seasoned heroism, and
that is to be a _living_ martyr, to bear the simple true witness
tactfully but clearly, when it takes the very life of your life to do
it, though it doesn't take your bodily life in a violent way.

You know they don't martyr people these days for their Christian faith.
At least not in the western half of the earth, the Christian hemisphere.
No, that's quite behind the calendar. That's rather crude, quite behind
the cultured advanced Christian progress of _our_ day. Our Christian
civilization has gone long strides beyond that. We have grown much more
refined. Now we kill them _socially_. Many a one who would live true to
the Jesus-ideals in daily life in a simple sane way finds certain social
doors shut and carefully barred.

We kill them _commercially_ now. The man who will quietly hew to the
Jesus-line in business is quite apt to find his income reduced. The bulk
of business shrinks. The thermometer is run down below the living point.
We kill men by _frost_ now. The blockade system is skilfully used;
isolation and insulation from certain circles. We are much more refined.

The great need to-day is of _living_ witnesses to the Christ in home,
and social circle, in the street, and in the market-place.

"So he died for his faith; that is fine,
More than the most of us do.
But stay, can yon add to that line
That he _lived_ for it, too?

"It's easy to die. Men have died
For a wish or a whim--
From bravado or passion or pride.
Was it hard for him?

"But to live: every day to live out
All the truth that he dreamt,
While his friends met his conduct with doubt,
And the world with contempt.

"Was it thus that he plodded ahead,
Never turning aside?
Then we'll talk of the life that he led"
Even more than the death that he died.

The Forgotten Preacher.

With a simplicity in sticking to his main point, John goes quietly on:
"_that he might be a witness of the light_." That's rather interesting.
It was of the _light_ he was to bear witness; not of himself. It was not
the technical accuracy of his work, not its scholarliness and skill that
absorbed him, but that the _crowd got the light_. Rather striking that,
when you break away from the atmosphere round about, and think into it a
bit.

Here's a man walking down a country road. It's a hot day. The road's
dusty. He gets a bit weary and thirsty. He comes across