Testament are those that I read to-day, the most tragic I think, in the literature of mankind:

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not!"

And yet the religion of Jesus is the religion of compassion, the religion of the Eternal Compassion that cannot finally be defeated.

Here is the gospel. Do not sit down and paint the blackness of the world. It knows how black it is. Tell it of the loving-kindness of the Lord and His unfailing compassion. Climb on the altarstairway of the pity in your own heart up through the gloom and into the presence of God.

You recall Whittier's "Ten on the Beach." How one recurs to that series of poems. Whittier, who regarded our human world so often and with such eyes under the aspect of tragedy, sings:

"Oh, the generations old

Over whom no church-bells tolled,
Christless, lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies!"

There is the appalling tragedy. But he had faith to match it, faith in the Eternal Compassion declared through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Still Thy love, O Christ arisen,
Yearns to reach these souls in prison!
Through all depths of sin and loss
Drops the plummet of Thy cross!
Never yet abyss was found

Deeper than that cross could sound!"

There is the religion for this day. The complication is fateful and terrible, the experience in sin, folly, shame, and woe is immeasurable, the mystery is such that no finite mind can disperse or even mitigate. There remains the compassion in our own heart, aspiring to the Eternal Soul, finding in our human pity a ladder from time to Eternity, from finite to Infinite. When we climb that ladder we find ourselves in the presence of the Absolute Compassion; we behold our world under the aspect of Eternity, and our world under the aspect of tragedy finally melts through suffering, through all the ways of an inexorable justice, through recreative pity, into accord with a Universe all light, all love, all joy, all peace.

VI

WHAT IF CHRIST WERE NOT?

By

NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, D. D., LL. D., Pastor, Plymouth (Congregational) Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.

Newell Dwight Hillis was born at Magnolia, Iowa, in 1858. The Presbyterian Church at Evaston, Illinois, was the scene of his first pastorate. At the death of Prof. David Swing he was called to the pulpit of Central Church, Chicago. In 1899 he was called to the pulpit of historic Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, as successor to Drs. Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott. Upon learning of the death of Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus who was, perhaps, the foremost American pulpit orator of this generation, Dr. Joseph Fort Newton wrote me saying: "Only Hillis can take his place as master of the Pulpit Art." Judged by the throngs that everywhere seek to hear him, by the number of times his words are quoted, and his name mentioned both in America and England, together with the popularity of his many written works, it is scarcely too much to say that there is no more influential living preacher in the English-speaking world.

Among Dr. Hillis' best known books are: All the Year Round, The Battle of Principles, The Contagion of Character, The Fortune of the Republic, The Quest of John Chapman, A Man's Value to Society, The Investment of Influence, The Quest of Happiness, The Better America, The Influence of Christ in Modern Life, Great Books as Life Teachers, Great Men as Prophets of the New Era.

VI

WHAT IF CHRIST WERE NOT?'

"And Jesus said to his disciples, Will ye also go away? And Peter answered, To whom?" -JOHN 6:67, 68.

S

EVERAL authors, with varying skill, have written books on the condition of the world

if Christ were not. Every one is familiar with Jean Paul's Dream of the Children, coming into the church and sobbing out their sorrow because there is no Christ, and no Christmas, and that all alike are orphans. Henry Rogers wrote a book called "The Eclipse of Faith," in which he imagines that some powerful hand has wiped the influence of Christ out of civilization, as some hand wipes the chalk writing from the blackboard of the schoolroom. This brilliant author represents himself as going into his library to discover that every vestige of Christ's life and words has wholly disappeared. He opens his law books upon the legal safeguards protecting children in the poorhouses, the orphans, the chimney sweeps, the boys in the coal mines, the poor in tenements, the slaves everywhere, and lo! all these laws have disappeared, leaving paragraphs blank in some law books, with here and there whole pages, and indeed, entire 'Published also in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.