The Great Discovery

s in the clear morning air. In other days the music of song and laughter often floated from its open windows, but now it was stricken du

duality. They were all individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each with his love and hope and fear. There was none among them so poor but some heart clung to them. They may die, no longer in units, but in broad swathes, mo

of a wild revolt. It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it is the joy of the centuries yet to be. In nameless

sion which war sends sweeping through the hearts of men. And yet it is not that. For when they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her son was dead, she bowed her

f the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote) that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even death. When the loy

ed this little globule of a world, a third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid

ieve in some high destiny for themselves. But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man

the generations on this and millions unnumbered of worlds all survived. With vivid gestures he passed them all before the eye-low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and at last the ?sthetics of

wg." It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable universe-this cheapening of ourselves. There was nothing at last but the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the gener

he sense of the madness of the universe and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but that-nothingness and corruption. A handful of bones thrown up by

has come upon us unawares, and in the extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity. If

e; and here, too, they deceive us. For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes. In nature there is no destruction. A handful of ashes in a grate look like annihilation, but what it represents is really resurrection. The imprisoned sunr

aulted aisles and "windows richly dight," it symbolises the Unseen-the beauty which the heart yearns for. On that beauty materialised, ruthless Vandalism rains shot and shell; the devouring flames consume it. Its gaunt walls are now a monument of barba

d the stones until they seemed to breathe-and shells cannot destroy that. The loveliness was shrined in the souls of the generations that gazed, and, gazing,

n them, and the moonlight will etherialise them. One symbol of beauty may seem to perish; but the spirit of beauty itself, dwelling in th

auty. He has struggled with adversity, and in the conflict he has learned patience, tolerance and a wide charity. Waves of affliction have passed over him, and he has learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised hearts c

er thought and unselfish care-to annihilation? That is unthinkable. To know one good man is to know that the human

ould 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

mere dust. But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous Power did not occur to the untutored Galilean

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 wh

om the ends of the earth. A Waldensian pastor full of the dream of a rejuvenated Italy; a leader of French Protestants, who has forgotten his controversy with the Pope in the great upheaval through which his race

py hour, I met the Professor. One phrase of his lit up for me the days of darkness. "We see the alchemy of Providence at wo

e our hostess was nervously solicitous over the fate of a teacup which the

of life is mere cant." Our hostess rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of bot

uld be his god. A world without death would be a world with no room for the Cross. Men climbed the heights of nobility as they defied death. The crackling flames were unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony that truth and

into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into living souls (over whom death can have no domi

him who lies in a nameless grave in France? The opportunity for winning glory and earthly fame did not come his way;

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have it otherwise. "It is better far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade from the trenches, now united with him in death. There is a place for sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those whose sons choose to survive with shame. He has taken his place amon

dead never return. There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none who do not know the way." It is a poor, emasculated religion that does not believe that. When at the last the bugles call in the quiet