I call the world’s attention to this picture with the assurance that this is the great, the beautiful, and the important lesson. If there be those who do not see in the body-racked figure of Christ an honest reiteration of an actual event, who cannot honestly admit that such a thing could have reasonably occurred, there is still a lesson just as impressive and just as binding as though it had. These people whom you see kneeling here and lifting up their hands present an actuality of faith which cannot be denied. This Christ, if to you and to me a myth, is to them a reality. And in so far as He is real to them He implies an ardent desire on the part of the whole human race for tenderness and mercy which it may be as well not to let go unanswered. For if Christ did not suffer, if His whole life-story was a fiction and a delusion, then all the yearning and all the faith of endless millions of men, who have lived believing and who died adoring, only furnishes proof that the race really needs such an ideal--that it must have tenderness and mercy to fly to or it could not exist. Man is a hopeful animal. He lives by the belief that some good must accrue to him or that his life is not worth the living. It is this faith then, that in disaster or hours of all but unendurable misery causes him to turn in supplication to a higher power, and unless these prayers are in some measure answered, that faith can and will be destroyed, and life will and does become a shambles indeed. Hence, if one would balance peace against danger and death it becomes necessary for each to act as though the ideals of the world are in some sense real and that he in person is sponsor for them. These prayers that are put up, and these supplications, if not addressed to the actual Christ, are nevertheless sent to that sum of human or eternal wisdom or sympathy as you will of which we are a part. If you believe that hope is beautiful and that mercy is a virtue, if you would have the world more lovely and its inhabitants more kind, if you would have goodness triumph and sorrow laid aside, then you must be ready to make good to such supplicants and supplications as fall to you the virtues thus pathetically appealed to. You must act in the name of tenderness. If you cannot or will not, by so much is the realization of human ideals, the possibility of living this life at all decently by any, made less. THE PUSHCART MAN