Puslapio vaizdai
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frightfully unpractical politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once said to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation, whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some, at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him not to do. "The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way," said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. Honor is of the world, worldly-and some people have distorted that magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done in "Tomlinson."

All this about Honor is not so much a digres

sion as an approach. For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of self-defence, the lie "of obligation" cannot be juggled away; and it is the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend's secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil, while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as consecrated and de rigueur. But the gentleman, I venture to say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.

It is easier—as some sociologists do-to plot the curves of a desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be

I

THE SENSUAL EAR

HAVE a friend who always calls-when he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes

forgets the Methodist Church building in our village, a "conventicle." I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome "conventicle," just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an ideait is almost a fear-that Gospel Hymns, No. 5, is by this time Gospel Hymns, No. 10, and that some of the most haunting melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the "Endeavorers" are now chanting Hymns Ancient and Modern. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!

When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies has indulged in a new "democratic" vagary; when flour has gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of

the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis-then my husband (he, too, of yore an "Endeavorer") and I are wont to burst, simultaneously, mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are Gospel Hymns. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say hardily, "Let's." Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing getting a free "revival." Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning, so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along with the words.

They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They wallow in beat and accent. “A Shelter in the Time of Storm." We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh, how I wish that either of us could remember more than one "verse" of

Well, wife, I've found the model church,

And worshipped there to-day;

It made me think of good old times

Before my hair was gray.

I have never heard it sung-I never "belonged" to the Y. P. S. C. E.-but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he has heard "the trundle-bed one." I do not believe it, though he is a truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page,

Poking (perhaps it was another verb) 'mid the dust and rafters

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A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever sung; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in "To the Work, to the Work," or "There Shall Be Showers of Blessing."

(Mercy-drops round us are fall-ing,
But for the showers we plead.)

He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against "God Be with You Till We Meet Again"-perhaps because they always sang it for the last one. But I can usually get him to "oblige" with a solo-"Throw Out the LifeLine"-which I am sure was not in "No. 5," because we never, never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one "the people of Montreal seemed to like best." Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in

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