h men the current forms of Christianity excite
no enthusiasm, and that the bonds of their attachment to it are lax and
easily dissolved? And what is felt by these men within the Church is
felt with much greater strength by multitudes of sincere men outside
the Church, who do not hesitate to express their feeling and to
pronounce current Christianity a burlesque and tragic travesty upon the
real religion of the Nazarene.

But the moment we do begin to live, however inefficiently, as Jesus
lived, the sublime reality of His religion is revealed to us. We do
actually find that in the postponement of our own desires for the sake
of others; in the abandonment of our own apparently legitimate
ambitions for the service of the poor; in the patient endurance of
affront and injury; in the forgiveness of those whose wrong seems
inexpiable; in the daily exercise of love that "seeketh not itself to
please," but hopeth all things, and believeth all things,--there is a
joy beyond joy, and an exceeding great reward. We do actually find
that to forgive our brother freely is better both for him and us than
to judge him harshly, and the wisdom of Jesus is thus justified in its
moral and social efficacy. We do actually find that in ceasing to live
by worldly maxims and by living instead according to the maxims of
Jesus, we have attained a form of happiness so incredibly sweet and
pure that the world holds nothing that resembles it, and nothing that
we would exchange for it. For this is now our great reward, that peace
attends our footsteps, and that our hearts are no longer vexed with the
perturbations of vanity and self-love, of envy and revenge. We find
human nature answering to our touch even as it answered to the touch of
Jesus, and revealing to us all its best and purest treasure. We find
the very natures we thought intractable and destitute of all affinity
with ours, brought near our own; the very men and women we thought
wholly alien to us suddenly made lovable, and full of qualities that
claim our love. And as we thus humbly follow in the steps of Jesus,
trying to live each day as He lived, we know that sublimest joy of
all--we feel Jesus acting once more through our actions, and we see in
the eyes that meet our own the same look that Jesus saw in the eyes of
those whom He had cured of misery and redeemed from sin.

A CONFESSION

_THE NOBLEST GRACE_

_'Tis something, when the day draws to its close,
To s