e, cannot use
it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be
made to open the gate of God's Kingdom. His chief war was against the
Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage.
Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In
their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their
tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of
Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British
Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of
respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at
all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear
of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed
out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and
ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should
be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public
charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he
exposed with utter and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed orthodoxy
is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their
hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside.
He showed that the spirit alone was of value. He took a keen pleasure in
pointing out to them that though they were always reading the law and the
prophets, they had not really the smallest idea of what either of them
meant. In opposition to their tithing of each separate day into the
fixed routine of prescribed duties, as they tithe mint and rue, he
preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.

Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful
moments in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the
rich vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers had given her, and
spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet, and for that one
moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses of the
snow-white rose of Paradise. All that Christ says to us by the way of a
little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul
should always be ready for the coming of the bridegr