macy between nations was not generous, marriages between families were for convenience, leagues between confederates were for selfish protection and safe plunder, and the whole ancient system of gratuity, as is any system but that of æonian life, was coarse, selfish, and demoralizing. The giving encouraged by æonian life was what Paul called Charisma, that is, gracious bestowal-the offering of a heart all self-forgetting and eager to do good for its own sake-not glittering sham like the scattered coins of monarchs; nor like the bounty of nobles, a golden chain for the neck of genius; nor alms to the idle and vicious to make them more so, a benediction on folly, not the price of a profitable contract of marriage converting love into avarice, but charisma, love with proffered hand and whole soul.

The third characteristic of æonian life was Action. To commune with God and to love unselfishly must be balanced with holy action. "Follow me!" was the constant cry of the Master. "Sell all, give, but also come!" "Go thou, and preach the Kingdom of God!"

So He urged the luxurious, the maker of excuses, and every awakened one who had entered the Gate and was walking in the Way.

Spiritual gifts were talents, of which some men received more and other men less; but no man must bury what he was given. If not productive, the talents were misused, and, if uninvested, would shrivel, be squandered, and lost. Believers were to be lights in the world, the salt of the earth, a leaven of godliness, to leaven the crude lamp of humanity, purifying fire. To lay up treasure for self in an existence of spiritual laziness, showed not æonian life, but æonian death.

One might have to forsake father and mother, wife and child, might have to forego home and wealth, yea, be called to suffer martyrdom. No share in æonian life had that cowardice which shrank from danger, that laziness which scorned work, nor that despondency which whines over hardship. In matters of moral and religious decision, the line of least resistance was viewed by the

Master as the pathway of the weakling and the knave. It was the petulance of a child, the impatience of the thoughtless, the insurrectionary mood of the ungrateful, to sigh for a bed among lilies or a throne in a palace.

Such was æonian life in a human soulcommunion with God, oblivion of self, and sublime action in right-doing, regardless of

consequences.

CHAPTER XIII

THE COMING JESUS

GENIUS often fails to perceive the sublimity of its own sweep of vision. God uses men to do that, the end whereof is hidden from them.

Thus, Luther never escaped his inherited reverence for the German nobility as rulers by right divine, nor did he ever free himself from profound abasement in presence of ecclesiastical authority when rightly constituted, according to his own ideas. This was innate to his peasant blood. He fought abuses and not institutions, in conscience, not in irreverence. Yet the logical result of his heroism was civil equality and religious liberty. He built better than he knew.

Goethe admitted that he did not possess the key to the full meaning of Wilhelm Meister,

in the seeming belief that he was urged on to his literary work by a power within, not fully comprehended by his conscious mind; and Emerson was unable to tell, at a later day, what many of his earlier mystical sayings originally signified. Both men were sublimely great, seers who could not always interpret their own visions.

So with most prophetic natures, they do not read all the meanings of their own inspiration; their voices utter marvels that seem to their own ears an unknown tongue. What we call creative minds are, after all, themselves in the line of cause and effect, mere agents of a cosmic thinking which transcends human ingenuity.

Jesus was, to some extent, an exception to this rule. To be sure, He Himself confessed that He "knew not the day," and yet He persistently projected His personality into the future. The future was His own. The secret of the world He should reveal. The redemption of society He should accomplish. Constantly He avers that He "shall come." There need be