se poems about
Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and
every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a
little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a
delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-
disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of
season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple
romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far
too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the
Greek; it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and
dark house.

And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely
probable that we have the actual terms, the _ipsissima verba_, used by
Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even
Renan thought so. But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the
Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the
ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over
the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ's own
words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me
to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might
have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato
understood him: that he really said [Greek text], that when he thought of
the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute
expression was [Greek text], and that his last word when he cried out 'my
life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected,'
was exactly as St. John tells us it was: [Greek text]--no more.

While in reading the Gospels--particularly that of St. John himself, or
whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle--I see the continual
assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material
life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love,
and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Some
six weeks ago I was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat
instead of the coarse black or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It
is a great delicacy. It will sound strange that dry bread could possibly
be a delicacy to any one. To me it is so much so that at the close of
each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or