love and friendship contain more than they do for other men.  Christ takes us more completely out of ourselves and wraps us up in those to whom we feel ourselves bound.  He makes life touch life at more points, life draw from life more copious inspirations, life cling to life with more affectionate tenacity.  He roots and grounds us in love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear them from us irrevocably—­parents, children, husband, wife, lover, beloved, friend,—­is to leave us of all men most pitiable.

  Love—­the prisoned God in man—­
  Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
  Cries like a captain for eternity.

Again, Christ gives men an ideal for themselves which in their threescore years and ten, more or less, they cannot hope to achieve:  “Be ye perfect as your Father.”  Jesus Himself, in whom we see the Father, is for us that which we feel we must be, yet which we never are.  Immortality becomes a necessity to any man who seriously sets himself to become like Jesus.  Our mistakes and follies, the false starts we make, the tasks we attempt for which we discover ourselves unfit, the waste of time and energy we cannot repair, the tangled snarls into which we wind ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life absurd, if it be final.  It cannot be more than a series of tentative beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a gigantic blunder.  If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out on its quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor.

  The fiend that man harries
    Is love of the best.

We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory is forever impossible for sheer want of time.

Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order—­the Kingdom of God—­a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its accomplishment.  We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is redemptive.  But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order appears.  Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute.  Haste means folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly.  Things as they are have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle.  We ache with curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give anything to be in at the finish.  But there is death.  We just begin, and then—!