to come, the official figures given above. If peace were here now the profits on our Philippine trade for the next two hundred years would not give us back the money thus far expended in the prosecution of the war, with a reasonable rate of interest · on the amount. It is idiocy from a commercial standpoint to say that such war will pay the people of this country as a whole -idiocy opaque, impenetrable, pitiable. Grant, as perhaps should be done, that the profit upon Philippine trade made by the syndicates, land-grabbers, and exploiters of the labor there will eventually find its way into the general store of the country's wealth. It will not put back in the next two centuries what has even now been taken out of that store and consumed in the riot and waste of war.

The colonial experiments of Great Britain indicate in no wise the success we may hope to have in the Philippines. England's colonies were founded for the purpose of making new homes for her overcrowded population, and for the purpose of opening new fields for the production of bread for her people and raw material for her home manufactories. We do not need new lands for such purposes, nor will we for generations yet to come.

as

I have not touched upon the question as to whom the Philippines will pay, nor upon the one as to whether, so far concerns the people who make the investment, the amount already expended and yet to be expended would not pay far better in something else. The answers to these questions seem obvious.

Topeka, Kan.

FRANK DOSTER.

GEORGE D. HERRON: THE TRAGEDY OF

THE

CONSCIENCE.*

HE life of George D. Herron has been almost from the beginning, and probably will be to the very end, a vital part of that tragedy of conscience and truth and love which seems to be inherently necessary to the progress of the world toward a higher and freer and richer life. It is impossible to think of his life without thinking of tragedy-impossible to speak of his life without telling the story of tragedy. For that has been its warp and woof. Nor is it possible for any man to convey to his fellow-men a truth more important for them to know than the truth of this same tragedy of love and conscience. The divinest portions of human history are those written in blood.

It is very difficult, however, for most of us to recognize such a tragedy when it is quite near us. We can see it or we think we can at a distance, in some far-away period of the past where all the actors are unrelated to ourselves. But we do not comprehend very well the meaning of the tragedy in which we ourselves have a part. For most of us, I suppose, the "divine" is synonymous with the "ancient," and our God is safely dead and buried. Or, at best, he is as far as it is possible for us to get him from the sphere of human action and experience. Theophany is some vision of the strange and uncanny.

"I have had a theophany. Jehovah appeared to me in a burning bush on the mountain top." So the exiled Hebrew is supposed to have testified far back in the twilight of history. But it was not in any sort of bush that Moses found his theophany. It was rather in the vision of his oppressed countrymen in far-away Egypt, which had been fairly burned into the very substance of his soul-in that essentially did his

A Sunday evening lecture given in Plymouth Church, Rochester, N. Y., March 31, 1901.

theophany lie. It was a human vision. He found and had communion with Jehovah only as he found and had communion with his own essential self-that self which was intimately and indissolubly bound up with the lives of his suffering brothers and sisters.

"We have found the Messiah," cried the Galilean fisherman, Andrew, to his brother long centuries ago. But Andrew had seen nothing but the face of a stranger, a man like himself. He had had no theophany. Nor was he conscious of any such thing. And if the time ever came in the life of that Galilean peasant, or in the lives of his companions, whom we have canonized, when they were able consciously to say they had had a vision of the divine, it was only after they had witnessed the tragedy of a human life-not after they had seen this Nazarene against the background of the cross-crowned hill outside the walls of Jerusalem, but after they had seen the moral texture of his character against the background of the sordid life of their age. There has never been a theophany, and it is safe to say there never will be, which is not the vision of human life in its deeper capacities.

Let us think for a moment of that tragedy of the first century of which Jesus of Nazareth was the central figure. We shall find that it was precisely the same sort of tragedy as that which is being enacted all around us to-day. We shall discover more than that. We shall see, I think, that the type of life which Jesus represented is exactly the type of life that George D. Herron represents. I know of no principle involved in the life of the prophet of Nazareth that is not also involved in the life of this prophet of our own day.

History tells us that about the end of the first quarter of the first century of what we call the Christian era a young man from the little city of Nazareth began to preach down in the Jordan valley. The young man's name was Jesus. Very few-perhaps none of those who listened to him there had ever seen him or heard of him before. He was a stranger. No church had ordained him. No religious body had authorized him to preach. The members of his own household up in

Nazareth knew nothing of his intention to preach. They had not educated him for that purpose. He had been taught the trade of a carpenter, and as a carpenter his parents expected he would live and die. His father was a carpenter. He was the eldest son. His father was dead. His mother with several younger brothers and sisters were left. And these became his natural charge. Upon him devolved the support of the family. And probably for several years he had contributed largely to their maintenance.

But one day, not long after a rude preacher by the name of John had begun to speak his message to the people down by the Jordan side, this young Nazarene left his home along with many other people and went to the place where John was preaching. There Jesus proclaimed himself a believer in the things that John was saying, and shortly he himself began to preach the same essential message. The burden of John's message was: "The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Change your minds and enter the kingdom." That became likewise the key-note of Jesus' preaching and remained so to the end of his life. The kingdom of heaven meant to Jesus a social order of brotherhood and fellowship right here on earth. That was the central and dominant thought of his whole life and ministry. His whole philosophy of life was based on that social ideal. All his teachings are the necessary corollaries of that fundamental proposition.

Let me remind you that in this conception of life, which he began to propagate, Jesus was not repeating the instructions of any school or any recognized teacher of his day or nation. On the contrary, he was teaching ideas that were new, strange, startling, and revolutionary. Indeed, they are so to-day. There is not a sentiment or suggestion in the Sermon on the Mount which does not contradict the well-nigh universal beliefs and customs of our world. Select any church or religious body you like, and ask its members whether in actual practise they hold the sentiments expressed in the Sermon on the Mount; whether they believe that the "poor in spirit" are "blessed"; whether peacemakers are generally regarded as the

children of God; whether the inheritance of the earth is supposed to fall to the lot of the meek; whether a man who is persecuted for righteousness' sake is thought of as a happy man; whether the idea of loving one's enemies, of giving to him. who would borrow and expecting nothing back, or behaving with equal benevolence toward the evil and the good, just as the rain and sunshine do, is very widely cherished; whether it is possible to serve God and Mammon.

The united testimony of Christendom nullifies and contradicts every principle of Jesus' teaching. It holds to a set of beatitudes entirely at variance with those which Jesus taught. It has no use for the virtues he extolled. Indeed, it gives no evidence of having any comprehension at all of the mode of life which he embodied. He emphasized the fact that prayer at set times and places is not a good thing. But Christendom tenaciously maintains the exact opposite. And nothing is esteemed more natural by the religious world to-day than to serve God and Mammon-God Sundays, and Mammon all the time.

But the point I wish to make is simply this-that the young prophet of Nazareth taught new, strange, startling, and revolutionary truth. People are reported to have said: "He speaks as one having authority, and not as the scribes." In other words, Jesus made an impression on the people very different from that made by their ordinary teachers. Besides, as was natural and inevitable, a movement in opposition to Jesus at once sprang up among the influential men of that land and time. Spies were put on his track. They tried to entrap him with questions, hoping by his answers to get some excuse for arresting and bringing him to punishment. They finally succeeded, and after three years of public life he was executed as an outlaw.

Let me remind you, too, that it was characteristic of Jesus that he trusted the witness of his own soul. He had no tradition to base his teaching upon. There was no church behind him, nor any book. He freely criticized the Bible, which was then revered. He taught what he himself believed to be