and,
in the technical phrase, create his character. A historian confronted
with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have
but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side,
and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment
and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human
nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from
point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which will
be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror of
eternal fire can teach a business man to bend his imagination to such
athletic efforts. Yet without this, all is vain; until we understand the
whole, we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no
more than broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains buried;
and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in
our ears.

Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.

"_Ye cannot_," He says, "_serve God and Mammon_." Cannot? And our whole
system is to teach us how we can!

"_The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light._" Are they? I had been led to understand the reverse:
that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly in his
affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of repute had
written a conclusive treatise "How to make the best of both worlds." Of
both worlds indeed! Which am I to believe then--Christ or the author of
repute?

"_Take no thought for the morrow._" Ask the Successful Merchant;
interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not
only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe, all we hope, all
we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this
one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as
unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the "same mind that was in
Christ." We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else
He or we must be in the wrong. Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts
from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style
which the reader may recognise: "Let but one of these sentences be
rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be