^ The modern man lives in a sort of supreme fear of being duped. But when this fear of self-deception goes so far as to get itself built into a sort of shrine and worshipped as Clifford worshipped it, we are at least candidates for commiseration. It is like keeping out of battle for the sake of avoiding wounds. And when all the deeper interests of the heart are the stake to be fought for ! How bleak it all is ! It is not easy to forget those frosted words of Clifford, written after he had cast out all his native beliefs. " I have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven upon a soulless earth, and I have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion was dead."
1. "To whom shall we go?" Shall we cast in our lot with the icorldling ? Shall we smother our fears, our misgivings, our aspirations, our hopes, in the amusements, the interests, the pleasures of this lower world, and thus by a determined effort quench the Divine light which is in us? We cannot do this. We cannot forget the home from which we came. Ever and again, the memory of the Father whom we left intrudes itself upon us. We began our cnreer of self-will in riotous living; and we have ended it in famine and destitution. These husks may be good enough for the swine that perish ; but to us, the children of our Father, to us, the heirs of heaven, they are vile, they are loathsome, they are sickening.
^[ A large section of humanity has espoused for its creed an
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abject materialism. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." What a vanity fair is modern social life ! Multitudes are trying to drown their disgust in deeper cups of pleasure and riot. Men call the doctrine of Jesus " hard." " But how much harder," cries Tolstoy, " how much harder is the doctrine of the world ! In my own life I can reckon up as much suffering caused by following the doctrine of the world as many martyrs have endured for the doctrine of Jesus." Yet this " doctrine of the world " is preached to human hearts as a doctrine of " good news," and crowds have turned away from the Man of Nazareth to hear it. What a travesty upon hearts, what a mockery of happiness ! The modern martyrs are not in the church ; they are in the world. For real martyrdom to-day, name the frenzies of contemporaneous finance. Ask the women who are racked in an inquisition worse than Torquemada's. Watch the young people training for the enjoy- ment of a diet of husks and sawdust. And worst of all, these crucifixions are entirely gratuitous. They give the cross without the crown or the promise of it. They yield the pang without the palm.^
'-'•^— A % " To whom shall we go ? " Shall we seek counsel of the /^ secularist ? Shall we be content to bind our hopes and fears by the limitations of time and space ? Will it suffice us to extend our scientific knowledge, to perfect our machinery, to improve our police regulations, to study our sanitary conditions, shutting our eyes meanwhile to the immensity which lies above and around us ? Nay, our eternal spirit would lash itself into agony against the bars of this narrow cage. " Our immortality broods " over us " like the day," " a presence which is not to be put by."
H The late Mr. Win wood Reade unhappily thought and published that there was no God. His wild book he called the Ifartyrdom of Man; and without God in the world man is a martyr. A personal creator he asserted was an impossibility, and, to prevent any approach to hope, the existence of a soul an improbability, but not as the other, a demonstrable falsehood. These wild and whirling words were uttered by one who in his last book, issued as he died, said that he often sighed for his old belief, when to him "God was semi-human and man was half Divine, and after life death began (?) and happiness never ceased, and my mother and my Margaret would be joined to me again. Now my heart rebels against the fate of the human race, doomed to work like coral insects of the sea." This he wrote, aays his
1 G. C. Peck, Visum and Task, 134.
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biographer, his uncle, Charles Eeade, " with the hand of death upon him." We need not wonder at the mournfulness of one without hope in the world. We quote these words because the storm which lifts aside the waters shows the depths beneath. Let no man reject faith carelessly. No Christian hand could have painted more truly the want which Eevelation, and that alone, supplies. The reviewer of a contemporary, with a full sympathy with Winwood Eeade, quotes Schopenhauer, who, probably with like thoughts, says that, " if we take into account^ the pain and misery, the unhappiness and sin, with which the^ earth abounds, we can only wonder whether it would not have been better for us if the surface of the earth had remained like that of the moon, devoid of atmosphere, an inert mass of cinder and slag." Can our readers blame us if we put a firm foot on the old ways, and insist again and again, out of pure love for our fellows, on the reasonable expectation of the larger hope and the fuller life, the warmth and happiness given by Him who is the Light of the world, in whose light we no longer walk in darkness, and who lighteth every man that cometh into the world, unless the heart rejects His light and crawls back into the hopeless gloom ? ^