nd.

It has been said that Christianity reduced to its simplest and most
intelligible form needs only two words to express it--"Follow me." It
has been said, also, that if all Christian men for the next twenty
years would give up the attempt to _explain_ Christ and devote their
attention to _following_ him, at the end of that time they would know
more about the person of Christ than they had ever known before, and
they would have put Christianity in a posture to conquer the world. I
accept all that. But before we claim that our problem is solved, let
us think for a moment what "following Christ" really means, and to what
it commits us, when we make it the keyword of simple Christianity.

Whoever sets out to follow Christ will have to follow him a long way
and to follow him into some dark places. The path we have to follow is
a narrow one. It runs all the time on the edge of a precipitous
mystery, sometimes taking you up to the sunlit heights and the Mount of
Transfiguration, and sometimes taking you down into the fires of
suffering and into the shadows of death. Following Christ means that
when you find these dizzy things before you, these dark things in your
path, you go through them and not round them. Have you a good head?
Have you a stout heart? Are you loyal to the leader in front? Easy
enough while the road runs by the shining shores of the Lake of
Galilee, but not so easy when it turns into the Garden of Gethsemane
and becomes the Via Dolorosa.

There are those who think they have followed Christ when they have
obeyed the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, loved their neighbour
as themselves and done unto others as they would that others should do
to them. To follow as far as that is to go a long way, much longer
indeed than most of us can claim to have gone. But to stop _there_ is
to stop in the middle, to miss the end of the journey, to come short of
the point of arrival, where the key lies to the meaning and value of
all that has gone before. We are too apt to rest in the thought that
to follow Christ is merely to follow a teacher or a reformer, so that
enough has been done when we have repeated his doctrine of Fatherhood
and brotherhood, voted for his precepts, and practised as much of them
as we can, or perhaps only as much as we find convenient. Let there be
no mistake as to the inadequacy of all that, whether presented in a
simple form or any other. To follow Christ is to follow a victor