To some of Mr. Wells's statements about Christ the reply is, 'It is n't so.' He was never hot-eared, says Mr. Wells. But when they brought Him a woman taken in adultery (in the very act, as they explain with shameless, unseeing malice), He dared not look them in the face, but in an agony of shame He stooped and wrote in the dust. He was never inarticulate, says Mr. Wells. But it is a possible reading of what took place on the night before He died, that He realized how little his followers had grasped what He meant, and in one last attempt to make them see, because words could not express it, He took Bread and brake it, and poured out the Wine; He girded Himself, and washed their feet. This is the God He reveals. This is the Life we are to share. 'Do this in remembrance of Me.' However much more those sacred acts mean, do they not at least mean that? And will Mr. Wells look at them and say, 'He was never inarticulate'?

He was never vain, says Mr. Wells. He first made humility a virtue in Western civilization. But his humility was of no tame, conventional kind. Because He was humble before God, He was fearless before men; He forgave his judges, instead of asking their forgiveness; He assumed a relation to the final destiny of humanity, and to the ultimate purpose of God, which makes the vanity of a Nietzsche seem not quite confident of itself. He was too proud to be vain.

Mr. Wells says He never tangled His miracles. But one record says, 'And He could there do no mighty work (save that He laid his hands on a few sick folk, and healed them). And He marveled because of their unbelief.' And when Mr. Wells sums up his difficulties by saying, 'He had no petty weaknesses. The essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses,' one is constrained to point out that it is written

large across the Gospels, so that the most careless may read it, that He who kept his white self unstained amid all the mud and sin of earth did nevertheless convince sinners and outcasts, the disreputable failures, that He understood them, that He was, without condescension, their very brother, and could meet their need.

These were the views which Mr. Wells held about Christ in 1907. In God, the Invisible King (1917), he shows more interest in the Jesus of history.

The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus . . . becomes something altogether distinct from a theological symbol. Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity. But he cannot worship Him.

It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by fighting . . . the symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father... these things jar with our spirit. We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith that God does not fail us nor

himself. We cannot accept the Christian's crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God . . . our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with eyes not downcast, but resolute against the sky; a face without pain, pain lost and forgotten in the surprising glory of the struggle and the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . . A Christianity which showed for its daily. symbol Christ risen and trampling gloriously upon a broken cross would be far more in the spirit of our worship.

Which is a complete reply to the Mr. Wells of ten years ago, who would have loved Him more easily if the dead had not risen, and if He had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back enhaloed and whiter than ever, a postscript to his own tragedy.

Mr. Wells, who prides himself on being up to date, has been tilting at a conception of Christ which belongs to

The spirit in which He met his death was not that of resignation, but that of the monk who, by his own fearless courting of death, stopped the gladiatorial shows of Rome. Christ fought the evil in the world by the only weapons that He believed could conquer it. And after His death, when two of His followers were on trial, the members of the Sanhedrin who observed them (and, presumably, had had at least public relations with Christ), when they beheld, not their gentleness or their 'sweet reasonableness,' but when they beheld the boldness of Peter and John, they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. That is the mark by which his contemporaries recognized his

influence on his followers.

Modern New Testament criticism gives us a portrait of Christ 'active and life-transmitting, one which his followers will not need, or rather will not

presume, to "defend"; and a crucifix which had much popularity in mediæval devotion represented our Lord, not naked and drooping and 'defeated,' but crowned as a king, and vested in an albe to remind us that his death was no defeat, but that as a priest He offered Himself a voluntary sacrifice. If anyone thinks that such a self-chosen Passion as his is weak or effeminate, he only reveals the poverty of his own imagination.

The Outline of History shows that, now Mr. Wells has faced Christ for himself, and allowed the story of his life

and teaching to make its own impression on him, he must bow before Him, as all honest and open-minded men are compelled to do. He recognizes the profoundly new and creative element in the teaching of the Universal Fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. Mr. Wells emphasizes, in his own clear and vivid phraseology, the revolutionary character of this new teaching, especially when it is applied, with Christ's pitiless, undiscriminating impartiality, to all things and all men:

There were no chosen people and no favorites in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as incapable of showing favor as the universal sun. And all men were brothers - sinners and beloved sons alike - of this divine father. . . . From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's mite enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no rebates, and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven.

And this universal claim on all men for all that they have, Mr. Wells points out, Jesus emphasized again and again, in all kinds of ways. And Mr. Wells will have none of the 'spiritualizing' of all practical meaning out of Christ's teaching by saying that his kingdom is a kingdom in men's hearts, or that it is

for the world to come. It means changed hearts and therefore changed lives.

Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed in his utterances, it is plain that they did not miss his resolve to revolutionize the world. . .. The directness of his political attack is manifest by such an incident as that of the coin.

Render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to the God the things that are God's... in view of all else that he taught left very little of a man or his possessions for Cæsar.

He was dragging out all the little private reservations they had made from social

service into the light of a universal religious life. . . . In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love. Is it any wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him?

In the work that he is doing for the unity of mankind, Mr. Wells is giving himself to express the spirit of Christ.

Men in our time have been seeking the 'Super-Man.' It must be some blindness on the part of Christians when they look at their Master, or some stammering of their tongues when they speak of Him, that has hindered this generation from seeing that He is indeed the 'Beyond-Man,' to whom man's virtue and knowledge are but a bridge and a prophecy-He who was killed at thirtytwo, but whose life overthrew a civilization, and Himself has become the axis round which all future history must revolve. He is the greatest possession of the race.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Wells's contribution to the religious thought of our time is not yet finished. He is a seeker, 'dissatisfied always with the thing seen and the thing believed,' re

vealing, in so far as he is typical, a spirit of almost prophetic sincerity in the attitude of our age to the deepest things. If his hopes, and guesses, and intuitions are at all typical of the modern spirit (and there is no man who so reflects the age, both in what he sees, and in what he misses seeing), then the modern spirit has set out on a pilgrimage in which a few steps further will bring it face to face with Christ. His faith is in many ways like that of the Gospels. And his denials are often rooted in human sympathies and divine indignations which are nearer to the mind of Christ than the unseeing complacency which finds belief easy. There is profound need for the Church to set itself to make real and full and intimate both its experience of Catholic Christianity, and also its understanding of the thoughts and aspirations of the present age, so that it may explain, in the idiom of to-day, the religious meaning and spiritual value of its ancient symbols, its institutions and ceremonies and prayers and sacraments, so that the seeking hearts of the children of this distracted generation may turn again home.

Ar half-past seven I was certain that she would come, and I was desperately happy. My coat was fastened only by the top button. The wind blew it open, but I did not feel the cold. My head was thrown back proudly, and my college cap was perched on the back of it. My eyes looked on men with an air of

patronage and audacity; on women they looked with challenge and kindness. Although already for four days I had loved her alone, I was so young and my heart was so rich that I could not remain indifferent to other women. My steps were quick, bold, and free.

At quarter to seven, my coat was

done up on two buttons; I looked only at the women, and without challenge or kindness, but rather with disgust. It was only one woman that I wanted; the rest might go to hell. Those others were in the way, and their seeming like ness to her made my movements uncertain and constantly changing.

At five minutes to seven I was hot. At two minutes to seven I was cold. At seven I knew she would not come. At half-past eight I was the most wretched creature in the world. My coat-buttons were all done up; the collar was turned up, and my cap was pulled over my nose, which was blue with cold. The hair on my temples, my moustache, and my eyelashes were all hoary with frost. My teeth were slightly rattling against each other. By my uncertain gait and my stooping shoulders I might have been taken for a fairly vigorous old man returning from his friends back to the workhouse.

And she was the cause of all this misery. She! Oh, the Dev-! No, I won't. Perhaps she could not get away. Perhaps she is ill or dead. Dead!and I am cursing!

'And where?' another supported him. 'Let's dress up, and go to all the parties,' I decided.

And these insensate individuals actually became happy. They shouted, leaped, and sang. They were thanking me and counting their available money. And in half an hour's time, we were bringing together all the lonely melancholy students in town. When we had gathered together, ten leaping devils, we repaired to a hairdresser (also a provider of fancy dress), and his shop was soon filled with cold air, youth, and laughter.

I needed something sombre, beautiful, with a suggestion of elegant sadness, and I asked for a dress of a Spanish nobleman. He must have been a long nobleman, for his dress concealed me completely, and I felt somehow very lonely as in a huge empty hall. I got out of it, and asked for something else. 'Would you like to be a clown motley with little bells?'

a

'A clown, indeed!' I exclaimed, with utter contempt.

'Well then, a bandit? Such a hat and dagger!'

'A dagger! It suits my intentions.'

Sad to say, the bandit whose clothing they gave me had hardly reached his maturity. Most probably he was a young rascal of about the age of eight! His funny hat would hardly cover my head, and from his velvet trousers I was dragged out as from a trap.

The next thing, a page, was no good. He was all spotted like a leopard.

The monk was all in holes.
'Well, hurry up, it's late!'

My companions were all dressed and growing impatient. There was only one dress left, a distinguished Chinaman's. 'Let's have the Chinaman's,' said I in despair.

It was the devil knows what! I will not say anything about the dress itself. I pass over in silence the idiotic colored