so he is the greatest spiritual force among the prose writers of our time.

It seems well to honor the heroes of the faith, and Thomas Carlyle was—and is—one of them. If ever man believed in the Eternal God, in the perfectibility of human nature, in the moral order of the universe, in the supremacy of the spiritual, it was the old man whose long residence in Chelsea made that part of London glorious. He was always "on the side of the angels," always true to his convictions— which were sound. Always he faced the beasts of materialism with a dauntless heart. Our life what is it, unless dominated and permeated by the spiritual influence? Surely it is only a "vapor" that passeth away. knowledge, and the only knowledge that is divine. There is no way to get it into men except by making them profoundly and divinely discontented with things as they are. We can not get this message from the easy, cheerful optimists who refuse to see the plainest facts of life. We can get it only from those who, like Dante, have had the vision of hell. So we may conclude that if our religion does not body forth to us the realities of life it is worth noth

This is the

ing to us. To go to church, to give a little money to keep up the services, to profess Christianity with our lips, and all the while to live in bondage to the flesh, slaves to that life which Christ came into the world to destroy-this is to blaspheme the most sacred things. "I am the resurrection and the life," said Christ. Unless his followers partake of that resurrection and share in that life, unless they humbly endeavor to live up to the truth as it has been revealed to them, they have no life in them. So the Easter message is a call to reality, to that utter truth which we all ought to desire and to seek, to that noble life which the true servants of God have always lived.

THE

BIRTHDAY OF THE CHURCH

WHITSUNDAY, or Pentecost, is the fes

tival kept in commemoration of the birth of the Christian church. True to the scientific method, the men who are trying to relate the church more directly to life, are going back to the very beginning of things—are studying origins. The so-called progressives who object to this method forget that the best way to find out what the church ought to be is to find out what its Founder meant it to be, and to learn, as far as possible, how He was understood by those to whom He spoke. For the more closely the church conforms to the original pattern, the nearer will it come to being the true church of Jesus Christ. No one, not even the most extreme radical, proposes to depart from that pattern; no one professes to do anything more than to conform wholly to the mind of Christ. Now it is not proposed to go into any question of organization, important as that is.

For, though there is a great longing for church unity, it is not believed that men are prepared, as yet, to deal with this question in an unprejudiced way. So much has happened in nineteen Christian centuries, and so many systems have been built up which engage the affection and loyalty of men, that it seems hopeless to look in the near future for organic unity, greatly as it is to be desired. But some things stand out so clearly on the face of the record as to challenge the attention of the most careless reader of the account of the Pentecostal baptism. For instance, there was unity of the closest kind. For they "were all with one accord in one place." They were also expecting and looking for one and the same thing, namely, the outpouring of the divine influence. That the message was for all, that the church was to be catholic, is also clear.

But the immediately important thing, and the practical thing, is that the first gift to the church, the thing, indeed, which made it the church, was the gift of spiritual power. And this gift, as St. Peter reminded the people, was in direct fulfillment of the words of the prophet Joel:

"It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams."

The church was to be a prophesying and a teaching church, and that first of all. It was to be the storehouse of divine power, the transmitter of that power, and the applier of that power to the life of the world. But more important yet, those who were admitted to the church were promised but one thing—that is that they should "receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." The spiritual power in both cases came first. The church was to be, not rich or fashionable, not primarily a dispenser of charity, but the abode of the Spirit of God. And those who were admitted into its fellowship were not told that they should have earthly blessings, but they were told that if they repented and were baptized "for the remission of sins," they should receive that same divine power. A greater gift it would have been impossible for any of them to conceive of. When they had that, they had all. It was this that they coveted, this that they longed for. And