Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/63

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

that they surrendered where that happier generation will not surrender but will achieve. The needed capacities are buried of God in life, but we are not willing to believe that they are there or to have faith in Him to energize them.

Let me put the truth in yet a different way.

Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received a very interesting letter from a friend who is one of the best known and best loved judges in our country. It was written on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day, and he said in it that he was pursuing the practice which he had pursued for many years, of trying in the interval between Good Friday and Easter morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from his thought of life and of the world in order that he might thus bring home to his own mind and conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, and he said he could hardly wait for Easter morning to come to escape from the oppressive gloom and depression in which his spirit was as a result of his enforced practice. And he begged me, as one of his friends, to try this between the next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see what the experience would mean.

Oddly enough my own thoughts that same day on which my friend was writing this letter were exactly the opposite of his. He was thinking of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was thinking of all that He had come to be and to