the tangled snarls into which we wind
ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life
absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative
beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a
gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal
hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out
on its quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor.

The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best.

We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory
is forever impossible for sheer want of time.

Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order--the Kingdom of
God--a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its
accomplishment. We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where
hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for
brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by
a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is
redemptive. But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more
heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and
brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to
realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order
appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest
improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means
folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly. Things as they are
have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with
curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give
anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, and
then--!

Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though
without a Christian's faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached,
"The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as
one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags." But the allusion to death
set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued: "It is a
curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction
increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at
all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no
more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a
good deal--at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate
and compa