tle his notes
dropped from his hand; and the silence grew oppressive. The dramatic
force, the tender passionate insight, the fearless modernness with which
the story was told, made it almost unbearable. Those listening saw
the trial, the streets of Jerusalem, that desolate place outside the
northern gate; they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last
cry. No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden
her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience; the
men had forgotten each other; and for the first time that night, in
many a cold embittered heart, there was born that love of the Son of Man
which Nathaniel felt, and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which has in it
now, as then, the promise of the future.

_'"He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, and he
rolled a stone against the door of the tomb." The ashes of Jesus of
Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestin--_

'"Far hence he lies
In the lorn Syrian town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down."'

He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam
broke over the pale exhausted face--a gleam of extraordinary sweetness.

'And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate
fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the
Resurrection. How natural--and amid all its falseness, how true--is that
naive and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a
measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of
Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and
imaginations of men.'...

'And now, my friends, what of all this? If these things I have been
saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me?
Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and
degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this'--and he
pointed to the newspapers-'it is your urgent business and mine--at
this moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our
precious, invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and
cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not
answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in
the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship,
and that if they cannot worship Jesus they wil