He feels Christ's eternity so much that he cries out for him continually and will not be satisfied without him. He knows that he must have the Christ if he wants to grow great enough to meet life's demands. In a poem, "A Prayer for Enlargement," which I quote in full because of its brevity, one feels this dependence: "Shrive me of all my littleness and sin! Open your great heart wide! Open it wide and take me in, For the sake of Christ who died! "Was I grown small and strait?-- Then shalt Thou make me wide. Through the love of Christ who died, Thou--thou shalt make me great." The Fiery Cross. To the Christian the following quotation will mean much. In it we hear the echo of Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy; or of that marvelous story of the regeneration of a human soul in Tolstoy's The Resurrection; an old-fashioned conversion of a human being; a Paul's on the road to Damascus experience. And the tragedy is that just about the time that the world of literature is being fascinated with this story of "Rebirth" the church seems to be forgetting it. It is told in the first verse of Ex Tenebris--"The Lay of the King Who Rose Again": "Take away my rage! Take away my sin! Strip me all bare Of that I did wear-- The foul rags, the base rags, The rude and the mean! Strip me, yea strip me Right down to my skin! Strip me all bare Of that I have been! Then wash me in water, In fair running water, Wash me without, And wash me within, In fair running water, In fresh running water, Wash me, ah wash me, And make me all clean! --Clean of the soilure And clean of the sin, --Clean of the soul-crushing Sense of defilure, --Clean of the old self, And clean of the sin! In fair running water, In fresh running water, In sun-running water, All sweet and all pure, Wash me, ah wash me, And I shall be clean." The Fiery Cross GOD AND HIS VOICE From the voice of Christ and the voice of the cross it is not far to hear the voice of God either in life or in John Oxenham's books. Behind the cross and behind the Christ stands the Father, and a treatment of this great poet's writings would not be complete if one did not quote a few excerpts from his writings to show that God was ever present "keeping watch above his own." The first note we catch of the Father's voice is in "The Call of the Dead": "One way there is--one only-- Whereby ye may stand sure; One way by which ye may understand All foes, and Life's High Ways command, And make your building sure.--- Take God once more as Counselor, Work with Him, hand in hand, Build surely, in His Grace and Power, The nobler things that shall endure, And, having done all--STAND!" The Vision Splendid.