l not trouble to love him.
Is the world desolate with God still in it, and does it rest merely with
us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we
are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have
tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and passionate
memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him most
audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and Englishmen,
as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance have decided.
If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been
disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches we turn away from that in
which our weak will; and desponding souls are meant to find their most
obvious and natural help and inspiration from that symbol of the
Divine, which, of necessity, means' most to us. No! give him back your
hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him! Let
combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what they
did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a practical
grip on human life. Then we too shall have our Easter!--we too shall
have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen_. Not here--in
legend, in miracle, in the beautiful out-worn forms and crystallizations
of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence and a more
reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired by his
memory, called afresh by his name!-Risen--if you and your children will
it--in a church or company of the faithful--over the gates of which
two sayings of man's past, in to which man's present has breathed new
meanings, shall be written:--

'_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_

and--

'_This do in remembrance of Me._'

The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance in which it
had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst
of it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the
adjoining rooms, the gas-fitter's tall companion Andrews mounted the
platform, while the gas-fitter himself with an impatient shrug, pushed
his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately
to work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal
_sang-froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and
temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of
what great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