Francis might feel it,
Catherine might feel it, because they lived in an atmosphere of poetry,
unchilled by criticism. I could never feel as they felt because I
could not transport myself into their atmosphere. Yet as often as I
turned to these great lives, something thrilled within me, some living
responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien
to them. Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could
make me, of their company? But how could I attain to their faith?
What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand
perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of
Christ which they possessed? And then the answer came--not suddenly,
but as a still small voice slowly growing louder, more positive, more
intense--_Live the Life_. Try to do some at least of the things that
Jesus did. Seek through experience what can never come through
ratiocination. _Be_ a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like
him, and know Jesus as he knew Him. Live the life--there is no other
way.
Simple and far from novel as the answer seems yet it came to me with
the authority of a revelation. It illumined the entire circumference
of life. I could no longer hesitate: Jesus had never spoken from the
Syrian heavens more surely to the heart of Saul of Tarsus than He had
to me.
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