ness, malevolence, and
small-heartedness; and that all life is dignified where there are
love, purity, and piety in it, whatever be its social category.

I read the other day that it is probable that the very mire of the
London streets contains that mysterious substance known as radium, the
most tremendous agent of light and heat ever yet discovered by man; so
in man himself, however low his state, there is the spark of God, an
ember lit at the altar fires of the Eternal, and it is because we
forget this that we forget the dignity of common life. For we do
forget it. We may make our boast that a single human soul is of more
value than all the splendors and immensities of matter; but in our
actions we treat the boast as a mere rhetorical expression. There is
nothing so cheap as men and women--let the lords of commerce answer
if it be not so. But Christ acted as tho the boast were true. He
deliberately inwove His life into all that is commonest in life. He
has made it impossible for us, if indeed we have His spirit, to think
of any salient aspect of human life without thinking of Him.
Where childhood is, there is Bethlehem; where sorrow is, there is
Gethsemane; where death is, there is Calvary; where the toiler is,
there is the poor man of Nazareth; and where the beggar is, there is
He who had no place where to lay His head. There is not a drop of
blood of Christ, nor a throb of thought in our brains that is not
thrilling with the impact of this divine life of lives. And so the
true dignity of life is this, that Christ is in all men, faintly
outlined it may be, defaced, half-obliterated, but there, and the
Church that forgets this has neither impulse nor mandate for Christ's
work among men.

2. And then, again, there is a second reason: we have not learned to
look for Christ among the common things of life.

"Let us build three tabernacles," said the wondering disciples on
the Mount of Transfiguration, and the speech betrayed a tendency of
thought which was in time to prove fatal to the Church.

The Christ without a tabernacle, the free, familiar Christ of the lake
or the wayside was everybody's Christ; but the moment Christ is shut
up in a church or a tabernacle He becomes the priest's Christ, the
thinker's Christ, the devotee's Christ, but He ceases to be the
people's Christ.

I remember five years ago standing in the great church of Assisi,
which has been erected over and encloses the little humble chapel
where