Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
He took bread and said that it was His body; and He gave thanks for
it, He broke it, and He gave it to them and said, "Do this in
remembrance of Me." . . . Do what? . . . The demand is nothing less
than this, that men should take their whole human life, and break
it, and give it for the good of others.
The growth in love, and the sacrifice which evokes that growth in
love, are, I would suggest the most precious things in life. Take
away the condition of this and you will destroy the value of the
spiritual world.
One may form, I think, a true judgment of the man from these few
extracts.
He is one who could not move an inch without a thesis, and who moves
only by inches even when he has got his thesis. His intellect, I mean,
is in charge of him from first to last. He feels deeply, not sharply. He
loves truly, not passionately. With his thesis clear in his mind, he
draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then,
with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being,
moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing.
Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily,
take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is perfectly sure of
striking home.
You must not think of him as old beyond his years (he is only a little
over forty) but rather as one who was wise from his youth up. He has
never flung himself with emotion into any movement of the human mind,
not because he lacks devotion, but because he thinks the victories of
emotion are often defeats in disguise. He wishes to be certain. He will
fight as hard as any man, but intelligently, knowing that it will be a
fight to the last day of his life. He is perhaps more careful to last
than to win--an ecclesiastical Jellicoe rather than a Beatty. Nor, I
think, must one take the view of the critic that he has never stuck to
the main point. Every step in his career, as I see it, has been towards
opportunity--the riskless opportunity of greater service and freer
movement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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