peculiar and besetting sin of the cultivated and academic life. On
which side, then, do I propose to stand; with the cultivated neutral
and his skillful {162} questioning: What is truth? or with the prisoner
who in this early morning says: "Every one who is of the truth heareth
my voice;" with Pilate in his neutrality or with Jesus on his cross?

{163}

LXV

THE FINISHED LIFE

_John_ xix. 30.

(PASSION WEEK--SATURDAY)

The last word of Jesus as he gives up his spirit is: "It is finished."
But was it what could be called a finished life? Was it not, on the
contrary, a terribly unfinished life, prematurely cut short, without
any visible effect of his work, and with everything left to live for?
Surely, if some sympathetic friend of Jesus had been telling of his
death, one of the first things he would be tempted to say would be
this: "What a fearful pity it was that he died so soon! What a loss it
was to us all that he left his life unfinished. Think what might have
happened if he could only have lived to sixty and had had thirty years
for his ministry instead of three!" And yet, as Jesus said, it was a
finished life; for completeness in life is not a thing of quantity, but
of quality. What seems to be a fragment may be in reality the most
perfect thing on earth. You stand in {164} some museum before a Greek
statue, imperfect, mutilated, a fragment of what it was meant to be.
And yet, as you look at it, you say: "Here is perfect art. It is
absolutely right; the ideal which modern art may imitate, but which it
never hopes to attain." Or, what again shall we say of those young men
of our civil war, dying at twenty-five at the head of their troops,
pouring out all the promise of their life in one splendid instant? Did
they then die prematurely? Was not their life a finished life? What
more could they ever have done with it? Why do we write their names on
our monuments so that our young men may read of these heroes, except
that they may say to us that life may be completed, if one will, even
at twenty? All of life that is worth living is sometimes offered to a
man not in a lifetime, but in a day.

And that is what any man must set before him as the test and the plan
of his own life. You cannot say to yourself: "I will live until I am
seventy, I will accomplish certain things, and will attain a certain
position;" for the greatest and oldest of men when they look back on
their lives see in them only