d, but it is justified by your gifts,
given to you by Providence. Therefore let your hearts be larger than
your Empire and your national Church, and the respect of mankind towards
you will be warmed by love. Surely there can not be built a greater
Empire than yours, humanly speaking. The only greater Empire than yours
will be Christ's Empire. And if you are longing for something greater
than your present possession, you are indeed longing for this universal,
pan-human Empire of Christ. Otherwise you would be sticking either at a
stagnancy or at something impossible. Both would be unwise: nature
tolerates no stagnancy and punishes experiments with the impossible.

But who am I to teach you? "A reed (from the wilderness) shaken with the
wind"? Not I but the present despair of the world teaches you. I am only
a loud amongst many suffocated cries from West and East, from North and
South, directed to you: lift up your hearts and listen! God is now doing
a great thing through you, and the whole world is expecting a great
thing from you. What is this great thing? How to reach it? Pray and
listen! One thing only is sure, that this great thing will come neither
from any Foreign Office nor from any War Office, but from the living
Christian Church. Yes, she is still living, although she looks dead. She
is only sleeping. But Christ is standing beside her now, calling: "Rise,
ye daughter! Talitha Cumi!"

CHAPTER II

THE DRAMA OF THE CHURCH

The Church is a drama. She represents the greatest drama in the world's
history, yea, she personates the whole of the world's history. She
originated in an astounding personal drama. Humanly speaking, in the
life of Jesus Christ during the three years of His public work there was
more that was dramatic, from an outside and inside point of view, than
in the lives of all other founders of religion taken together. And
speaking from a soteriological and theological point of view, His
life-drama had a cosmic greatness, involving heaven and earth and both
ends of the world's history. Wonderful was the life of Buddha, but his
teaching was still more wonderful than his life. Very striking was the
life of Mohammed, the life of a pious and romantic statesman, but his
work quickly overgrew his personality. Five years after Mohammed's
death, Islam numbered more followers than Christianity five hundred
years after Golgotha. But the life-drama o