. The 
 Christian was like the Boy JESUS in the Temple, 
 and the world was like the circle of old men. 
 JESUS had been too artless for them. The Father's 
 Home it was the last thing in the world that 
 they would have called the Temple, and it was 
 the one title that settled absolutely what you 
 were to do both inside and out of it. 
 
 So the world hated Him, and them too. But it 
 does not hate us much, for we have got mixed up 
 with its own old round of complications and we 
 fuss about happily together ! It works out in 
 everything. 
 
 Suppose, for example, we just went back simply 
 to that Apostolic daily Breaking of Bread, what
 
 THE RELIGION OF COMMON THINGS 61 
 
 a splendid beginning that would be ! And why 
 not ? Awkward breakfast hours, trouble with 
 servants, a High Church custom there you are 
 at once ! But is the life more than meat, or not ? 
 And what does it matter whose a custom is if it 
 is good ? And is there any one who would not 
 admit that if the vast majority of Church people 
 started to make a daily practice of that half-hour 
 with the risen Lord in our neglected churches, it 
 would simply and absolutely revolutionise our- 
 selves and our world ? 
 
 Ought one to call that Service a " common 
 thing " ? One finds oneself asking that, which 
 exactly proves how far we have wandered away 
 from what the Church meant by the use of green ! 
 Of course it is meant to 'be a " common thing " to 
 the Christian, and with it every other practice of 
 our holy religion as common as eating and drink- 
 ing and dressing and working and loving. For it 
 was precisely these which were lifted up to, and 
 meant to be lived upon, the heavenly level by the 
 Sermon on the Mount, and these, transfigured, 
 are Christianity. Consider the lilies the sparrows. 
 . . . Glory in the green !
 
 XIV 
 
 THE PATIENCE OF GOD 
 
 (PsALM xxiii.) 
 
 mHREE of the most curious of the Old Testament 
 -L books are Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, 
 yet these three do more to bring before our minds 
 the essential value of the Old Testament than 
 even those lessons from the Kings and Chronicles 
 that are so often attacked in these days. That 
 an early and probably polytheistic drama, a 
 collection of extremely human and cynical saws, 
 and a writing that is, at the best, a page of hard 
 philosophy bred of the fatalistic East, should still 
 find a place in the joyous and youthful Christian 
 Church, is an amazing thing. Their secret ought 
 to illumine, as by a lightning-flash, the method of 
 the dealings of God with men, and it is only 
 another illustration of the muddle of our minds 
 that it does not. 
 
 The old view of inspiration and of course no 
 view of inspiration has ever been promulgated 
 authoritatively by the Church was that Almighty 
 
 God laid controlling fingers on the hands of writers 
 
 62
 
 THE PATIENCE OF GOD 63 
 
 to such an extent that He alone was responsible, 
 not only for the theology, but also for the geo- 
 graphy and history and psychology of what was 
 written. As a consequence, the writer might 
 awake, as from a trance, and scan what he him- 
 self had written, uncomprehendingly ; and the 
 reader, no matter how long after, might count on 
 every word, and even on the absence of words, as 
 nothing less than the work of the finger of God. 
 
 This view always led to difficulties difficulties, 
 for example, in any attempt to reconcile the 
 known character of God with the hideous mas- 
 sacres, outrivalling either German or Turk of 
 our times, apparently ordered by Him in Pales- 
 tine ; but these difficulties became plainly insur- 
 mountable the moment a detached and fearless 
 criticism was brought to bear on the Old Testa- 
 ment. It is, for instance, entirely beyond doubt 
 that the history of Kings does not square with 
 that of Chronicles, and that Jephthah had a 
 markedly different religious faith from that of 
 the writer of Isaiah liii. ; or that, as we have said, 
 there is a book or two in the " Divine Library " 
 which, at surface value, is hardly divine at all. 
 
 People are still making these discoveries and 
 making them with pain. And yet, at the other 
 end of the scale, men for whom the Old Testament 
 had become, at best, an enigma, are awakening to 
 the marvel of the divine picture therein revealed. 
 
 It is the infinite and tender patience of God
 
 64 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 that glows like a hidden jewel in the books that 
 we name the Old Testament. The Divine Will 
 had brought into being a creation of which the 
 ultimate development is not even yet in sight, 
 and a creation of such delicate balance that 
 nothing short of the Divine could have hoped 
 to control its evolution without destroying its 
 identity. As we now see, the end in view was to 
 sum up all things in Christ ; but to bring such a 
 being as man to that inclusion, to prepare him, 
 that is, that he might ultimately attain to his 
 triumphant destiny as a Member of the Body of 
 Christ, that was an accomplishment all but 
 beyond imagination. Take the lowest Australian 
 aboriginal, and conceive what it meant that his 
 will and receptive powers should be so guided 
 that he might become, at last, a St. Mary or a 
 St. John! 
 
 We tend to lose sight of the fact that you 
 cannot produce the highest in man by a display of 
 fireworks or conjuring. The training of a child is, 
 of course, a simple illustration. An Edison or a 
 Pasteur or a Thomas a Kempis is the product of 
 generations, and of generations of teachers who 
 have successively toiled at the raising of the 
 human receptive capacity and at the development 
 of environment. Each must labour, blind to the 
 ultimate achievement, ignorant of what has been 
 done, content to see nothing apparently accom- 
 plished, and yet whole-heartedly in his generation.
 
 THE PATIENCE OF GOD 65 
 
 And as for the control of that whole vast education, 
 it is infinitely beyond finite ability at all. 
 
 This, then, is what Almighty God has done ; 
 this is the great part that He has reserved to 
 Himself in the world scheme ; and this process is 
 what is shown us in the Old Testament. No one 
 book reveals it wholly ; each makes contribution 
 to it ; and the inspiration of the Bible lies largely 
 in the collecting of these inimitable evidences. 
 
 There is the drama of old Job. True, it is not 
 Job who matters ; the value of the book lies in 
 the evidence it offers of primitive man at grips 
 with the elemental problem of pain, and of the 
 method God used to deal with him. Not by some 
 supernatural proclamation of a philosophy utterly 
 beyond his comprehension, nor by the vision of an 
 end which would have been meaningless to him, 
 nor by delphic utterance or material auguries by 
 which man feebly supposed, often enough, that 
 God would work, did the Father of Heaven deal 
 with His children ; but by the age-long presenta- 
 tion of mighty natural workings which first 
 riveted the attention of, and then beat out their 
 meaning to, the sons of men. The Jew seems 
 first to have learnt the lesson. These are but the 
 outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do 
 we hear of Him / . . . Though He slay me, yet will 
 I trust in Him. And so Wisdom was justified of 
 her children. 
 
 It comes to this, then : that we should abandon 
 5
 
 66 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 the half of our worries in regard to the Old Testa- 
 ment. The old questions of Jonah and his whale, 
 and Balaam and his ass, are not worth the answer- 
 ing. Have it the way you think the evidence 
 points, and leave it at that ! Their value does 
 not lie there at all. But when I see at work the 
 minds of the men of that age leading to the writ- 
 ing of such narratives ; and when, as I compare 
 the massed evidence, I watch the great Master 
 throwing down His problems and leading on from 
 answer to answer, not in a cycle of days or of 
 individuals, but of seons and of nations, I can but 
 bow my head in wonder and awe, and whisper to 
 myself again the Shepherd Psalm.
 
