and undemanding half-Christianity. The Gospel has been emasculated long enough. Preach Christ to-day in the total challenge of His high, imperious claim. Some will be scared, and some offended: but some, and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage at His feet.
II
I pass on now to a second form in which the fact of tension, of paradox and conflict—so characteristic, as we have remarked, of the mental and spiritual climate of to-day—thrusts itself upon the preacher of the Word. This is the radical tension between Escapism and Realism. You will encounter nothing more baffling than the way in which an urgent quest for reality and an intense desire to avoid reality at all costs can apparently consort together.
Consider the latter tendency first. Some of you will know St. John Adcock's striking poem The Divine Tragedy. It is an imaginative attempt to conceive what would happen if Jesus of Nazareth were to come back to the modern world; if some of those who profess our holy religion, and remain safe and snug behind a façade of second-hand dogma and devotion, were suddenly confronted with the blazing reality of Christ Himself. Hear the poet's conclusion:
When a blithe infant, lapt in careless joy,
Sports with a woollen lion—if the toy
Should come to life, the child, so direly crost,
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