II

In the intellectual life of the race, the true order would seem to be reality, feeling, reason. The infinite thing is the universal reality. We touch this reality first of all in feeling. The feeling is indeed penetrated with intelligence; still it remains feeling. It rises in the forms of interest, curiosity, surprise, desire, expectation, confidence, and the spirit of prophecy. From this psychic confusion of great riches, issue clear conceptions, valid insight, sure knowledge. Reason is the latest born in the psychic family, and it remains forever overshadowed in life by its elder brothers feeling, and the reality of which feeling is the witness.

That we are in a real universe is an assumption upon which we live; that we feel this real universe before we are able to think it, is an obvious fact in our experience; that we think, even at our best, something not only immeasurably smaller than the total reality, but also something that is nothing more than a fraction of the content of feeling, is a statement too plain to call for argument about it. When one sees a child playing on the lawn in front of its home in the sunshine, as the days lengthen into its second summer in the world, three things are clear. There is the enfolding sunshine; there is the sense of life heightened by the sunshine; there is some dim consciousness of the relation of cause and effect between the sunshine and the experience of exhilaration. We have here, one may presume, a hint of man's life as a spiritual being. There is the divine reality; there is its effect upon feeling; there is the account of the connection between these two. The contention is that the divine environment is the ultimate and infinite wonder; close to this stands feeling truly inexhaustible in its content; last of all comes reason, in

evitable in the mature human being, and inevitably behind in its work.

Originality would seem to begin in feeling. Copernicus has a feeling that the Ptolemaic system is all wrong; Newton that there must be some bond of union among all worlds; Berkeley that Locke's idea of matter is an absurdity; Kant that a true psychology should consider the action of the mind upon its object no less than the action of the object upon the mind; Darwin that life must have a history, that it must be an ascent. Feeling is the first sign of genius; to feeling in men of great genius we are indebted for the beginnings of the achievements that have made their names illustrious. The feeling for nature has given us our greatest scientists; the feeling for man our supreme poets; the feeling for God several of our weightiest philosophers and all our highest prophets.

When Jonathan Edwards contended that genuine religion consists largely in the affections, he did not mean to confine religion to a mere subjective circle. For him, as for every other wise man, the heart is not a possession out of all relation to universal Being; it is the organ of closest contact with universal Being; of intuitive intercourse with it or him; of response to immediate impact; it is the organ of a storehouse of intimations, appeals, and gifts. The subtlest forms of mind work here, and they bring into the spirit of man experiences, assurances, and hopes of a transcendent character. From this world of religious feeling, reason elaborates its world of meanings, concepts, beliefs; still the primary world of religious feeling remains unsearchable in its richness, unfathomable in its depth.

III

Christmas has its chief meaning here. It is one of the Christian forms

of appeal for the benignity of the universe. The encompassing Infinite is austere; all religions recognize that fact. The ultimate reality, whatever it may be, is hard upon human beings; no wise man can avoid that conclusion. Sometimes we are almost driven to the bitter belief that the universe is against us; that our lives are a pitiful and foredoomed failure in the heart of infinite unconcern, perhaps of infinite disdain. The pessimism in books is first of all written with the pen of fateful experience on the tablets of the heart. There are many points at which the black antipathies of the universe toward human beings gather and pour in upon us in floods. Here is the birth and cradle of vital pessimism.

There are other points at which we become conscious of the supporting sympathy of the encasing Mystery. There are times and seasons when we cannot doubt that the stars in their courses are fighting our battles. There are in our inmost soul at such times assurances of the benignity of the Eternal. For this benignity there are many forms of appeal in our family, social, and political life; we come to the greater forms in the higher religions of the world. In one way or another all these carry to the weary and heavyladen a benediction from the Soul of the universe. Commotions follow in man's heart; high moods of moral conquest and peace, the play and interplay of relieving human sympathies; these, however, are but effects, the supreme cause is out beyond in the benignity toward men at the centre of all being.

Christmas is, as I have said, one of the forms in the Christian religion for this benignity. Love, marriage, parenthood, childhood, friendship, and all the greater forms of humanity, are strangely affected and exalted at the Christmas season. What means this

overflow of human kindness and hope? The birth of Jesus has seemed to the wisest men the most significant token of sympathy for man, at the centre of all reality. When the flood-tide of Christmas is upon us it is hard to remain unbelievers. We rejoice; we do more than rejoice; we know that we are glad, and why. Life is enfolded in the universal sympathy, and on this account we are justified not only in our momentary exaltation but also in our permanent working faith.

