made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structure
of such passages. Certainly there are few finer examples of the swift
architecture of style than that single fragment about the flowers;
the almost idle opening of a chance reference to a wild flower,
the sudden unfolding of the small purple blossom into pavilions
and palaces and the great name of the national history; and then with
a turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grass
that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven. Then follows,
as so often in the Gospels, the "how much more" which is like a
celestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic. Indeed this
_a fortiori_, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I may
remark incidentally) a thing very much needed in modern discussion.
Many minds apparently cannot stretch to three dimensions,
or to thinking that a cube can go beyond a surface as a surface
goes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitely
above all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen.
But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of this
many-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy with
the modern mood. Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated
art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all
that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life.
I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this
pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels.
For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely
as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural
things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his
testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things.
Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read
it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you
will certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man.
It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet;
that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons.
He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty of
the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle.
And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there
is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers,
an unfathomable evil.

In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps
the mind which admi