This is the witnessing we're sent to do. And the crowds crowd to listen, when it's given. This is the way _the_ Witness did. He followed the clear Father-voice, though the road led straight across the regular roads through thorn hedges and thick underbrush. Should not the servant tread it still? The word that John uses here underneath our English word _witness_ is the word from which our English word _martyr_ comes. And martyr has come to mean one who gives his life clear out in a violent way for the truth he believes. But, do you know, that is easy. "Easy?" You say, "Surely not, you're certainly wrong there." No, you are right. It is not easy. To face a storm of lead, or feel the sharp-edged blade, or yield to the eating flame,--that is never easy. But this is what I mean. There's the heroic in it, and that helps. You brace yourself for it. The terrible crisis comes. You pull together and pray and resolutely, desperately, face it. A little while, and it's over. You've been true in the sharp crisis. You have taken a place with the noble army of martyrs. And we who hear of it have a martyr's halo about your head. But there's something immensely harder to do. Without making a whit less than it is the splendid courage of martyrdom, there's something that takes immensely more courage, and a deeper longer-seasoned heroism, and that is to be a _living_ martyr, to bear the simple true witness tactfully but clearly, when it takes the very life of your life to do it, though it doesn't take your bodily life in a violent way. You know they don't martyr people these days for their Christian faith. At least not in the western half of the earth, the Christian hemisphere. No, that's quite behind the calendar. That's rather crude, quite behind the cultured advanced Christian progress of _our_ day. Our Christian civilization has gone long strides beyond that. We have grown much more refined. Now we kill them _socially_. Many a one who would live true to the Jesus-ideals in daily life in a simple sane way finds certain social doors shut and carefully barred. We kill them _commercially_ now. The man who will quietly hew to the Jesus-line in business is quite apt to find his income reduced. The bulk of business shrinks. The thermometer is run down below the living point. We kill men by _frost_ now. The blockade system is skilfully used; isolation and insulation from certain circles. We are much more refined. The great need to-day is of _living_ witnesses to the Christ in home, and social circle, in the street, and in the market-place. "So he died for his faith; that is fine, More than the most of us do. But stay, can yon add to that line That he _lived_ for it, too? "It's easy to die. Men have died For a wish or a whim-- From bravado or passion or pride. Was it hard for him?