 XV 
 THE HOLY NAME 
 
 (PHILIPPIANS ii. 9-11) 
 
 IT is a happy thing that the Feasts of the Holy 
 Name and the Transfiguration come so close 
 together, for nothing has ever been so transfigured 
 as that Name. Whispered in the holy purity of 
 Mary's heart by the angel, it came to be thundered 
 in the cynical Eoman's courtyard by a blood- 
 maddened mob of murderers, the Name that now 
 is above every name, and in which even things in 
 heaven bow. And these two feasts together make 
 up a kind of lesser feast of the Incarnation, a 
 feast to emphasise the surpassing majesty of the 
 Incarnation as Christmas emphasises its humility. 
 It is a thing to wonder at, this sacred Name. 
 Mr. Lowes Dickenson, in the Hibbert Journal, 
 thought so when he wrote : " What ! the Lord of 
 the stars and of the tiger to be called by a pet 
 name ! " Exactly. We glory in it. We even 
 trade upon it : 
 
 Little JESUS, wast Thou shy 
 
 Once, and just as small as I ? 
 67
 
 68 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 And we do well, for that Sacred Name is the 
 safeguard of our humanity, the eternal promise of 
 what that humanity can and may be. Some- 
 where, in that realm beyond our sight and all but 
 beyond our thought that we glibly call Heaven, 
 stands one Who still turns fHis Head at the echo 
 of a Name as once when called from work or play 
 by Mary in Nazareth. And He is the same as 
 that dim God Whom early Israel feared to name 
 at all, the God for Whom " I AM "bare Exist- 
 ence was alone fitting style. How soon one 
 reaches the old antithesis ! Such talk must be the 
 one truth in all the world worth knowing, or the 
 most monstrous of lies. 
 
 Christianity very early pointed out the result 
 of faith in a named God. Marriage became a 
 sacrament, and woman the one thing she had not 
 been before, holy ; the dead body a thing to 
 reverence, the burial-ground God's Acre ; and the 
 whole material world neither any longer a phan- 
 tom, nor, on the other hand, the only real, but 
 something infinitely more wonderful, a medium 
 for the expressioning of God. Call His Name 
 JESUS ! Then conception and birth had nothing 
 in them derogatory even to God ; then the body 
 and humanity was not essentially imperfect ; then 
 matter had some part to play even in eternity. 
 And the day of transfiguration showed the 
 possible accomplished. 
 
 Now I think that this is one of the Christian
 
 THE?HOLY NAME 69 
 
 standpoints that we shall have to fight hard to 
 establish again after the War. War I feel, at 
 any rate is not evil in itself, but it is a medicine 
 dangerous just because so powerful. War may 
 teach tenderness, the beauty of vicarious suffering, 
 the wonder of self-sacrifice, the transfiguration of 
 the flesh by the spirit ; but it may not. And it 
 does not seem to have taught us that yet. The 
 essential holiness of woman have the London 
 streets learnt that ? And this magnificent response 
 of women to the new call for labour, do we feel as 
 we look at it that this is altogether the sacrifice 
 of devoted love which will but purify the women - 
 hood of the Empire ? 
 
 If not, the reason, surely, is not far to seek. 
 For years, before the War, the glory of humanity 
 had been slipping away. " Modern conditions " 
 forced it on ; modern Christianity was too feeble 
 to stay it. Modern Democracy swung us away in 
 its strength from simple things, and understand- 
 able problems, and our homes. Glitter, dash, 
 show, pride what bubbles they are, and how we 
 fought for them ! And you cannot get away from 
 it that the Church did little or nothing to stay the 
 tide. Convention and formality laid cold hands on 
 the quick-beating heart of its humanity. 
 
 What one tends to ask in despair sometimes is 
 this : Is there any remedy ? But surely there is. 
 Not harder than our task was the task of the 
 Apostles, but we must return to their methods.
 
 70 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 There must be, not the attempt to force things 
 from above, but the honest endeavour to leaven 
 from below. Acts of the Senate did not make 
 marriage sacramental, and Acts of Parliament will 
 not make it so again. That is the error of 
 Democracy : to suppose that the Millennium can 
 be brought in by a Committee. Mr. Chesterton 
 wrote of the Chinese Revolution that he was not 
 surprised to hear that China[was a Republic any 
 caucus strong enough could do that ; but he would 
 be surprised to hear that the Chinaman had 
 become a republican. 
 
 The Church, then, alone can do it. She wields 
 a power mightier than the State, but she has for- 
 gotten how to use it. Let us begin with our 
 churches. Let people learn to love them and pray 
 in them, learn to find them sanctuaries and homes, 
 learn that in them, at least, they will find things 
 simple and honest and true. Let us forget to 
 worry about numbers : a little one soon becomes 
 a host in the hands of God. And just as in the 
 Old Testament the " Name " of God stood for the 
 sum of His characteristics, so let us restore the 
 " Name " of JESUS to our churches that our world 
 may be again transfigured by its power.
 
 XVI 
 
 . KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 
 
 (1 COBINTHIANS xiii.) 
 
 I DOUBT if any text in the whole of the Bible 
 has been more misrepresented than one of 
 the shortest and simplest and best known of all. 
 Thou God seest me : what does that mean to most 
 of us ? It would be interesting to know if there 
 are any who do not instinctively recall their 
 childhood when they hear the words, and couple 
 them with a sense of fear. My own first remem- 
 brance is the story of a little girl who would steal 
 the sugar, but who was deterred therefrom, and 
 finally converted, by the device of her mother in 
 writing out this text and pinning it up inside the 
 cupboard over the sugar basin ! So far as I can 
 make out, that experience is all but universal. 
 The text is read as a reminder that the great 
 Commandant is always around, and that in con- 
 sequence the soldier should look out not to break 
 the military rules. 
 
 Yet Hagar had no such thought in mind when 
 
 she said these words. An outcast, weary, despair- 
 71
 
 72 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 ing, aching in body, scorched by the desert sun, 
 and in agony for her unborn son, she felt herself de- 
 serted by God and man. Then her eye lit suddenly 
 on the Angel of the Lord. Thou God seest me, she 
 cried : Thy love has not forgotten me. The words 
 are in no other spirit than that of the 23rd Psalm. 
 Thou art my Shepherd; Thou leadest me beside 
 the still waters ; Thy rod and Thy staff they com- 
 fort me. 
 
 Now, if there be one supreme truth in the 
 religion of Christ, it is this : God never looks 
 upon men other than in love. He cannot, for 
 God is love. He first loved us. He does not 
 require anything to induce Him to love us, neither 
 the burnt-offerings of the Old Testament, nor 
 even the Lamb of God of the new. He always 
 has loved. He always will love, and nothing at 
 all that men can do will make Him not love. 
 His eyes are upon us from birth to death and 
 beyond, and upon us in love. 
 
 But what about sin ? Ah ! sin brings sorrow 
 into the loving eyes of God, often pity, sometimes 
 just wrath, but neither sorrow nor pity nor wrath 
 that are incompatible with love. As a matter of 
 fact, the sort of sorrow and pity and wrath that 
 we see in God, is due to His love and nothing else. 
 Even His wrath is not the anger of Allah ; it 
 is the wisdom of the Father. And the deepest 
 waters cannot quench that love. 
 
 It is this kind of love that St. Paul talks about
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 73 
 
 in his famous chapter. That is an infinitely 
 remarkable chapter. In it the Apostle dares to 
 say that a man may possibly strip himself of all 
 his possessions to feed the poor, and even give 
 his body to the flames, and yet lack true love. 
 And if so, according to St. Paul, these things are 
 nothing. That is a daring statement ! This kind 
 of love never fails : it believeth all things, hopeth 
 all things, endureth all things. It thinks no evil. 
 It is the spirit which underlies our Lord's words : 
 Give to him that asketh of you, despairing of no 
 man (B.V.). In a word, it is God's love. 
 
