Jesus. He knew that familiar and dear face. There were the outstretched hands and the side. But Thomas did not put his hand into that wounded side. In a crisis faith has to act and to decide. Faith is higher than knowledge. Faith has various sources of knowledge. It uses the intellect, the affections, and the will. The intellect is arrogant at times and seeks to rule out the affections and the will, but they have to be heard. We must use our intellects, for God gave them to us. But he also gave us our affections and our will. Thomas really understood no more than he did before how Christ came into that room, and how he rose from the dead, but here Jesus was and Thomas must decide what to do and at once. Thomas surrenders to the Risen Christ: "My

Lord and my God" (John 20. 28).

This is no mere exclamation of amazement, as the reply of Jesus shows. Thomas gave Jesus the worship of his heart and Jesus accepted his new faith and loyalty at its face value. We do not have to say that Thomas fully grasped the significance of his language and comprehended how the Risen Christ is both God and man. Faith has risen above mere intellect evermore. Faith has seized upon the heart of the situation. The man who has struggled with his honest doubts has risen by faith of experience to the noblest confession in the Gospels. It is Thomas the doubter, the pessimist, the skeptic, who has become the man of sublime faith. We may thank God that it is possible for such a thing to happen. Jesus was patient with Thomas, for he knew that he was not posing as a skeptic for social prestige, but at heart really longed to believe. He was not occupying a false position, but was working toward the light. So Jesus met Thomas with proof that won him. But Jesus puts no crown on the doubt of Thomas. He rejoices in his new conviction and frank confession, but Thomas has missed the highest form of faith. He had refused to believe in the Risen Christ unless he conformed to his own tests. He had refused to believe the witness of those who had seen the Risen Christ. So Jesus says: "Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20. 29). This beatitude Thomas has missed. It belongs to those who will never see with their eyes Christ on earth, but who will be satisfied

with the testimony of the eyes of the heart. They will reach up the hands of faith and will grasp the hidden hands of Christ. These are the heroes of faith who do not make unreasonable demands of Jesus in the realm of the Spirit.

Surely this rebuke to Thomas may be a rebuke to-day to those who press their skepticism too far. Criticism and science have their rights and their duties, but the intellect is not the whole of man any more than the body is the whole of life. The kingdom of God consists in love and joy and peace and righteousness, and not in meat and drink. Peter heard Jesus speak this rebuke to Thomas. And Peter will one day speak of Jesus, "whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Peter 1. 8). That blessed privilege is open to every believer to-day whatever doubts may beset him. He can find his way back to Christ-in whose face one finds the glory of God.

A J. Fahrton

THE PHANTOM OF DEATH

Now, when the world is so full of the memory of death, death great and beautiful, it is time to sweep away the old, morbid conceptions, the dark superstitions, the ancient dreads and fears. More terrible and archaic than the dinosaur has been our dread of death. With all our alleged knowledge of science we have been as unattuned to the resistless and magnificent onsweep of the natural forces as the savage who hid in his lair from the onslaughts of imagined gods in the elements. We have been fearful, primitive, unadapted. We have been ancient, purblind, cowering. We have pictured death as a distinct and terrible entity, a down-swooping specter, a black visitant, a hooded skeleton. Through the ages our minstrels and artists have heightened the vision for us and increased the dismal sound, and we, responsively, have sat within our cottages and castles awaiting with horror the phantom of our fear.

In a recent era of great death, our youth, the radiant, upstanding hosts of them, revealed to us a new vision. They went out, in the flame of their life, more spirited, more sentient, more ablaze with health and beauty and passionate love of earth than any hosts before them. They met, with a suddenness never before experienced, an impact of vitality against dissolution, never so keenly known. Because the mutation was so widely undergone, and so widely witnessed, we see and understand as never before the significance of the process. We are lifted up on a wave so much vaster than that which lifts us on the occasions of individual deaths that we are borne up at last to a plane of vision which it were well we had reached before. From it we are given to see life and death, not as two peaks confronting each other, one flooded with light, the other cowled with night; but as two knolls in the vast plain. From it we actually behold, as our philosophy had taught us to conceive with those dim eyes of the sequestered mind, that life and death are not dual, alien, opposed, but fused, melting, identical, a single process. From this plane, bewildered, we catch intimations of

vaster enveloping processes of which the life-death process is only a small phase, even as the stars of Scorpio are an infinitesimal swarm in the swinging mesh of the Milky Way.

