aggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
any great value.

And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
that is within the reach of all.

The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave
himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is
the pattern for our action to shape itself on.

All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much
of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed
himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give
himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from
them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office,
_officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is
what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to
seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable
for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance,
Providence, or our own will has placed us.

Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization
than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation,
of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling,
an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the
cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the
self-interest