 Now the interesting thing is the relation of 
 knowledge to love. St. Paul says what he does 
 say in order to insist upon that. Prophecy, 
 Tongues, Knowledge, shall vanish away. We 
 prophesy in part, and we know in part. Yet, 
 following after love, the greatest spiritual gift that 
 we shall desire is knowledge a wonderful saying. 
 And why ? Surely because to love is to desire 
 for union with the beloved, and hence passionately 
 to seek the road to union, which is knowledge. 
 If ye love Me, keep My Commandments. He that 
 doeth the Will, shall know of the doctrine. This 
 kind of love, then, is the royal road to knowledge. 
 Let us plagiarise the Father ! " I love that I may 
 know ; I do not know that I may love." 
 
 Now I believe that this is the key to religion. 
 Far too often love is accepted as a substitute for 
 knowledge. How often we hear it expressed or
 
 74 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 understood : It does not matter what his beliefs 
 are ; he has a genuine love for souls ! Or : Don't 
 worry about dogmas ; get him to love God and 
 keep His Commandments ! Or (on the other 
 hand) : Preach the faith, and don't bother about 
 the rest ! All these make the supreme mistake ; 
 they presume a divorce between knowledge and 
 love. 
 
 There is no better illustration of this than the 
 matter of the Creeds. The credal words began 
 by being a declaration of love, and the love that 
 bade a man use them, bade him sign and seal 
 them with his blood. Piece by piece the faith 
 was built up, not in order to wreck some other 
 theological proposition, not to straiten the already 
 strait way of life, above all not out of a too curious 
 theological imagination; but it was built up by 
 men who had so passionate a love towards the 
 Person of the Kedeemer, that they could not but 
 safeguard His Name in the world. The Creeds 
 were songs sung by hearts aflame with love that 
 the Christian Army might go forward as one man 
 to the battle. 
 
 It is for us, then, to get this thing clear for 
 ourselves. Let us remind ourselves that the 
 Knowledge of God is not an almost unnecessary 
 by-product of Christianity, but that it is part of 
 the Will of the Father for us, and no less import- 
 ant than sound morality. Let us base our attacks 
 upon heresy on our love to the Father, and not
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 75 
 
 upon our jealousy of our brethren. And let us 
 make that plain, as we can make it plain, both in 
 life and teaching. 
 
 And remember this, God so loved that He gave. 
 Christ died on the cross a martyr for the truth 
 about the Father, in order to make exhibition of 
 God's love, and in order to make possible a re- 
 conciliation between God and man. And this 
 thing is a parable to us. Clinging to true faith 
 because we love God too much to trifle with it, 
 but demonstrating by our passionate service our 
 love of the brethren, we too might bring about 
 that reconciliation for which our Lord Himself 
 prayed, when He said : May they be made perfect 
 in one.
 
 XVII 
 
 "LIKE A FLINT" 
 
 (Sr. MATTHEW xi. 7-12) 
 
 I COUNT it a good day's work, if, after a 
 battle, I have been able to say some prayers 
 with a few dying men, and perhaps to administer 
 the Blessed Sacrament once." So I heard from a 
 chaplain in Flanders this week. His letter came 
 on top of several more I had recently seen, some 
 unquotable here, all most curious documents. 
 Their general trend is : (1) This War has brought 
 no general revival of religion among our men ; 
 (2) it has shown up the incredible ignorance and 
 paganism of the great majority ; but (3) it is a 
 magnificent personal opportunity ; and (4) it has 
 taught us a lesson we dare not forget when we 
 get home, and which the Church must learn. 
 
 All these propositions seem to be open to con- 
 troversy ; but I am bound to confess, from what I 
 have seen, that I believe them. The one I chiefly 
 question is the last, for I wonder if we dare 
 attempt what follows from it. It seems to me to 
 be an easy thing to say, but a very hard thing to
 
 "LIKE A FLINT" 77 
 
 do. Like that interesting book, A Student in 
 Arms, it deals with generalities that are hard 
 to put into practice, and that may easily fritter 
 out into nothing. What then ? 
 
 Now the other day a curiously interesting thing 
 happened in camp. There was a sermon preached 
 at the usual Parade Service that set the mess 
 talking, and yet it was one of ^the simplest, and 
 one would have thought most obvious, of sermons. 
 The preacher spoke for not more than about eight 
 minutes on the contrast between John Baptist 
 and Herod. He said that Herod was the type of 
 the average man, though perhaps of the average 
 man in unusual circumstances. He was not 
 radically bad ; he was just weak on principles. 
 He could not resist his friends ; he did not know 
 when to say " No " ; he played with truths which 
 he knew to be truths. And John was not so 
 much gifted as straight-forward ; he was just the 
 man who acted quite straight on his principles. 
 
 That simple sermon provoked a great con- 
 troversy. The men said that that line of John 
 Baptist was just the one the Church did not take. 
 It shirked issues. It shirked its own problems. 
 It burked inquiries and reforms because of its 
 own divided opinions and because of its own 
 alliance with the world. It was afraid to face 
 facts. 
 
 Now one gets a little tired of hearing about the 
 mistakes of the Church that, to begin with, is a
 
 78 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 shirking of issues. "The Church" is a good 
 scapegoat. Modern society has accepted the 
 dictum, " Because my neighbour does not do his 
 duty, therefore I need not do mine," all but uni- 
 versally ; and it is one of the evils attendant on 
 our huge democratic systems that "the State" 
 or " the Church " as a rule makes an excellent 
 " neighbour." 
 
 It seems to me that the great lesson of the 
 War is that each one of us must look to himself. 
 We ourselves have got to begin by doing the thing 
 we believe to be right without respect of persons. 
 We clergy, for instance I cannot help thinking 
 that we have got to give up preaching " suitably 
 to the Church " in which we happen to be at the 
 time. I have heard a great bishop go to a strong 
 Low Church and preach an enthusiastic sermon 
 on Conversion, and go next day to a High Church 
 and preach equally enthusiastically on Confession. 
 Now no one impugns the bishop ; we all love and 
 honour him; but is it the John the Baptist 
 policy ? If one believes both those things, it is 
 plainly one's duty to preach Confession where it 
 is denied, and Conversion when it is neglected. 
 
 Of course it is not only the clergy all of us 
 habitually live in an atmosphere of mutual defer- 
 ence, both morally and dogmatically. And people 
 expect it ; it is bad form not to do it ; and the 
 consequence is no one ever hears the real truth 
 that we feel in our heart.
 
 "LIKE A FLINT" 79 
 
 The spectre before which we tremble is: 
 " What would happen if we didn't ? " which, as far 
 as one can see from the Holy Gospel, is the last 
 thing we ought to think about. It would mean, 
 probably, an entire re-arrangement of parties and 
 policies and churches. It meant for John the 
 Baptist the headman's sword, and a place among 
 the martyr princes of the Church. 
 
 For eighteen months at least after the War 
 there will be the most amazing re-arrangements 
 that the world has ever seen. The world's high- 
 ways will be crowded with an uncountable mul- 
 titude returning home. Tension will be over 
 enthusiasm at its height; discipline relaxed. 
 Every man will be taking up his old life as if it 
 were a new thing. Before one aspect of all this, 
 one literally trembles God alone knows how 
 we shall come through with it. But before the 
 immense possibilities of it, one trembles too. Out 
 of that turmoil and moral confusion a rock might 
 well be reared on which the kind of souls for 
 which Christ died might place their feet and find 
 their salvation. But it will not emerge by Acts 
 of Parliament or decisions of bishops or any 
 other act from above. It will emerge if you and 
 I can set our faces like a flint in this crisis of the 
 Kingdom to which we have been called,
 
 XVIII 
 OF THE ANGELS 
 
 (2 KINGS vi. 15-17) 
 
 FTIHE Kevised Version of Heb. i. 14, with one 
 -*- word still better rendered, gives us a very 
 remarkable statement about the angels. They 
 are said to be worshipping spirits sent forth to 
 do service for the sake of them that shall inherit 
 Salvation. Like many another text, this one is 
 packed full of thought, and we should probably 
 mostly agree that it is legitimate to develop 
 it. Angels, then, have a primary duty of wor- 
 ship, and they are sent by God upon errands 
 which, directly or indirectly, benefit Christian 
 people. 
 