From this same plane, as spiritual aviators, we observe that our beloved life to which we so passionately hold, in our little human shape, enclasping with small arms, inhaling with eager breath, surveying with elfin, ardent eyes, is a far smaller, less important thing than we had, even in our most profound philosophical moments, realized. When we are in life, erect, sentient, brilliantly equipped with the marvelous machinery of consciousness which our ancestors have bestowed upon us, it is our human habit and our human fault to believe that existence in human form is the sole reality, the "be-all and the end-all," the cosmic consummation. Exactly as our eyes have become so perfectly adapted to their environment, so crystal-cognizant of this iridescent world, even as our hands have become tools so suited to this place that they carry in sensations only of this earth-solidity, this granite density, these terrestrial concretions, even as our ears have tuned themselves only to these earth-echoes, these few vibrations that traverse the strings of our small sphere, so too our spirits and minds, with all their content of hopes, dreams, aspirations, surmises, faiths, beliefs, convictions, intentions, and potential deeds, are preformed to this latitude of the Milky Way, this habitat, this life. With inherited ease we enter into the actuating belief that life is all-important, all-wonderful, unique. Through the long crowded line of ancestral human traditions is lost the primordial tradition that we are fire and mist and swinging atoms, cast for only a moment into a life-shape, recast, rethrown, children of the nebulae and of eternity.

From our intense concentration upon this life-form come all our corresponding agony and fear of so-called death. We have so cherished and developed and beautified and intensified this life, made of ourselves such distinct entities clear-cut from the chaos, palpitating with such exquisite sensation from head to foot, that the return into the chaos seems to us a cruelly sharp change, à torturing anguish, and we bitterly call it "death." This is our strange and wonderful penalty for deserting the earth-mother, ris

ing up out of her multitudinous molecules of clay into the compact, quivering, rapturous, suffering human body and soul.

Not only had we learned, we aggregated atoms, to love life per se, mortal life, but we had come to love our own forms of it, our specialized selves, our entities. These identities had become so precious to us that the surrender of them in their present shape added to the death-change a specialized horror. We had become too addicted to life, too preoccupied with ourselves. It needed the great, conspicuous wave of self-surrender which has been sweeping the world to re-demonstrate our relationship with the earth, the air, and the eternal fires; to set great intimations blowing in upon us from trans-earth areas. It is with a wonderful and terrible vividness that we realize at last that, as our prophets and poets have sung to us through the ages too faintly for our comprehension, life, the prized, the beautiful, the great, is in very deed only a spark on the wind of the eternal elements, an experience so small that it deserves in the vocabulary of the spheres not even the dignity of a name; that death, which we see stalking over the earth gathering in its millions upon millions of bright bodies and lustrous souls, is a change from so-called life; a little fading of the color, a conversion so imperceptible that even the sun cannot behold it, that the postdeath reunion with the universe, greater than the episode of life and death, is ultimate, superb, desirable.

This last experience alone reveals itself as natural, impersonal, peaceful, permanent, sublime. This alone holds all the ideal conditions toward which we strive in the accidental adventure of life. In the stress and strain of living are we not ever striving toward peace, utter and complete? Death alone bestows such peace. Through its tranquil interact we should be prepared and rested for any post-death evolutions. In life are we not always seeking through the temporary, the transient, the futile, for the fundamental, the permanent, the everlasting? Our lives and our literature are replete with the moods and the words "seeking," "yearning," "desiring." What do these participles signify but our unconscious intimations of life's incompleteness, its immaturity, its crescent hope, to be later fulfilled in the posthumous circle of completion? We, vagabond children of the cosmos, are ever un