Christ. Passing by His influence upon institutions, education,
art and literature, we shall do well to consider how His example has
instructed man in the art of a right carriage of the faculties in the
home and market-place. In the last analysis, Jesus Christ is the only
perfect gentleman our earth has ever known--in comparison with whom all
the Chesterfields seem boors. For nothing taxes a man so heavily as
the task of maintaining smooth, pleasant and charitable relations with
one's fellows. And Christ alone was able always to meet storm with
calm, hate with love, scowls with smiles, plottings with confidence,
envy and bitterness with unruffled tranquility.

In all His relations with His friends and enemies the quality that
crowns His method of living and challenges our thought is the
gentleness of His bearing. Matchless the mingled strength and beauty
of His life, yet gentleness was the flower and fruitage of it all. For
in Him the lion and the lamb dwelt together. Oak and rock were there,
and also vine and flower. Weakness is always rough. Only giants can
be gentle. Tenderness is an inflection of strength. No error can be
greater than to suppose that gentleness is mere absence of vigor.
Weakness totters and tugs at its burden. When the dwarf that attended
Ivanhoe at the tournament lifted the bleeding sufferer he staggered
under his heavy burden. Weakness made him stumble and caused the
wounded knight intense pain. When the giant of the brawny arm and the
unconquered heart came, he lifted the unconscious sufferer like a
feather's weight and without a jar bore him away to a secure
hiding-place for healing and recovering. He who studies the great men
of yesterday will find in the last analysis that gentleness has always
been the test of gianthood, and fine considerateness the measure of
manhood and the gauge of personal worth. No other hero moving through
the crowds has ever been so courteously gentle, so sweetly considerate
in his personal bearing as this Christ--who never failed to kindle in
men transports of delight and enthusiasm.

The crying fault of our generation is its lack of gentleness. Our age
is harsh when it judges, brutal when it blames and savage in its
severity. Carlyle, emptying vials of scorn upon the people of England,
numbering his generation by "thirty millions, mostly fools," is typical
of the publicists, authors and critics who pelt their brother man with
contemptuous scorn. Th