 Personally, the chief difficulty about the angels 
 always seems to me to be that we see so little 
 of them. The evidence for their existence 1 take 
 to be conclusive. Making every possible allow- 
 ance, there is no sort of doubt, first, that every 
 biblical writer believed in them, and believed he 
 had sure evidence in regard to them. Secondly, 
 the experience of the Saints in all ages has only
 
 OF THE ANGELS 81 
 
 confirmed this testimony. And, thirdly, the uni- 
 versal Church, whether united or divided, has 
 never wavered in its statements, which I take 
 as an evident sign of the Spirit of Truth. For 
 instance, nothing could be more direct than our 
 own collect for St. Michael's Day. 
 
 In view of this, such questions as that of the 
 angels at Mons become purely academic : were 
 they, or were they not, definitely seen. That 
 angels there are, and that angels do God's holy 
 will on Dearth, is a proposition not affected for us 
 by the Mons incident, or any other, although it 
 is perhaps worth writing that angel incidents 
 in connection with the War seem to me to have 
 adequate witness. As with every other spiritual 
 manifestation, it is unscientific to reject such 
 witness, as is often done, on the ground that the 
 appearances were neither of the kind nor in the 
 way that we should expect, for nothing is plainer 
 than that we have not sufficient data to go upon 
 in this regard. Moreover, the more one thinks, 
 the more one is inclined not to dogmatise. It is 
 all but impossible to conceive of colour or form 
 at all in the spiritual world. The most authentic 
 angel story I know of is that of an appearance 
 to a native, who saw the angel as black and as 
 immense in size his feet on the earth, his wings 
 reaching to the sky ; and this was the more 
 remarkable because every picture of the angels 
 that the man had ever seen showed them white 
 6
 
 82 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 and of human height. More than likely angels 
 go on their earthly business either invisibly or 
 in such common guise that they are not recog- 
 nisable as angels. I should not be surprised to 
 find, one day, that I had seen far more than I 
 knew. 
 
 But all this is by the way. The real lesson 
 lies hid in Francis Thompson's great fire- 
 tipped words: 
 
 The angels keep their ancient places ; 
 Turn but a stone and start a wing ; 
 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, 
 That miss the many- splendour 'd thing. 
 
 Why ? I suggest that Hebrews gives us the 
 clue : we see little of worshipping spirits because 
 we have forgotten how to worship. 
 
 Worship does not consist in the saying or the 
 hearing of prayers, in Mass or Matins, in attend- 
 ance at Divine Service, in music or lights or 
 vestments or the absence of them, although all 
 these things may play a part in it, and Chris- 
 tian Worship without the Holy Sacrifice is, of 
 course, not Christian at all. Worship belongs 
 to the kingdom of God within you. It is of 
 the spirit, and a thing which may be beauti- 
 fully and rightly clothed in all of the things 
 mentioned above. But it is greater than any 
 of them. 
 
 Perhaps the real spirit of worship lies chiefly 
 in an attitude of expectancy. Expectancy implies
 
 OF THE ANGELS 83 
 
 faith: one is expectant of nothing unless one 
 believes it to be there. He, then, who has faith 
 in God, in His Majesty, in His omnipresence, in 
 His desire to prove Himself the Divine Lover, in 
 His royal supremacy over earth and sea and sky 
 and things seen and things not seen, and who 
 takes up that attitude of humble eager expect- 
 ancy, he it is who worships. To such a one 
 vocal prayer will at one time be helpful and at 
 another not. Kitual will have value chiefly 
 because that is the experience of the centuries 
 as to what is best done, and consequently fits 
 like a well-tried suit of clothes in which one 
 is free not to worry about clothes at all. And 
 the Holy Sacrifice occupies the unique place 
 it does in Worship, because at that time Faith 
 teaches that the Unseen is but thinly veiled 
 from us, and consequently Expectancy is at its 
 highest. 
 
 But it was on Thames banks and by Charing 
 Cross that Francis Thompson found so many of 
 his angels, and it is there we need them most. 
 Beauty is not so much without as within a man. 
 There is never grey in the sky to some people. 
 For some Eden is a myth; for others there is 
 no garden without God. Some go to church to 
 worship; others pretend that they require blue 
 sky and summer woods for the exercise; others 
 again are never not worshipping. These, curiously 
 enough, are not eager to have visible sight of the
 
 84 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 horses and chariots of fire round about ; they are 
 more eager to know the Will of God at every 
 turn and do it. And for them the angel messenger 
 waits round every corner, and their eyes con- 
 stantly behold the land that is very far off.
 
 XIX 
 
 REMEMBER . . . 
 
 (MicAH vi. 5, R.V.) 
 
 OCTOBEE, in our English Kalendar, always 
 ushers us into the reading of the Minor 
 Prophets, into, that is, some of the finest writing 
 in the Bible, however little understood. These 
 vivid little books fragments of " sermon-notes," 
 incomplete collections of sayings, rudely strung 
 together "visions" glow with passion and em- 
 ploy magnificently every artifice of the " prophet." 
 Biting sarcasm and vehement appeal both reveal 
 an intense patriotism which was nothing short of 
 a religion, and which, when it became Christian, 
 did much to make Christianity the successful 
 rival of Rome. 
 
 The Minor Prophets, of course, are over-difficult 
 for general reading, especially when that reading 
 is obliged to be without comment. The text is 
 often obscure, and an intelligible revision would 
 have to be far too drastic for it to have any hope 
 of common church use. But any one who cares 
 enough to take up the study, can very speedily 
 
 8 5
 
 86 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 find something of the very real literary, and the 
 vastly more important spiritual beauties of the 
 prophets. 
 
 Probably one of the chief things to avoid is 
 that method of reading which fixes upon some 
 half verse of pious sentiment and weaves round it 
 and into it developed Christian theology that is 
 not there at all. This not only does violence to 
 one text ; it also obscures the prophetical method 
 and meaning as a whole. The prophets have 
 certain very definite and recurrent ideas, and 
 certain equally definite methods of presentation, 
 and the reader wants to get hold of one or two 
 of these general characteristics rather than a few 
 scraps of pious sentiment. 
 
 One such noble theme is finely expressed by 
 the word that stands at the head of this chapter. 
 The function of the prophet was not even 
 primarily that of a foreteller ; primarily his duty 
 was that of interpretation. He was a man com- 
 mitted to the daring faith that God's hand never 
 leaves the world He made, and that true history 
 means nothing less than the working out of God's 
 will. The prophet therefore conceived that to 
 keep before the eyes of his countrymen the record 
 of their past, and to interpret that fact, was a 
 religious work of the utmost importance. He 
 asked no more than to be able to step into the 
 breach at some crisis, either of prosperity or 
 adversity, with some such cry as Remember from
 
 REMEMBER ... 87 
 
 Shittim unto G-ilgal \ Bemember, that is, all the 
 storied glory of God's dealing with your race, in 
 battle and in peace, from your first entry into 
 this land until the smoke of your sacrifices went 
 up from its conquered soil. Eemember that He 
 has never failed to punish and never failed to 
 reward; that He has saved again and again by 
 few as by many ; that He requires of you but 
 honesty of purpose and loyalty of heart. 
 
