You see, then, what is involved. Unless we can follow him through the point where his victory was won, all the rest will not amount to very much. We must follow him to the _end_ if we are to be his disciples. It is said of his first followers that when they came to this last lap of the journey, when the road before them took that critical turn which led through the Garden of Gethsemane, and became a Via Dolorosa, they all forsook him and fled. Do not some of our modernized versions of Christianity show a similar weakness, a similar reluctance to grasp the nettle, a similar tendency to stop short in their following of Christ precisely at the critical point? They forsake him and flee--flee for their lives!--This it is that makes simple Christianity so difficult; so difficult but so splendid, so infinitely worth achievement. There was a phase in the ministry of Jesus, a comparatively untroubled one, when he went about among men in a temper of radiant optimism, declaring his confidence in the Divine Companion, a confidence so complete that all anxiety for the morrow was banished and the soul freed for a life of the utmost generosity and beneficence. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Nothing too bad to be incurable; nothing too good to be hoped for; nothing too high to be attempted; nothing so precious that we cannot afford to give it away. Yes, even that! For there is that within the hero which is so rich that he can afford to give his very life away, and be none the poorer, but the richer; a strange discovery, made by many a brave lad during the recent war, as he prepared himself to "go over the top," and thought of his mother or of his beloved.