had loved them; and thus instinctively they fulfilled what the adorable mystic who wrote the fourth Gospel called his "new commandment." In this love, clearly a new sort of love to most of them—especially to women like Mary of Magdala and the Samaritan water drawer—in this love, characterized by a peculiar sense of "light" and "life," they found themselves at the center of a strange power which enabled them to operate all the necessary laws of conduct from within, and to bear all the pain and sorrow of life—and death itself—smiling.
The quality and intensity of their devotion, at once childlike and passionate, is suggested to us by recollection of the woman who sat on the floor kissing the feet of Jesus all through the dinner while the host performed the usual courtesies. She had become quite literally childlike, and was therefore qualified for this extraordinary new "kingdom," and was a fit companion for the beloved disciple, for the ecstatic St. Francis, for Thomas à Kempis, for Saint Theresa, for Saint Joan, for Vaughan, for Blake singing his songs of innocence, and declaring to the organized church:
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
It is possible, of course, that if Jesus had reappeared many centuries later, he might have concluded that a man's ability to do good work in the world is dependent on his wealth and his membership in various powerful organizations. He might have taken to bishops and deans who mixed in politics and wrote filthy satires and edited old plays and fought for the
