Part 11 (2/2)

The slow return of the dying s is as true as if it were studied fro at the words ”I am the Resurrection and the Life” arrives not as a draht breaking forth before sunset The chief speaker of the poe faith that coh love, and St John was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets The dialectic proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of sihted with le lines arise so naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be of one texture with the whole: this, for exaht happen on his face;

and this:--

When there was s;

and this:--

Lie bare to the universal prick of light;

and these:--

The Bactrian was but a wild childish man, And could not write nor speak, but only loved

Such lines, however, are made to be read _in situ_

The faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century, and is not the sa of Christ had alike one end--to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of Divine Love, and to ree, conscious partakers of that love Where love is, there is Christ Our conceptions of God are relative to our own understanding; but God as power, God as a coence, God as love--Father, Son and Spirit--is the uts above us Let us now put that knowledge--ience, love--these surround us everywhere; they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes The historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger assurance of faith We are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen Why revert to discuss miracles? The work of o accoe of the Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ acco itself in humanity at the present time And the Christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within the belief The acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak

This, reduced here to the baldest state's St John It is thrown into lyrical forue_ to the voluers, the sound of the trulory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent

We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative:

Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, Sad sway of sceptre whose 's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care:

Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trurows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Becoreat poe and the Book_, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of _A Death in the Desert_, has al life: he is absorbed in the soleood and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist:

Lies bare to the universal prick of light

He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of ht And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity of our e is identical with that of John Man's lass” in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of God, ”our known unknown” The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible God's power--that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence--that is no less evidently present What of love? The dread ative the idea of divine love The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of God to hest ment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves

All questions in the earth and out of it

But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact,

Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye-- The same and not the same, else unconceived--

the Pope dare not affirent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale--historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth--remains:

So loved hand or the bare?

By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth

Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses[92]