 The imagination is stirred as one thinks of it. 
 There was the stiff-necked forgetful race, always 
 straying to the right hand or to the left, now 
 wooed by lust of power, now afraid where, as like 
 as not, no fear was, the race with its proud kings 
 and hard-headed people and mountain-girt strong- 
 holds and (if it would) caravan and sea-borne 
 trade ; and there was the prophet, perhaps some 
 peasant dreamer from the hills, who dared to stem 
 the stream of popular movement by his old cry, 
 Lest ye forget \ 
 
 Now it would be easy to say that we want 
 more of this, but what I want particularly to 
 emphasise is that we want more of it from 
 a practical and English point of view. For a 
 hundred sermons that draw out the Divine 
 Providence in Jewish political and ecclesiastical 
 history, not one is preached doing the same for 
 English. Yet that Providence is not less over us 
 than it was over them. That is the lesson of the 
 prophets. The cry, Remember from Shittim unto
 
 88 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Oilgal, the half, that is, of the Minor Prophets, is 
 all but worthless to us when we but take it as it 
 stands. What does Shittim or Gilgal or Sinai 
 and Jericho mean to the average Tommy, and 
 what can it mean? You can doubtless force a 
 point with graphic story -telling, but the whole 
 value of such speaking, as the prophet well knew, 
 lay in the fact that the words struck a note, 
 without artifice, in the hearts of his hearers from 
 which he could go on to other things. And if we 
 would learn from the prophets, we must learn to 
 speak not of past Jewish history as of some unique 
 and sacrosanct thing, but of present history and 
 of our own past, as if it too was, as it is in truth, 
 a mirror of God. 
 
 Curiously enough the cry to Remember is not, 
 rightly interpreted, a cry to hark back to old 
 ways a kind of spiritual "crusted Toryism." 
 On the contrary, it is in this that the lost power 
 of the Jewish prophets lay, in a linked conserva- 
 tism and liberalism, in an assurance born of the 
 past to dare for the future. " Eemember the old 
 that you may brave the new ! " that was the 
 meaning of their cry ; and the meaning, too often, 
 of their lamentation was that the people allowed 
 themselves to drift on the floods of new forces, 
 whereas they should have learned from their past 
 how those same water-floods could be ridden to 
 new victory. 
 
 That, then, is our lesson. In this amazing
 
 REMEMBER ... 89 
 
 world in which we find ourselves, a world in 
 revolution, Remember from Shittim unto Gilgal. 
 Eemember that the dynamic of faith in the Lord 
 Christ has proved itself, in the past, strong enough 
 to come victorious through ages of failing faith, of 
 moral death, of political stress, of social revolution, 
 and that it can do the same again. Let Joshua 
 look back over forty years and read its lesson ! 
 Then will he set his face to the crossing of Jordan 
 " very courageous."
 
 XX 
 
 VOCATION 
 
 (CoLossiANs iv. 14 ; EPHESIANS iv. 1 ; 1 CORINTHIANS vii. 24) 
 
 ST. LUKE occupies a place apart in the New 
 Testament Church, and if it were not for 
 him, we might be tempted to view that Church 
 in a false light. It is difficult to escape, as one 
 reads the Acts and the Epistles, from a sense 
 that that age was so remote from our own that it 
 affords an historic study rather than a practical 
 help. Those in the inner circle of Church life 
 may not feel this, but that is due to the fact that, 
 as a rule, there is a good deal of artificiality 
 about our position. The average man does not 
 feel much affinity with the age of Paul. Christi- 
 anity seems to him to have changed since then. 
 Then it was heroic, miraculous, alive to an almost 
 legendary degree ; now it is but what is it to the 
 average man ? You cannot escape from it that, 
 whatever it is, it is something in which he feels he 
 has no place. 
 
 In truth, I suppose, there was a side of Chris- 
 tianity that w r as not what is commonly called 
 90
 
 VOCATION 91 
 
 heroic and miraculous then, and there is a side of 
 Christianity which is both heroic and miraculous 
 now; it is our view-point that is wrong. It is 
 one of those heart-breaking problems of life that 
 somehow or another the distorted in religion 
 comes to be accepted for the real. While one is 
 still young and eager that sense of unjust dis- 
 tortion acts like a spur, but only too soon it 
 begins all but to choke enthusiasm. Some trick 
 of the devil has confounded our language again. 
 " For thirty years I've listened to padres, and I 
 never knew what they were talking about," said 
 a young man to me the other day ; and yet I have 
 not a doubt that the padres he had heard were on 
 the whole convinced, eager and human men. And 
 it is much the same with the Bible ; even its 
 simpler pages seem to speak of unreal men and 
 things. 
 
 There is, of course, an element of truth in the 
 charge. There have not been many Peters and 
 may be fewer Pauls, and the Acts is the Acts of 
 Peter and Paul almost exclusively. But there is 
 something wonderfully modern and commonplace 
 about St. Luke. He is understandable, and one 
 thinks of him almost as a shrewd modern. He 
 was, it seems to me, the educated professional 
 man, in touch with the hard facts of life, and if 
 an enthusiast, one whose enthusiasm was balanced 
 by commonsense. As a matter of fact, more of 
 the saints have been like him in this than we
 
 92 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 sometimes allow ourselves to remember, but at all 
 events that is his own unique position in the New 
 Testament Church. The able writer, the man of 
 judgment, one whose profession existed on his 
 knowing the world of men, St. Luke deliberately 
 judged in favour of the Christ and as deliberately 
 threw in his lot with His Apostle. 
 
 The interesting thing about him is this : that he 
 does not seem to have conceived of his conversion 
 as necessitating any acceptance of the position 
 as Mr. Gosse says about the old pedlar who sang 
 of the Pope of a " volunteer evangelist." The 
 great Evangelist it looks very much as if he were 
 less like an " evangelist " than any of them. He 
 does not appear to have preached, or thrown up 
 his work, or forgotten his grammar, or lost his 
 sense of logic ; rather he knew he had a vocation, 
 and he therein abode with God. 
 
 Surely he preaches thereby a timeless and in- 
 valuable sermon. We have for ever to be getting 
 ourselves back to a sense of what vocation means, 
 and to a sense that the world is going to be 
 Christianised in every generation, not by people 
 who abandon their jobs, but by people who live 
 like Christians in them. 
 
 In a certain native territory are a set of native 
 traders who could probably do more for Christ 
 if they would than all the priests taken together. 
 Good fellows all, as a rule they do all but nothing. 
 Two I have known who were converted, who
 
 VOCATION 93 
 
 promptly closed their stores and took to " mission 
 work." Why ? " You cannot trade and be a 
 Christian " that is the saying, not only of those 
 shops, but of many who stay because meat is more 
 than the life. How pitiable a thing is this ! It 
 requires not the spirit of a St. Paul but that of 
 a St. Luke to meet it. I fancy St. Luke would 
 have gone on trading. And failed ? And have 
 been ruined by his dishonest competitors ? I am 
 not so sure, but of this I am sure, that that might 
 have been so, for Christ requires some people to 
 fail for Him. How does it run ? 
 
 Hungry, weary, tired, and old, 
 I take my footsore Master's road ; 
 Willing to fail as Christ has failed ; 
 I am as Thou hast made me, God ! 
 
 The mistake we make is to suppose that this 
 old world can be slowly transformed into a 
 heaven can be patted into shape, so to speak, 
 and that by " give and take " or reforms or move- 
 ments or armed fists or sermons. I doubt it. 
 It seems to me that our Lord taught that the 
 world was to pass away, to be broken, to tear 
 itself up. The irresistible dynamic was to be 
 introduced into it, forcing it to choose, to con- 
 demn itself, to destroy itself. He began by 
 setting His Face to the Cross ; and we must never 
 forget that our Blessed Lord found the inevitable 
 cross by simply living quietly and speaking truth- 
 fully. So did St. Luke. So should we.
 
