f them for you and me?
Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and
degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this'--and he
pointed to the newspapers--'it is your urgent business and mine--at this
moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our
precious invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and
cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not
answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in
the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship,
and that if they cannot worship Jesus they will not trouble to love him.
Is the world desolate with God still in it, and does it rest merely with
us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we
are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I
have tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and
passionate memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him
most audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and
Englishmen, as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance
have decided. If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he
has been disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches, we turn away
from that in which our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to find
their most obvious and natural help and inspiration--from that symbol of
the Divine, which, of necessity, means most to _us_. No! give him back
your hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him!
Let combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what
they did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a
practical grip on human life.... Then we too shall have our Easter!--we
too shall have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen._ Not
here--in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful outworn forms and
crystallisations of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence
and a more reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired
by his memory, called afresh by his name! Risen--if you and your
children will it--in a church or company of the faithful, over the gates
of which two sayings of man's past, into which man's present has
breathed new meanings, shall be written:--

'_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_'

and--

'_This do in remembrance of Me._'

The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance in whi