d this truth. He had
watched a fight between drunken men in which one shot the other. He said
to me, 'When I see how bad some of my brothers are, I know how good the
Great Spirit must be to love them all!'"

"Was--was he a member of any church?" inquired the amiable Presbyterian,
with a facetious gleam in his eyes.

"I didn't ask him--of course we know he wasn't a Presbyterian."

Hereupon Father Riley and the wicked Unitarian both laughed joyously.
Then the Congregationalist, gazing dreamily through the smoke of his
cigarette, remarked, "You have omitted any reference to the great fact
of Christianity--the sacrifice of the Son of Man."

"Very well, I will tell you about it," answered the young man quite
earnestly, whereat the Unitarian fairly glowed with wicked
anticipations.

"Let us face that so-called sacrifice honestly. Jesus died to save those
who could accept his claim to god-ship--believing that he would go to
sit at the right hand of God to judge the world. But look--an engineer
out here the other day died a horrible death to save the lives of a
scant fifty people--their mere physical lives--died out of that simple
sense of oneness which makes us selfishly fear for the suffering of
others--died without any hope of superior exaltation hereafter. Death of
this sort is common. I would not belittle him you call the Saviour--as a
man he is most beautiful and moving to me--but that shall not blind me
to the fact that the sacrificial element in his death is surpassed daily
by common, dull humans."

A veiled uneasiness was evident on the part of his listeners, but the
speaker gave no heed.

"This spectacle of sacrifice, of devotion to others, is needed as an
uplift," he went on earnestly, "but why dwell upon one remote--obscured
by claims of a God-jugglery which belittle it if they be true--when all
about you are countless plain, unpretentious men and women dying deaths
and--what is still greater,--living lives of cool, relentless devotion
out of sheer human love.

"Preach this divineness of human nature and you will once more have a
living church. Preach that our oneness is so real that the best man is
forever shackled to the worst. Preach that sin is but ignorant
selfishness, less admirable than virtue only as ignorance is less
admirable than knowledge.

"In these two plain laws--the individual's entire and unvarying
selfishness and his ever-increasing sensitiveness to the sufferings of
others--there is th