 XXI 
 
 ALL SAINTS 
 
 (HEBREWS xi. 22, 23) 
 
 IT is an interesting social fact that the average 
 man cannot get along without saints. There 
 never was a truer scrap of philosophy than Plato's 
 " Man is a social animal," which comes to mean 
 that man is meant for friendships. Friendships 
 support and encourage him ; it is by them that 
 he is spurred to effort ; it is friendship that makes 
 his heaven. 
 
 / sometimes think my heaven would be 
 An orchard and the far blue sea . . . 
 And one dear angel, known to me. 
 
 I forget exactly how it goes, but it is like that. 
 Men say that love can make a heaven of earth, 
 and it can. And if we lose that love, what is 
 our hope ? Surely : 
 
 And with the morn those angel-faces shine 
 Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile ! 
 
 There are some who seem to be able to do 
 without friends, but in the first place I am not 
 
 94
 
 ALL SAINTS 95 
 
 sure that they really do so ; and in the second, 
 I am inclined to think that if they do, they 
 miss the Kingdom. Little children, love one 
 another. . . . I have left you a commandment that 
 ye should love one another it is not for nothing 
 that words as these stand so prominently in 
 the New Testament. Man's social instincts are 
 developed and intensified by true religion. True 
 religion makes him humble, and he wants to be 
 helped; true religion makes him loving, and he 
 wants to help. 
 
 Now friendship and the " cultus of the saints " 
 are twin brethren. Just as a man seeks friends 
 so he seeks saints, and would make his friends 
 saints. We all do it. Those of us to whom the 
 word " saint " is all but a reproach, do it as much 
 as any one else. There is a fine passage in The 
 Student in Arms, which points out that the least 
 likely Tommy has an ideal of manliness which is, 
 as a matter of fact, the Church's conception of 
 the Christ ; and every Tommy all but " worships " 
 those in whom he sees something of this. Even 
 The Student in Arms has his Beloved Captain. It 
 is the world-wide instinct. Every boy worth 
 his salt has his gallery of heroes upon whom, 
 consciously or unconsciously, he moulds himself. 
 Every statesman, every soldier, every minister of 
 religion, every living soul who is keen on 
 his profession, has his haloed saints whom he 
 surrounds with what is, in fact, an atmosphere of
 
 96 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 prayer for the smallest part of prayer is petition. 
 He thinks of them, he copies them, he consults 
 themy if possible ; he seeks their company, and 
 still more, he gives them a place in hia secret 
 soul, which is the holier as he is clean and 
 manly. 
 
 It is all so simple ; yet what a drear distortion 
 our queer religious consciences give to it ! I 
 knew an old saint who would talk with glowing 
 words of Abraham, Enoch, Daniel, and Job, and 
 whose heaven lay before him, a dear place where 
 familiar friends dwelt, and yet the hagiology of 
 Catholicism was anathema to him. A Spurgeon's 
 Tabernacle gibes at the "superstition" of a 
 St. Mary's Church. And, on the other hand, we 
 offend with our doctrines just because we set 
 them in an artificial light instead of emphasising 
 their common sense and practicability. 
 
 We, in the Church, have to our hand in the 
 Kalendar of our Saints one of the finest weapons 
 for the conquest of the souls of men that was 
 ever forged. The appeal to the imagination 
 stands easily first among methods for the con- 
 version of souls, and the craving for what I have 
 called friendship is one of the commonest and 
 most elemental needs of men. We possess, in the 
 stories of our saints, an imaginative stimulus 
 unrivalled by any other in the history of the 
 world. The loyalty of martyrs, the cool insolent 
 daring of confessors, the unutterable reckless
 
 ALL SAINTS 97 
 
 romance of missions, the spiritual world-conquests 
 achieved by such as Francis of Assissi or Joan of 
 Arc, all these lie ready to our hands. And we 
 all but never use them ! We tell Old Testament 
 stories, but, without the least suggestion of 
 irreverence to the sacred Scriptures, there is not 
 a story in that collection which cannot be 
 surpassed in the annals of the Catholic saints. 
 Why in the world we should expect it to be 
 otherwise, I do not know. Surely A.D. should 
 be a more glorious record than B.C. ! Yet our 
 saints' days come and go, and we priests ourselves 
 do not take the trouble to learn their stories. 
 One hears high dignitaries argue for the omission 
 of such names as Lucian, Cosmos and Damian, 
 or Prisca, from our already scandalously robbed 
 Kalendar, using, as an argument and a joke, that 
 they know nothing of them. In all the records 
 of human fatuousness this would be difficult to 
 beat. 
 
 Are these hard words ? God knows I would 
 not wish them to be. But All Saints' Day always 
 comes round to sadden rather than to cheer. If 
 I might make a personal confession, I would say 
 how Butler's History of the Saints, in a pocket 
 edition, has been my sole book, other than the 
 New Testament, on many a long and lonely trek, 
 and that it has inspired and comforted, rebuked 
 and warned, gladdened and amused and saddened, 
 a hundred times. It has peopled heaven for me, 
 7
 
 98 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 and it has done more ; it has transformed earth. 
 And although one does not like to talk about 
 these things I have not found that companion- 
 ship with the whole company of heaven hides our 
 Lord.
 
 XXII 
 UNITY 
 
 (Si. JoHNxvii.) 
 
 FAE more often than we do, we ought to face 
 the great question of Christian Unity, for 
 it is surely not possible to doubt that disunion 
 among Christians is contrary to the very spirit of 
 Christianity, and the chief cause of that general 
 religious impotence which cannot be denied. 
 That uniquely solemn last prayer of our Blessed 
 Lord should be the centre of our study. There it 
 stands, His final prayer-pleading for the world 
 under those human conditions which He had 
 come to support. That we have it to read at all 
 can be none other than divine providing, and 
 whether prayed in Gethsemane or not, the spirit 
 of it is the spirit of the sweat as it were great 
 drops of blood. It was His last prayer. Upon the 
 eternal throne, Christ would indeed make eternal 
 intercession by reason of His Nature, human and 
 divine, but not again would He pray as we use 
 the word. It is the last prayer-agony of Him 
 who died for men. And two great burden 
 
 99
 
 zoo THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 notes ring through its every line Love and 
 Unity. 
 
 Love and Unity it is the union of these that 
 offers the key to our difficulties. You cannot 
 have unity without love, and where there is love 
 there is no real disunion. It is easily possible, 
 and only too common, to make a cheap point that 
 we want unity and not uniformity, whereas, in 
 point of fact, real unity is bound to make for a 
 great measure of essential uniformity ; but with- 
 out question the only unity worth having is a 
 union based on love. A common love of our 
 Blessed Lord and of the brethren is a solvent in 
 which nine-tenths of that which goes to make up 
 disunion melts away. Jealousy, prejudice, hasty 
 criticism, misunderstanding all these disappear 
 before love, and, moreover, and it is a great 
 point, perfect love casteth out fear. If there were 
 no fear in religious controversy, no fear lest the 
 other man should score a point, no fear lest he 
 should seek his own glory or gain, no fear lest the 
 issue should seem to shame our own past, there 
 would be little left of controversy. 
 
