God knows, but even a little worse, perhaps, at watching. The Gospel strikes again the note of the persecution, to be surely expected by all true witnesses of Christ: persecution, not by wicked people, be it noted, but by the respectable and the godly: "They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service." There is much in these solemn warnings, deliberately incorporated by the Church in her most sacred days, that ordinary Christians can not by any stretch of application appropriate to themselves!

But the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth Who shall bring all things to our remembrance, is promised; and year by year the Church waits with the disciples in the Upper Chamber, confident that the best is yet to be and that she shall receive the promised Power.

CHAPTER VIII: WHITSUNTIDE

Antiphon: How hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? V. They began to speak with other tongues,

R. As the Spirit gave them utterance.

O God, Who as at this time didst teach the hearts of Thy faithful people, by sending to them the light of Thy Holy Spirit; Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in His holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end.

Amen.

CHAPTER VIII: WHITSUNTIDE

OD among us, our Brother, that has been

the centre of thought from Advent until now. God within us, our Indweller, to this deepest sanctuary of experience, we are summoned by Whitsunday.

This faith in the Indwelling Spirit is the final sanction and seal of democracy. Lacking it, most thinking people would automatically become aristocrats:

"Thou art a man: God is no more:

Thy own humanity learn to adore,"

cries William Blake. But belief in humanity as even potentially divine, is the last triumphant defiance to the aspect of things, a defiance very difficult to sustain in the face of the sorrowful human story. To know that God created us is scant comfort; it but deepens our shame as we see "what man has made of man." To know that God becomes Man and suffers with man is indeed

the source of strength and consolation; yet one can not forget the daily spectacle, patent to seeing eyes, of man crucifying the God who saves him. But He Who is the Eternal Seeker, the insatiate Lover, has further reassurance to offer our despair. He comes as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the sweet Guest of the Soul, a guest whom no sin of ours can exile. The heavenly spark is part of our existence; it is the spark of life without which the soul were not. He Who is Creator and Redeemer is also Sanctifier, and our very being, broken and desecrated though it be, is the Temple of His Presence.

There is a definite reason for the certain fact that in the modern world, immanential ideas have accompanied the rise of democracy. As the People have been coming to their own, the visible emblems of King or Judge or even of Father, which had sufficed monarchical and autocratic times, as all religious art can testify, have lost reality. They have been replaced more and more by a burning intuition of a Presence, closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet. The Christian must claim as his own the splendid passages inspired by the vibrating recognition of Universal Spirit, which are the culminating glory of early nineteenth century poetry in England: