en.

THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge,
Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art:
But when my love rises like a sea,
I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man
To formulate a blessing.

JULIAN

"Vicisti Galilaee," he said, and sank conquered
After wrestling with the most gigantic of powers,
A dead man.

THE CRUCIFIED

On a naked slope of a poor province
A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet,
Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man,"
And a new chapter of history opened,
Having that for its motto.

PARABLES

There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago,
And now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow,
A lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset,
A vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him;
If this be not to be divine, what is it?

Cecil Chesterton tells us Gilbert read the Gospels partly because he
was not forced to read them: I suppose this really means that he read
them with a mature mind which had not been dulled to their reception
by a childhood task of routine lessons. But I do not think at this
date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period:
that official Christianity, its priesthood especially, had travestied
the original intention of Christ. This idea is in the _Wild Knight_
volume (published in 1900) and more briefly in a suggestion in the
Notebook for a proposed drama:

Gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his
hands, and finds them torn with nails.

_Clergyman_. The Church should stand by the powers that be.

_Gabriel_. Yes? . . . That is a handsome crucifix you have there at
your chain.

That the clergy, that the Christian people, should have settled down
to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert
to all that Our Lord's life signified, was one of the problems. It
was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more
fully in _Orthodoxy_. Here he simply writes:

It is not a question of Theology, It is a question of whether,
placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.

Sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of
vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In "White Wynd," a
sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was
to return again in _Manalive_ especially, and