 Love begins by the remembrance that by far 
 the greater number of those who differ from us do 
 so because they honestly believe that they are 
 thereby working towards the same goal as our- 
 selves by a better way. They do not differ from 
 us for their own sakes, but for the sake of God. 
 I am, of course, speaking of those who hold con-
 
 UNITY ioi 
 
 sidered positions ; and to a man who is so placed 
 there is only one thing that can be said : I would 
 not have you otherwise: go on and the Lord 
 guide you. What else can one say ? How can 
 one ask a man who believes that he is what he is 
 with all his heart for the sake of God, to be 
 something else for the sake of me ? It cannot be 
 done. The initial judgment can only be : You 
 must not do otherwise as yet. And that once 
 said, that renunciation made for the sake of truth 
 and love, and behold Union is knocking at the 
 door. 
 
 Secondly, Love is humble. Two lovers of God 
 and of one another in the Christian sense, will 
 only tolerate that coming between them which is, 
 as they see it, an essential principle, and the very 
 sorrow which a recognition of some such difference 
 breeds, does much to narrow it down. Private 
 opinions will not keep two such men apart. 
 Differences which are of the essence of faith must 
 separate until some solution from God be given, 
 but things which we ourselves know to be only 
 the result of our own sense of logic or of history 
 or of common sense will never do so. And love 
 will separate the gold from the lesser metal I 
 will not say the dross quickly enough, only to 
 show that there is more of the precious metal 
 held in common than seemed possible. 
 
 Let us be practical a moment. Half the great 
 dividing questions of our day resolve themselves
 
 102 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 into the simplest elements in this crucible of 
 love. Take the question of Orders. The Christian 
 world falls into two camps on this question: 
 those who believe in Holy Orders as conferred by 
 virtue of the Church because the Body is Christ, 
 and those who deny regular orders at all. It is 
 not the bishop who, in our faith, confers regular 
 orders on me, but the bishop as the medium of 
 the Church, which is Christ. My Presbyterian 
 brother whole-heartedly embraces that proposition, 
 but to him the medium of expression is not the 
 chief presbyter alone, but the body of the elders. 
 The other half of Christendom does not believe 
 that such regular orders exist or were meant to 
 exist ; it does not claim them ; it can hardly be 
 angry with me if I therefore do not attribute them 
 to it. It claims prophetical orders the direct 
 call of God. But we have almost forgotten that 
 prophecy truly exists, and that there is nothing 
 antagonistic between such and regular orders. 
 They are complementary. 
 
 Consider the Blessed Sacrament of unity. 
 What, of faith, holds those apart who agree that 
 here (1) is a special blessing dependent on a 
 special Presence, and that (2) the elements are the 
 divinely appointed media for the obtaining of such 
 blessing ? What do I believe more, of faith ? 
 True, I insist on calling them the Body and Blood 
 of Christ and who would decline to allow me to 
 name them by His own name for them ? but
 
 UNITY 103 
 
 what do I, in my finitude, know of the content of 
 the infinite mysteries that I name so ? God give 
 us mutual love, the love that will not deny to 
 me the right to reserve and worship what my 
 brother, for the same end, considers should be 
 best as reverently consumed, and humble lovers 
 of the Master from twenty churches will draw 
 near together to the Sacrament of Love. 
 
 Your young men shall see visions. I do not fear 
 to say that I see a vision, a vision of the King- 
 doms of this World rocking before the thunder of 
 the Name of JESUS from ten thousand throats 
 as one, and the world shall know yet that the 
 visionary, with eyes alight and heart aflame, is 
 right when he maintains that there is no such 
 word as " impossible " in the vocabulary of God. 
 The zeal of the Lord of Hosts shall perform this.
 
 XXIII 
 ADVENT 
 
 (REVELATION xxii. 20) 
 
 Emmanuel 
 Shall come to thee, Israel! 
 
 IT is a wonderful saying. In Apostolic days 
 they said it, and scanned the heavens for 
 the immediate signs of His appearing. As the 
 centuries lengthened, in catacomb and prison 
 cell, faith still repeated the triumphant words 
 expectantly, still threw them back at consul and 
 magistrate in a grim defiance of the hideous 
 present. By the time of the world's conversion 
 the phrase was liturgical, and maybe fewer 
 hearts had still the old longing as Advent came 
 round; but the Church's witness was undimin- 
 ished. And so on, year by year, it has been. 
 Now expectancy has been high, and now despond- 
 ency ; from persecuted souls on Scottish moors 
 or Virginian plantations or in Elizabethan 
 prisons, the song has come again and again no 
 whit less defiantly than of old ; in days of care- 
 lessness or power, as often all but mechanically ;
 
 ADVENT 105 
 
 but still, from mud mission church and from 
 Gothic cathedral it rings out : 
 
 Emmanuel 
 Shall come to thee, Israel.' 
 
 We live in a sceptical age, and there are few of 
 us who do not wonder questioningly as the old 
 message comes round. How can it come about ? 
 we ask. Shall we really see a vision in the 
 clouds of heaven and hear the sound of the 
 trump, or is that but figurative language telling 
 of what will come in obedience to natural laws ? 
 Frankly I feel that I do not know, but I am 
 content to use the old terms to myself and leave 
 the rest against the day of His so certain re- 
 appearing. For the Advent, with all its difficulty, 
 is one of those fixed points in theological philo- 
 sophy from which one argues as axiomatic. One 
 cannot believe in the eternity of the world as we 
 know it ; one cannot doubt that the Incarnate 
 has us still in His Heart. 
 
 But then again, from another point of view, our 
 age is curiously credible. Prophets even of the 
 year of the Advent are as many among us now 
 as they have ever been in the story of the 
 Church, and since they are as a rule singularly 
 pious people, it is unkind to smile. But, writing 
 on the Advent, one is bound to say that their 
 arguments seem to have little weight. Theories 
 based on the Number of the Beast or the weeks of
 
 106 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 Daniel leave us a little unmoved ; and even the 
 vague forecasts based on the return of the Jews 
 and so on, depend so much on questionable 
 theories of inspiration, and rather doubtful com- 
 parative politics, that they are hard to accept. 
 No man knoweth the day or the hour. . . . He 
 shall come as a thief in the night. . . . These seem 
 more likely texts. But it matters little which 
 way it is ; in fifty years I shall certainly see Him, 
 anyhow. 
 
 That is the thought, then, that I link with 
 Advent. This same JESUS. . . . This seems to 
 me to be the emphasis the Church would lay. It 
 says to tired hearts, confused and perplexed by 
 novel movements and incredible changes : " One 
 thing at least is sure. That same JESUS whom 
 you know so well by faith, Whose beauty entrances 
 you, for Whose rest you long, shall come to thee, 
 O child of the new Israel." Our meeting will be 
 the coming home. Even so, come, Lord JESUS. 
 
