sed over him, and he has
learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised
hearts come and lie down in his shadow, and there find healing. With
eyes cleansed from self, he looks out on the comedy and tragedy of
life, and he sees the hidden springs. The healing power that goes
forth from him grows with the years. At last he dies.

Does nature conserve the shell while it consigns the jewel in the
shell--the man himself, with all his love and tender thought and
unselfish care--to annihilation? That is unthinkable. To know one
good man is to know that the human personality is imperishable. It was
through that knowledge that the soul of man triumphed over the terror
of death.

There walked in Galilee a Teacher who made a handful of peasants feel
the possibilities of moral loveliness latent in the human heart, and
when He died they could not associate the thought of death with Him.
"It was not possible that He should be holden of it," they said one to
another. Everything was possible but that He could become as a clod in
the valley of corruption. Of course even that was possible if the
world were a chaos given over for sport to malicious demons.

It would be possible, then, that the self-sacrificing love stronger
than death, and the spirit of unsullied purity should become mere dust.
But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous
Power did not occur to the untutored Galileans. Therefore they faced
death with level eyes, refusing to believe in its triumph, saying to
their hearts, "It is not possible."

And that is the rock on which to plant our feet in the day when the
world is given over to the wild welter of bloodshed. In every parish
over all the land blinds are pulled down, and hearts, wrapped round in
the dimness, sit still in the shadow of a dumb affliction. They will
never again hear the familiar footsteps coming to the door; they will
hear it in their dreams--only to awake and find silence. Never again
will the first question be when the door is opened, as it was through
all the days since the golden days of childhood, "Where is mother?"
But the great things which made life noble have not been destroyed by
bullet or shell. No man is worthy of freedom except the man who is
prepared to die for it. The heart, which in death proved itself
deserving of freedom, has entered into the fulness of freedom. The
heavens are again aglow when we realise that.

***

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