"Endure hardness," said one of its greatest
apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance
of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we
ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the
abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of
Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and
trample on His cross.

In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the
triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will
be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt
Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been without their
witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine,
yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it,
arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it
turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose,
and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and
therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its actual corruption the
Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments,
to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and anon from its
deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending
under this noblest burden of our doom--some Savonarola or St Francis
charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and
right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of
hell.

Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental
principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the Cross--sharply and
strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in physical science tend,
in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher
requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce and navigation, at
once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and
aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for these. Systems
of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness
is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is
simply coincident with physical well-being. Political Economy aims as
undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of
the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as Political Economy claims
to deal with man in his physical life