n holiness. In the west, saints amazed the
world with their austerities and self-scourgings and confessions and
vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that. His reformation was
a triumph of imagination and a triumph of cheapness. It brought you
complete salvation and asked you for nothing but faith. Luther did not
know what he was doing in the scientific sociological way in which we
know it; but his instinct served him better than knowledge could have
done; for it was instinct rather than theological casuistry that made
him hold so resolutely to Justification by Faith as the trump card by
which he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have put it, the sign in
which he should conquer. He may be said to have abolished the charge for
admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this; but Luther and Calvin did
it.

JOHN BARLEYCORN

There is yet another page in the history of religion which must be
conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully understood.
people who can read long books will find it in Frazer's Golden Bough.
Simpler folk will find it in the peasant's song of John Barleycorn, now
made accessible to our drawingroom amateurs in the admirable collections
of Somersetshire Folk Songs by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From Frazer's magnum
opus you will learn how the same primitive logic which makes the
Englishman believe today that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the
strength and courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face
of the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers
and bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable of
incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his divinity
by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the song of John
Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the seed, the growth,
and the harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles and as
inexplicable as ever, taught the primitive husbandman, and, as we must
now affirm, taught him quite rightly, that God is in the seed, and that
God is immortal. And thus it became the test of Godhead that nothing
that you could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it
would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind eternal
life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again slain and
buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and indeed must, use
John Barleycorn "right barbarouslee," cutting him "off at knee" with
your scythes, scourgi