Christmas comes burdened with a profound and cheering philosophy of history. The philosophic background of the advent of Jesus is in these words: 'And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest . . . as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' The meagre character takes refuge in the ampler; the child hides in the greatness of the parent's life; the pupil in the shadow of the teacher's strength; the average man in the community in the commanding nature of his leader. Thus we rise till we come to those few highest minds which are, in Burke's fine words, 'the refuge of afflicted nations.' History is changed not by ideas alone, but by ideas as expressed in the supreme personality. The world we live in has been made for us; the source of this world-making power is the idea in action; the idea in action is the mind of the great man at work. We are everlasting debtors to the great men who have preceded us; they have become our refuge and strength and without them we should be homeless and impotent.

Thus the idyl of the advent of Jesus becomes the epic of the ideal human career. The Apostle to the nations knew the meaning of the manger in Bethlehem, and the emotions that Bethlehem and its manger have always stirred, when he said, 'We have the mind of

Christ.' That mind has been a worldhome for countless human beings; and this world-home has been built upon the Infinite benignity of the universe. Thus the Christian philosophy of history breaks in upon us at Christmas and carries us away like a flood. Then it is easy to chant with Milton, "Till one greater man restore us'; to sing with Tennyson, ‘On God and Godlike men we build our trust'; and to give thanks with the Evangelist for the 'Life that was the Light of men.'

Our human world has gone wrong. A shallow evolutionism constructs a theory of progress that goes in straight lines; a profounder evolutionism questions the facts and reads an advance of another sort. We are impatient to-day with legends of the fall; the impatience is not without excuse, and yet it is by no means wise. Legends often carry in imaginative form the wisdom and sorrow of a race; those who have an eye for the wisdom, and a heart for the sorrow, will ponder the legend; they will not laugh it to scorn.

When we refrain in the first instance from generalizations and confine attention to individuals, the grounds of dispute vanish. It is not difficult to see, indeed it is impossible to avoid seeing, that multitudes of men and women go wrong. For them existence has become bitter and almost hopeless. They have sinned; they have been sinned against; they are suffering Ishmaelites whose hand is against every man, against whom is the hand of society. Now let us generalize from those who have gone wrong under our eyes to the millions that have gone wrong under the eyes of God. Then imagine what Christmas brings to many of them; what it is capable of bringing to all of them. On them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death a great light has shined. Christmas proclaims the mighty Gospel that human beings live

in a redemptive universe. Comfortable persons who live on the moral income of an heroic past may sneer at this; the multitudes whose work keeps the world alive and who are noble enough to know that they have gone wrong will greet this Gospel, as of old, with a Gloria in Excelsis.

Custom may harden or it may renew and deepen human nature. Upon a hollow-hearted scoundrel playing the rôle of a pious man custom acts as time acts on a cooling planet; it makes the crust harder and deepens it till it is dust and ashes to the core. The action of custom upon a sincere mind that would pay all its dues is of a different order. In this case custom brightens to the infinite heights the sky overhead; it brings morning up out of night; it renews the power of the ideal; on each recurrence it initiates a profounder movement of spirit in the presence of life's best hopes.

Periodicity in sin is a tragic fact; it is the succession of snares set for the foolish man who on each recoil from his shameful act just committed thinks of himself as cured of his passion. The rhythm of passion returns; the intervals are like the lulls between the great breakers when the tide is rolling in; they are delusive. Vivid as the bitter fact are Shakespeare's words, "That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat.' Periodicity in dishonor lies upon men with the weight of the world; indeed it wears down and out the moral purpose and swamps multitudes in cynicism.

There is a periodicity that runs counter to this work of the devil. Custom here renews the mind in the possession of its best judgments; supports these judgments with freshened feelings; recovers to the faded resolution its native hue. Custom in this case is like a man standing on firm ground pulling his friend out of a bog: every return is another pull, another emancipation, another prophecy

that ultimate freedom is sure. Periodicity in religion is the law of the spirit of life in an imperfect world; it is a kind of Santa Scala whose steps lead to ever happier reconciliations between the actual and ideal in man.

Here is part of the Christmas magic. The world is on the whole sincere, and when the Christmas sunburst of benignity strikes it, this Memnon's statue sings again. The Christmas season is an indefinable compound of thoughts and feelings; hints and suggestions local and universal; richest memories and sincerest hopes; movements of heart confined to the family circle and

again going forth over the whole diameter of humanity. Instincts and sympathies are here that concern man in his fortune in this world and that reach to the Eternal and rest there. Utterly beyond exhaustive analysis is the heart of a representative human being under the Christmas enchantment. What does it all mean? As I have said, there are in fact many answers; to the writer the only answer with sure reason in it is that which sees in the Christmas gladness a fresh invasion of the Infinite benignity, a new assurance through a recurrent form of the coming of the Kingdom of God.

