to-morrow is cast into the oven.  Then follows, as so often in the Gospels, the “how much more” which is like a celestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic.  Indeed this a fortiori, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I may remark incidentally) a thing very much needed in modern discussion.  Many minds apparently cannot stretch to three dimensions, or to thinking that a cube can go beyond a surface as a surface goes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitely above all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen.  But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of this many-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy with the modern mood.  Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life.  I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels.  For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things.  Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you will certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man.  It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet; that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons.  He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty of the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle.  And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers, an unfathomable evil.

In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena.  I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal, in which Christ’s admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity.  The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through all the changing years, ran thus:  “If he was God, he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession.”  It did not seem to strike the Hibbert critic that this line of criticism raises the question, not of whether Christ is God, but of whether the critic in the Hibbert Journal is God.  About that mystery as about the other I am for the moment agnostic; but I should have thought that the meditations of Omniscience on the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic, to be a little difficult to discover.  Of Christ in the Gospels and in modern life I will merely for