r, is contributing something of energizing force to the task of
re-creation. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the
Lord of Hosts."
Fantastic and paradoxical as it may seem to link together Don Quixote
and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept
them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and
self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders
still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise,
his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule. In a sense we must all
be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the
Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for
the things that are worth fighting for--either that they may be
destroyed, or restored. And with St. Theresa we must be willing to
endure obloquy, suspicion, malice, if like her we live in faith,
subjecting our will to the divine will, and then sparing nothing of
ourselves in the labour of saving the world for God in the twentieth
century as St. Theresa laboured to save it in the sixteenth century.
The call today is for personal service through the right living that
follows the discovery of a right relationship to God. Not a campaign but
a crusade; and the figures of St. Louis and St. Francis and St. Theresa,
together with all the Knights and Crusaders of Christendom, rise up
before us to point the way. We would find the Great Peace, the world
would find the Great Peace also, but
_The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way._
We have been told: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you, for your
Heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these things." If we go forth on
this new and knightly quest--quest indeed in these latter days, for the
Holy Grail, lost long since and hidden away from men--we may, by the
grace of God, achieve. Then, "suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye," and
before we are aware, for "the Kingdom of God cometh not with watching,"
we and even the world, shall find that we have compassed the Great
Peace, and if we do not live to see it, yet in our "certain hope" we
shall know that it will come, if not in our time, yet in God's good
time; if not in our way, yet in His more perfect way.
In these lectures I have from time to time, and perhaps beyond your
patience, criticised and condemned many of those concrete insti
|