Its heroes are heroes of faith, whatever may be the earthly admixture. Its fighting spirit attaches itself always to the realization of a God-given hope. This indeed is the fuller meaning of David's words. Infinitely above the literal battlefields of earth are the conflicts of the world's great ideas, its moral conceptions, its spiritual hopes and ambitions. When men's fingers tingle with enthusiasm for these, when men's hands are taught to grip these with a strength born of God-this is David's truth carried into the battlefields of life where moral and spiritual issues are tried.*

5. As long as Christianity takes color from the Word of God, it will have a militant spirit. To this aggressive faith impossible will be, as Mirabeau said, "a blockhead of a word," and difficulties will be made "only to be overcome." The poet Tennyson expressed great admiration on one occasion for Garibaldi, the Italian patriot, whom Henry Taylor described as

-"that gentle hero, who

Dethroned an unjust King, and then withdrew
To tend his farm."

Garibaldi was visiting Lord Tennyson, and stretch. ing his wounded leg out in the presence of the poet he said, "There's a campaign in me yet." † The

* A secretary for Home Missions writes: "When I think of the nearly one million foreigners coming to our shores annually, and the open doors in Cuba and Porto Rico, my fingers tingle with enthusiasm." This is how God teaches our fingers to fight in this day of gospel opportunity.

Memoir by his son, vol. ii, p. 4. "The joy of my father in heroism," writes his son, "whether of a past age or of the present, and his delight in celebrating it, are more than ever apparent."

courage of Christianity is inexhaustible. It is fed out of the literature of courage in the Bible. Old King Clovis, hearing the story of the crucifixion, exclaimed, "Would that I had been there with my brave Franks, his enemies must have trembled." The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews reaches the climax of his argument for a faithful Christian life, when he adds, "Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." The sublime courage of the Son of Man in his life and death is an inspirational quality in the gospel that can never be exhausted.

Christianity makes a strong appeal to the heroic in man. It calls for action; it summons to aggressive service. It is nothing daunted by difficulties; neither is it content to occupy a narrow circle. Its mission reaches out to the end of the earth because its spirit contains an indomitable courage. In short it furnishes "a moral equivalent of war."* Wherever its sacred Book is known, men are inspired to do their best, and civilization takes on a militant air. Christianity would sheathe the sword of battle, but not the sword of the Spirit. The gospel is taught in terms of battle-the sword, the shield, the soldier, the armor, the fight Christianity is not a theory for the Academy or the Porch; it cannot be shut up in cells and retreats. God is

* "What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible."Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James.

still "teaching our fingers to fight." The progress of this militant faith must be indicated by some. thing more than dress parade and "marking time"; Christianity must be fighting battles all the time. Nothing less than such a literature of courage as is furnished in the Bible would be adequate to support the fighting spirit of Christianity.

None have expressed the value of a literature of courage such as is furnished by the Bible and by the books that have reflected its spirit, better than Henry van Dyke in his address before the PanPresbyterian Council. "I want the books that help me out of the vacancy and despair of a frivolous mind, out of the tangle and confusion of a society that is busied in bric-à-brac, out of the meanness of unfeeling mockery and the heaviness of incessant mirth, into a loftier and serener region, where through the clear air of serious thoughts, I can learn to look soberly and bravely upon the mingled misery and splendor of human existence, and then go down with a cheerful courage to play a man's part in the life which Christ has ever ennobled by his divine presence." *

Christianity and Current Literature," address delivered at Liverpool 1904.

VIII

THE CHARM OF LETTERS

IT has been said that letters are the most personal form of literature. We are not accustomed to thinking of letters as containing the material of literature; but a moment's reflection will show that they occupy no inconsiderable place in literature. "The Life and Letters" is not unfamiliar as a literary title. It is natural to associate "letters" with "life." The publication of a volume of letters is usually welcomed by the reading public, and few public men are excused from this demand of literature. The demand is based on native curiosity. We are all more interested in persons than in events. We insist upon biography. Incidents apart from mind and life have no charm for us. We ask irresistibly, What of the man? How did he act? What was his bearing under difficulty? What were his inmost thoughts? What was the story of his inner life?

The habit of preserving letters is an interesting testimony to the values set upon them. There is a universal feeling that by letters we are brought closer than by any other means to the "touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still." It is related of the widow of Schumann, the musical composer, that whenever she was about to play any of her husband's music in public, she would read over some of his old letters to her, written in the

lover days. Thus, she said, his very life seemed to fill her, and she was then better able to interpret his work. There are few households in the land that have not preserved in chest or drawers or pigeonholes some bundles of old letters by which they of the present keep themselves in living contact with those of the past. The essential charm of letters lies in the stamp of personality which they bear. It is said that Mr. John Morley, author of the magnificent biography of William E. Gladstone, prepared himself for the task by examining over fifty thousand of the statesman's letters. What a revelation of personality in such a volume of correspondence! Knowledge comes to us with new value when it bears the fresh marks of personality upon it. The peril of abstraction is removed, and truth makes its appeal out of a living and concrete example.*

The mind never quite recovers from the delightful surprise of finding letters in the New Testament. If men had been making the Bible, it would hardly have occurred to them to couch any considerable part of it in the form of letters. It would have seemed to them no doubt a sacrifice of stateliness, of that high degree of dignity which is supposed to be

* One can imagine the thrill of feeling in the mind of the archæologist who one day picked up, among the clay tablets found in the ruins of an ancient city, a letter from a soldier in the army to his sweetheart at home. The incident was related to the author on the deck of a steamer sailing up the Bosphorus. The letter ran about as follows:

Dear Bylbia, I have been ordered with my regiment up the Euphrates, and cannot even come to say farewell. I shall return in April and then we shall be married. April is a good month for a wedding."