calling to us across the mist of centuries. Listen to the golden words of a few passages.

"If thou seek this or that, and would'st be here or there, the better to enjoy thy own profit and pleasure, thou shalt never be at peace, nor be free from trouble of mind. And this thou must understand not of revenues and wealth, but of seeking after honour also, and of the desire of vain praise, which all must pass away with this world." (De Imitatione, Lib. iii. cap. xxvii.)

"He who would understand in their full savour the words of Christ must study to make his whole life comformable to him." (Lib. i. cap. i.)

"Many follow Jesus as far as the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the chalice of his passion." (Lib. ii, cap. xi.)

"Walk where thou wilt, seek where thou wilt, thou wilt find no higher way above, no safer way below, than the way of the holy cross.' (Lib. ii. cap. xi.)

"Make this thine aim, my son, rather to do the will of another than thine own. Ever choose rather to have less than more. Always seek the lower place and to be under the authority of all. Always wish and pray that the will of God may be wholly done in thee. Behold such a man as this enters into the region of peace and rest." (Lib. iii. cap. xxiii.)

"I, saith Jesus, will show him how great things he must suffer for My name's sake." (Lib. ii. cap. xii.)

"As the Father hath loved Me, (saith Jesus), I also love you, as I said to My beloved disciples, whom certainly I did not send to temporal joys, but to great conflicts; not to honours, but to contempt; not to ease, but to toils; not to rest, but to bring forth much fruit in patience. Remember these words, my son." (Lib. iii. cap. xxxi.)

"Follow Me; I am the way, the truth, and the life. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living. I am the directest way, the sovran truth, the uncreated life. If thou abide in My way, thou shalt know the truth, and the truth

shalt make thee free, and thou shalt lay hold on life everlasting." (Lib. iii. cap. lvi.)

"Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall have much peace." (Lib. i. cap. xi.)

Many indeed are they who have found spiritual joy and solace in the three books of the De Imitatione. Of the warmth and saintly fervour of the thoughts that run through it there can be no question; its tender and intimate dealings with the visitation of the soul are for all time and for every age. Nevertheless there is a serious limitation to its usefulness. It emphasises the passive or contemplative side to a degree that if not frankly confessed and counterpoised will tend to poverty of soul. It exalts the duty of renunciation so predominantly as to suggest that renunciation is an end in itself. This, its gravest defect, is doubtless a reflection of the tone of the age of its production, when in the arbitrary division between clergy and laity the active duties of Christian life were so surrogated to the ecclesiastic as to be virtually abstracted from the citizen. The remedy is to bear ever in mind these things-that asceticism is per se not a virtue but a vice, just as ignorance is: that persistent withdrawal from citizenship and the daily life of men, is a shirking of responsibility, not in itself a state of grace; that every imparted grace, every vantage gained by rest from conflict or withdrawal from turmoil, is an obligation to renewed activity in the cause of the truth of God and the service of man. Christ withdrew Himself oft into the desert or the garden for rest, for retirement, for prayer, but not that He might shirk the conflict of the coming day. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master.

On the other hand, in the active imitation of Christ there lie difficulties and dangers enough. There is a temptation to over-zealous and hotblooded men, in the very earnestness of their sincerity, to imitate the unusual activities of Jesus rather than the mildness and sweet reasonableness of his habitual mood. He could savagely denounce the brood of vipers, and trounce the hypocrites who came merely to catch Him in His discourse. The bitter wrangles with the priests and Pharisees which we find in the fourth Gospel, and which seem so sadly to traverse the beautiful and loving spirit, if not almost to lower the dignity of Jesus, are these to be the things in which we would imitate Him? Alas! the un-Christlike bitternesses of many old theological disputes are too sadly an imitation of these episodes, rather than of the sublime selfrenunciation of the closing scenes. It may be right -for the few only, certainly not for the many, and only upon due occasion-in defence of truth and right against the aggressions and assumptions of bigots, to speak strongly and plainly, even to seeming harshness. It may even be right, on occasion, to imitate the Christ in driving out the intruders, the profit-seeking financiers and paganistic ceremonialists, from the temple of God; not by violence, as with the whip of small cords, with which He drove out the sheep and oxen, but with the more effectual scourge of an enlightened and fearless exposure. Idolatries within the Temple, no less than Pagan debaucheries without, call for holy courage of action. Every great movement toward the purification of religion has required men who would dare, even in this respect, to follow the

Christ. But for the most part of us, should we attempt any such course we would assuredly deserve the rebuke of the Master, uttered to the sons of thunder who proposed to call down fire from heaven "Ye know not what spirit ye are of."

Rather will the imitation required of us be of the humbler sort, as we move amongst the mass of our fellow-men, sharing their burdens, trying to bring life and hope and faith and charitableness and sweet reasonableness into their lives by exercising these imitable Christ-like virtues in our own. But this is the very antithesis of a monastic withdrawal from the world. Do we feel discouraged at the apparent helplessness of social forces to cope with existing moral disorder? Are we impressed by the sad failure of the Churches to fulfil their mission? Is any of us tempted under a sense of these failures to abandon effort and withdraw into a life of contemplative solitude apart from the struggles and sufferings of men, thinking this to be a worthy imitation of Christ? Let him hear the voice that cries to him:

Come no further: not upon this road,

But on that other whither Christ has gone.

M

CHAPTER IX

Materialism

ATERIALISM is the tendency of certain minds to materialise; the tendency consciously or unconsciously present to refer all phenomena of the spiritual world—all religious ideas and emotions-to reduce even all purely intellectual conceptions to that which is visible and tangible. By a materialist I mean one whose habit of mind is to measure all things by that which is obvious and which obtrudes itself upon the senses, one by whom the facts of the higher nature are, if recognised at all, set down as being mere efflorescences of the physical being, one who either fails to understand the reality of those higher emotions that make for religious life, or who while professedly religious fails to understand them as realities in themselves and can only grasp them by degrading them into concrete and material forms.

This definition is given at the outset because the term materialism has been used in a narrower and more technical sense to denote the body of ideas which were prevalent in Germany rather more than a quarter of a century ago when Buechner wrote his famous work Kraft und Stoff-Force and Matter