HERALDS OF GOD
Leave us our toys; then happier we shall stay
While they remain but toys, and we can play
With them and do with them as suits us best;
Reality would add to our unrest. …
We want no living Christ, whose truth intense
Pretends to no belief in our pretence
And, flashing on all folly and deceit,
Would blast our world to ashes at our feet, …
We do but ask to see
No more of Him below than is displayed
In the dead plaything our own hands have made
To lull our fears and comfort us in loss—
Who will dare to say that the poet's imagination has misled him? Men have always been ready, in sheer self-defence, to erect some vague idealistic image of Jesus in the temple of their spirits. But that is the image which we have to break, that the living Christ may reign.
"Reality would add to our unrest." Indeed it would. Hence the familiar hiatus between piety and practice, the scandal of the divorce between sacred and secular, between religion and the common life. Hence the intent debating of theological controversies totally irrelevant to human need. Hence the cult of a religion that is garrulous about minutiae of form and procedure, and dumb about social injustice: "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." Of all such obfuscations of the flaming challenge of Christ, John Oman once pungently declared: "A minister who can do it will
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