You know they don’t martyr people these days for their Christian faith.  At least not in the western half of the earth, the Christian hemisphere.  No, that’s quite behind the calendar.  That’s rather crude, quite behind the cultured advanced Christian progress of our day.  Our Christian civilization has gone long strides beyond that.  We have grown much more refined.  Now we kill them socially.  Many a one who would live true to the Jesus-ideals in daily life in a simple sane way finds certain social doors shut and carefully barred.

We kill them commercially now.  The man who will quietly hew to the Jesus-line in business is quite apt to find his income reduced.  The bulk of business shrinks.  The thermometer is run down below the living point.  We kill men by frost now.  The blockade system is skilfully used; isolation and insulation from certain circles.  We are much more refined.

The great need to-day is of living witnesses to the Christ in home, and social circle, in the street, and in the market-place.

    “So he died for his faith; that is fine,
      More than the most of us do. 
    But stay, can yon add to that line
      That he lived for it, too?

    “It’s easy to die.  Men have died
      For a wish or a whim—­
    From bravado or passion or pride. 
      Was it hard for him?

    “But to live:  every day to live out
      All the truth that he dreamt,
    While his friends met his conduct with doubt,
      And the world with contempt.

    “Was it thus that he plodded ahead,
      Never turning aside? 
    Then we’ll talk of the life that he led”
      Even more than the death that he died.

The Forgotten Preacher.

With a simplicity in sticking to his main point, John goes quietly on:  “that he might be a witness of the light.”  That’s rather interesting.  It was of the light he was to bear witness; not of himself.  It was not the technical accuracy of his work, not its scholarliness and skill that absorbed him, but that the crowd got the light.  Rather striking that, when you break away from the atmosphere round about, and think into it a bit.

Here’s a man walking down a country road.  It’s a hot day.  The road’s dusty.  He gets a bit weary and thirsty.  He comes across a bit of a spring by the side of the road.  Clear cool water it is.  And some one has thoughtfully left a tin-cup on a ledge of rock near by.  And the man gratefully drinks and goes on his way refreshed.  He quite forgets the tin-cup.

Sometimes the tin-cup seems to require much attention, up in the corner of the world where my tent is pitched.  It has to be handled very carefully and considerately if one is to get what possible drops of water it may contain.  The human tin-cup seems to bulk very big in the drinking process, sometimes, in my corner of the planet.  It is silver-plated sometimes; just common tin under the plating.  There’s some fine engraving on the silver-plating, noble sentiment, deftly expressed, and done in the engraver’s best style.  But the water is apt to be scanty, the drops rather few, in this sort of tin-cup.  It’s a bit droughty.