HAND-MADE POETRY

I HAVE lost fifteen pounds. This is lamentable, as I was already incredibly thin. My nature cries for expression of this elemental sorrow, the sorrow

felt at the loss of sinew and substance by one already sufficiently lean and spare. I search the poets for a sympathetic voicing of my thought, and I find that upon this one subject they are silent. Can I believe that they were all abundantly rotund? Or did they regard their fluctuations in weight merely as physiological phenomena ? To me, the disappearance not condensation, but absolute evanishment

of hoarded ounces represents a mystic problem. Just whither have they flown, those atoms of mine, which, by laws of conservation, must now be reassembling themselves in some form: as dew, or dust, or flame, or ash, or ghostly vapor? And shall I claim no property right? Shall I feel no yearn

ing for chance tidings of how they fare? A fruitful thought, in sooth. And because no poet has tuned his lute for me, I must construct my poems by hand. Laborious, to be sure, but the easier for the careful following of masters.

Fancy an emaciated Browning poised upon his trusty scales, reading with stricken eyes the loss of so considerable an amount. How would he grasp his fiery pen and set himself in this wise to write:

Gone then! Enough good flesh and solid bone To make a hand. Nay, two the heft of mine. What does a hand weigh? Fifteen honest pounds Should make at least a head — a head, say, and a

the utter certainty that somewhere my atoms are abroad in the land. Is their secret hiding-place in the vague drifting of summer rain; or the throbbing red of the hawthorn blossoms; or the faint humming of whitened clover fields? It soothes me to reflect upon Swinburne's mad revelry in extravagant detail; give him but his six-stressed line, and the ends of the world for his cæsura, and hear the sweeping echo of his fantasy: Sunset has kindled its flame, and its cloud is the

wraith of my soul, Quivering there in the glow of the wind and the rose in the west,

Fragments that linger at last in the dreamhaunted vapors that roll Tranquil as incense that floats from the silverswung censer of rest.

Oh, that I wholly were vanished, to follow the part that has gone

Feeling the pulse of the light in the far-lying path of a star,

Fainting in fragrance of dusk as I steal down the

shadows alone

Dim-flying forms of the elves a-glimpse in the stillness afar.

But Swinburne, as usual, cannot be trusted to the finish. What assurance have I heard from any newsy herald that my atoms have solved themselves in evening mist and twilight fragrances? He is too remote, is Swinburne. As I ponder introspectively upon the tendency of such substance as remains to me, I find that its stirrings are mainly commonplace; that it thrills to a flower rather than to a fragrance, - at a touch more delicately than at a thought. And I cast about for a quiet singer who fain would forsake the Milky Way to haunt a garden path; who would rather dwell in a sea-pool with the gray barnacles and the companionable urchins, and the sensitive, frayed anemones, than upon the ragged crest of windy storm-clouds. Oh, for a dainty, lovesome triolet written by Austin Dobson's gentle shade! How would he trim his lantern and dip his quill and order his rhyme-scheme! And

how clumsily, in contrast, we rustle our way about his quaint Provençal garden close. Still-there is yet to be phrased the song of our own atoms, lately lost. Do they dance in the dew

In the heart of the pansies?
Oh I think that a few

Must have danced in the dew,
And that some of them flew

To make spice for the tansies,
Ere they danced in the dew

In the heart of the pansies! And still my thought is a mere problem. Still there is no ultimate conviction as to the whereabouts of my errant self. I ponder the advisability of seeking more ripe and elderly sympathy from Chaucer. But I am sure that he would light his Chaucerean candle and proceed forthwith, not to enlighten me, but, shrewd eyes a-twinkle, diabolically to describe me! And just that I could not bear. 'Lene as is a rake,' I find that I rather shrink from the cheerful Dan. And, besides, he is so traditionally and unalterably portly. I must forego the hope of tracing my molecules to his daisy fields. After all, as in every strait, we were wise to go at once to the mighty Elizabethan. In his great hand, the vexed thought should mould itself to quiet and measured lines. And how I warm to his graceful flattery, his broad latitude as to mathematical accuracy. Sir Francis, now, would have scanned my meagre proportions, divided his too prudent reckoning by fifteen, and begun his poem with a different fraction, -a seventh, perchance, or a sixth. Not so our Shakespeare, with his round and gracious numbers!

A tenth of me. Insensate, lifeless, nil.
Matter sans spirit, late a part of me,
Shocked by my pain, warm with my ecstasies,
Bathed in the vital flow of very life,
And viewless now mid incorporeal air,
My lost, invisible, and evaporate self.
If physical fractions are so easy spared,
Who fears the last dim hour of mortal change
When soul from flesh eternally shall part?