f Jesus was and still is
reckoned as the most marvellous aspect of Christianity: not His teaching
or His work, but His life.

Well, was not His life-drama typical and prophetic for His Church? His
Church had to live through all those agonies, external and internal,
that He Himself lived through. She had to go through sunshine and
darkness, through angelic concerts and devilish temptations, through
death and resurrection. In one word, she had to live His life, again and
again, treading sometimes quickly, sometimes reluctantly, her path,
always asking for light and comfort from her visions of Him. I say the
visions of Him, because those visions were omnipotent, including in
themselves words and works.

There is an impressive picture now circulating in London of an English
soldier lying wounded in agony on the battlefield. Well, what would a
Buddhistic painter put as a simile of consolation for the man in agony?
What else if not a Buddha's sentence or word? And what would a
Mohammedan painter put on the picture to console the expiring soldier if
not also a sentence or word from the Koran or an imaginative view of the
Paradise which is waiting for him? And you know what a Christian painter
depicted--the vision of the Crucified! the soldier lying beneath this
vision grasping with his hand Jesus' bleeding feet; this vision of the
Crucified is greater than any sentence, any word, yea, it includes all
the words of sympathy and of consolation. On another occasion the
Christian painter would paint another appropriate vision, and a painter
of another religion or philosophy would write another appropriate word.
Therefore, it is difficult to learn the Christian religion without
pictures, or to teach it without visions.

THE DRAMATIC FORMATION OF THE CHURCH

It was a quarrel, as usual, among men about God and bread, when Jesus
interrupted them. Peter never thought to fish anything else all his life
but fishes, nor Pilate to sentence to death anyone but criminals, nor
the Jewish patriots that they were losing their greatest opportunity,
nor the heathen of Britannia that they were contemporaries with the very
God in flesh of their posterity. How many times did it happen that Jesus
during the first thirty years of His life was present in the temple when
a Rabbi read the prophetic passages on the Messiah! Reading the
Scriptures the poor Rabbi measured the distance between himself and the
Messiah by thousands o