 I would like, if it be possible, to paint a word- 
 picture of what I mean. ... It was very con- 
 fusing, that entry into the Army and that arrival 
 in France. Everything in life seemed upset, and 
 privacy and opportunities for the worship one 
 loves were all but entirely gone. Also the 
 terrible cataclysm of the World War seemed so 
 stunning near at hand. Northern France was one 
 large camp, and one incredible medley of nations ; 
 and men, though everywhere kindly, seemed
 
 ADVENT 107 
 
 universally to have accepted the disappearance of 
 the old faith and its restraints and hopes. One 
 evening, then, of no special significance, I left the 
 camp and crossed the busy canal, by the huge 
 munition factory whose clangour never ceased by 
 day or night, and the great aerodrome whence 
 came and went hourly strange new tokens of 
 man's mastery of things, and sought a curious 
 little half-built stone church that had been begun 
 in this suburb of a big port before the War, and 
 had been left stranded forlornly among so en- 
 grossing claims on space and time. We found 
 the daily Benediction just beginning. It was very 
 French ; it shattered every liturgical convention ; 
 it had no sophistry of art or music to bolster it. 
 There was a fat and rather indifferent priest, and 
 one server ; a sharp-faced woman lit a dozen 
 candles and rang a bell; and the congregation 
 gathered. I looked around. There were half a 
 dozen peasant women of uncertain age; an old 
 wrinkled soul with a calm and childish face that 
 one looked at twice ; a few children ; a French 
 marine ; three German prisoners and their guard, 
 his rifle in the porch ; a couple of Americans ; 
 three or four English Tommies, and the colonel 
 of a Cavalry regiment, grim and sad-faced ; a 
 black Mosuto and his padre ; and myself. The 
 women sang the service unlovelily and unaccom- 
 panied ; the day was dull and smoky without and 
 within ; the church garish.
 
 io8 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 And then came the vision if it be vision ; call 
 it what you will. What a company ! from three 
 Continents, friend and foe, and not many noble, not 
 many wise. . . . Half were there because of their 
 simple unspotted innocence ; the rest of us 
 because we lacked that so. And what were we 
 doing ? Clinging, like shipwrecked mariners 
 who have no other hope, to the great rock of 
 faith in the incarnate Son, in the Saving Victim, 
 clinging, despite all change and fear and scepticism 
 to the one Hope in this dark world of sin. And 
 the world-wide, century-battered Church held 
 out to us the homely, tender, simple, all-sufficing 
 Saviour Whose Name our mothers taught us, oh ! 
 so long ago. 
 
 And I bowed my head, and the old hope rolled 
 up within, all but to tears : 
 
 Emmanuel 
 Shall come to thee, Israel! 
 
 Even so, come, Lord JESUS.
 
 XXIV 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 (Si. LTJKE ii. 1-17) 
 
 /^HEISTMAS closes the year, and I have heard 
 ^J people say that they think it misplaced. I 
 am not among them. To me there is something 
 infinitely tender in the (I suppose) unpremeditated 
 arrangement, for Christmas is the festival of 
 Home, and it is good to come home at the close 
 of the year. It is just the right sort of home too. 
 One tires of palaces and civilisations and modern- 
 ities ; but none are here. Only the fragrant straw 
 and the hillside and the clear white stars and 
 the wise, patient beasts and the deep mystery of 
 mother-love, always the type, but here the actual 
 sacrament of the divine. In cities our artificial- 
 ities fall off before it hardly, and we smile as we 
 go to church, and excuse our cribs with talk of 
 the children yet we go ; but on the veld and the 
 berg, among the kraals and the cattle, we recognise 
 without a wonder, and with only a glad joy, that 
 this is our true home. 
 
 It is the home of the Prodigal. God did very 
 109
 
 no THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 wisely when He cradled in the manger, for that 
 Baby is a perfect picture of Him. Given love in 
 the father's heart, the little child suffers the 
 touch of the soiled and hard hand without a 
 thought as to the dreadful business of sin that 
 that hand may have been about, and yet more 
 tears of penitence are shed by the side of un- 
 conscious children than anywhere else. And the 
 Divine Child holds out innocent baby hands, and 
 we cannot stay away. Oh yes, He knows ! He 
 knows ! but knowing, He put the sign of know- 
 ledge from Him, and calls us to the unstained 
 purity of the Mother and the Manger. He calls 
 to the Mother and the Cradle, where, men are 
 agreed, there can be no barrier or selfishness or 
 reproach. It is God's own wonderful trysting- 
 place with men, and they come wearily there, 
 year by year, after the long journey down the 
 days of conflict and of failure, and of gain found 
 little worth. 
 
 Yet the cradle is the start and not the goal. It 
 is of the future that one invariably thinks there, 
 and, after all, it is for that that God brings us to 
 His crib. For there is always time before us 
 another year to begin ; and when we have done 
 beginning years, we shall have to begin eternity. 
 Nor is it our own future only to which we go 
 away from Bethlehem. There is appeal in the 
 outstretched arms of the Infant JESUS : What 
 will you do with Me ? We close the year, by
 
 CHRISTMAS in 
 
 God's mercy, with absolution, made white again 
 as those Child hands, but as we kneel there we 
 are bound to ask if we shall pierce them in the 
 coming days. Shall we have a part once more in 
 bringing those Baby Feet to Calvary, in weaving 
 thorns for that Baby Brow ? Where better, then, 
 to make the fierce resolve to be more than con- 
 queror through Him that strengthened us ? 
 
 The manger again, reset as it was last year, 
 though we have strayed and sorrowed so far and 
 heavily in the days between, is a dear sign of 
 renewal. One comes almost with surprise year 
 by year to the crib. It seems as if He could 
 never condescend to be thus, again, after all that 
 we have done. It seems as if the companionship 
 of Mary and of Joseph and of the Angels about 
 that manger could never be again for us ; and yet 
 they are all waiting there for us to join them. 
 Oh tender parable ! Though your sins be as scarlet, 
 they shall be as white as wool. Whosoever cometh 
 to Me, I will in no wise cast out. As far as the 
 east is from the west, so far hath He set our sins 
 from us. 
 
 Bethlehem, too, makes that demand of us with 
 which the Christian pilgrimage of necessity both 
 begins and closes. In these days there are many 
 Christians who try to dispense with Faith. They 
 are Christians because it seems reasonable to 
 believe in a Supreme Author and " Prime Mover," 
 and because Christianity, rightly understood, is so
 
 H2 THIS SAME JESUS 
 
 excellent a moral code. Bethlehem, then, comes 
 to remind us that that is not Christianity at all 
 It is all right as far as it goes, but Christianity 
 stands for more. It stands for belief in the 
 supernatural, in the divine interposition in human 
 affairs, and that after a manner that is ultimately 
 inexplicable. The Saviour wrapped in swaddling 
 clothes that is the Christian discovery. It is no 
 use pretending anything different in order to 
 "reconcile modern thought." It is just here 
 that the whole wonder of our holy religion lies, 
 together with its tenderness and mysteries and 
 power. True, not all not many can stoop to 
 the low door of the cave-stable. Our Lord, in a 
 score of sayings, sadly recognised it. Two classes 
 only, indeed, as has been often pointed out, can do 
 80 the Wise Men who have made their eyes keen 
 enough to search down the vista of God and have 
 found it infinite, they come and are not surprised. 
 They have learned that He who is past finding 
 out, offers other proofs than the scientific and 
 mathematical. And the Shepherds, who have 
 used their eyes to see the simple natural things 
 of life and are not blinded by the glare of cities 
 and their dust, they too have learned those other 
 and intuitive proofs. There is something in the 
 group at Bethlehem, something in the eyes of 
 Mary (the Woman of women, and all women 
 know as we do not) and in that little Child, that 
 goes right to the heart of Kings and Shepherds.
 
 CHRISTMAS 113 
 
 And they open their richest gifts and worship by 
 Faith we say, Faith that is the diviner kind of 
 knowledge. 
 
 But what if one is neither a Shepherd nor a 
 King and most of us are neither. We would 
 be, but both that keen vision and that simple 
 sight have meant an innocence that we have 
 forfeited and an endurance that we seem never to 
 have had a hope of having is it not so ? Yet we 
 have come to a wisdom, born of failure and of 
 tears the certainty that these men from the hills 
 and these night- watchers are sure guides. So we, 
 too, stumble in. Lord, we whisper, / believe ; help 
 Thou mine unbelief. And one does not feel the 
 rough stones on which one kneels, nor does the 
 keen wind of the sleeping world outside, that 
 chills and pierces usually, matter any more, for 
 in the Face of that Child and of His Mother is 
 written the love that rewards the venture of 
 faith, and the vision, to the tired heart and weary 
 hand, is peace.
 
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