and affections, half-broken by the strain of life, and in the overcoming of the grudges and grievances which have been nourished throughout the year; and he asks: "Is there room for me in these hearts, with their conflicting passions? Are they able to welcome my spirit of peace and good-will?" He comes to us in the poor and needy, as he came in the beggar's garb to Sir Launfal and says:

"He who gives but a slender mite,

And gives to that which is out of sight,

The hand cannot clasp the whole of his alms,

The heart outstretches its eager palms,

For a God goes with it and makes it store

To the soul that was starving in darkness before."

He comes to us, last of all, in our personal restlessness and haste, our worry and care, our frivolity and excitement, and says to us, as he said to his disciples: "Where is my guest-chamber? Is there room for me in your busy, thoughtless life to-night?" and the soul that is touched by the sense of the Christmas season, flings open its gate and says: "Enter, O spirit of the Christ. Within my busy life there is still room. Enter, and keep the feast with me."

XVI

THE NEW NAME

To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it. — Rev. ii. 17.

HIS symbolism is drawn from the
Jewish ritual. The high priest in
the Old Testament had a special
It was

and intimate relation with God.
he alone that could enter into the Holy of
Holies and eat of the manna which was
hidden there as a sacrifice; and on his
breast he wore a special sign with a sacred
and mysterious inscription unknown to the
common world. The splendid imagination
of this author transfers all this immediate
and solemn intimacy to the whole body of
Christian believers. Ye are all, he means to
say, priests unto God. The sacred relation-
ship which, under the old Law, was for one
holy person, is now to be the blessed privi-
lege of all faithful souls. He that overcom-
eth shall have direct access to the presence

of God, without the intermediation of any priest. He can go straight to the altar of the hidden manna; he can wear on his own breast the special name which is known to him and to God alone. The Christian religion, that is to say, singles out the individual from the mass and gives to each one a place and significance and sanctity which are for no one else but him.

This is a time when we need to recall again and again the individualizing, personal, selective process for which religion stands. There probably never was a time in history when people were so much involved in wholesale, aggregate, mass-movements, and when the individual was tempted to think of himself as of so little account. When we want anything accomplished in our day, we organize an association, and hold a meeting, and appoint sub-committees, as if to justify Matthew Arnold in saying that our most sacred book was the Book of Numbers. When we look at the world of industry, what does it seem but a huge machine in which the individual worker is simply one little cog in one little wheel, whose impersonal action interlocks with all the rest? I stood once at the

death-bed of such a man, who had spent all his days as a clerk in the midst of a vast establishment; and as we talked about the death that seemed approaching him he looked up in my face and said: "Sir, I have been practically dead and buried for twenty years."

mass.

Or, once more, we look at our social life, and does it not seem like a great mass of conventionalism and conformity, to which the individual has to conform, but which he cannot hope to transform? The very slang of the time seems to make of the individual merely an atom in the movement of the One person says that he "keeps up with the procession;" as if the problem of his life were like that of a little boy who tries to keep step with the band. Another person says that he is "in the swim;" as if he were a sort of conscious chip swept along by a resistless current. And in the midst of this impersonal, aggregated conventionalism many a young life cries out: "Oh, to be, somehow, myself; to be something more than a cog in the machine and a chip in the stream! Oh, to have some personal and rational place in the order of things, which shall make it worth while to live!"

Now, that is precisely the gift of religion to many a half-submerged and dehumanized life. It sifts the person out of the mass. It gives him a name and a place of his own a very small place, no doubt, and a very humble name, but still his own. He is not a cog; he is not a chip; he is a child of God; and just as each child in a family has his own name and his own individualized love, so in the family of God there is a name and a right of approach for each humblest child.

That is the very first thing which religion does for a man. You open the Old Testament, and find that when God calls people He calls them not in a crowd, but each one by his own name. "Samuel, Samuel," He calls, and the boy says: "Here am I." You turn to the New Testament, and find that when the shepherd puts forth his sheep he calls each by name and leadeth them out. The shepherd goes after the one sheep; the woman seeks for the one piece of money. Each soul is identified and precious. You come to the last pages of the Bible and the promise is that he who overcometh shall be as the high priest, with the right to the hid