JESUS OF THE SCARS.

"He showed them His hands and His side."-St. John, c. xx. v. 20.

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on
Thy brow,

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the
Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place. Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim
Thy grace.

If when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of
Thine;

We know today what wounds are, have no fear,

Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

Edward Shillito.

The Westminster Gazette.

MYSELF.

What of myself?

I am like the unto the sere chrysanthemum

That is shorn by the frost-blade, and,

torn from its roots,

Whirled away on the wind.
Once in the valleys of Ch'in and Yung
I rambled at will,

Now ring me round the unfriendly plains of the wild folk of Pa.

O galloping dawns with Youth and Ambition riding knee to knee!

Ride on, Youth, with the galloping dawns and dappled days!

I am unhorsed, outventuredI, who crouch by the crumbling embers, old, and gray, and alone. One great hour of noon with the skyfaring Rukh

I clanged on the golden dome of Heaven.

Now in the long dusk of adversity I have found my palace of contentment my dream pavilion;

Even the tiny twig of the little humble

wren.

From the Chinese of Po Chu-i. (A.D. 772-846.)

SALONIKA IN NOVEMBER.

Up above the gray hills the wheeling birds are calling,

Round about the cold gray hills in

never-resting flight;

Far along the marshes a drifting mist is falling,

Scattered tents and sandy plain melt

into the night.

Round about the gray hills rumbles distant thunder,

Echoes of the mighty guns firing

night and day,

Gray guns, long guns, that smite the hills asunder,

Grumbling and rumbling, and telling of the fray.

Out among the islands twinkling lights are glowing,

Distant little fairy lights, that gleam upon the bay;

All along the broken road gray transport wagons going

Up to where the long gray guns roar and crash alway.

Up above the cold gray hills the wheelbirds are crying,

Brother calls to brother, as they pass in restless flight.

Lost souls, dead souls, voices of the dying,

Circle o'er the hills of Greece and wail into the night.

The Poetry Review.

Brian Hill.

We

When the news came that America had joined us in the war, most Englishmen experienced a thrill of exultation which they had not expected to feel. The great immediate and greater future advantages for the purpose of war, though some of us were fully alive to them, counted for little in the intense and lasting emotion of that moment. Many of us felt that the alliance, for purposes beyond the war, between what may be called the Liberal Powers, had not merely been extended, but extended in a manner which would do much to counteract influences hostile to its strength and quality. Contemplating, as we must, after the war, a long and difficult work in the establishment of lasting peace, rejoiced that the great and growing power of America is freed from the temptation to pose as a mediator between right and wrong, and will take part as a champion of right in the very arduous task of translating right into fact. All of us felt, and may be pardoned if we still feel yet more strongly the simple human pleasure which arises when a long estrangement among kinsfolk is suddenly and permanently reconciled. We felt and feel this in that inarticulate, instinctive way which carries with it the surest conviction-there are probably Americans who can hardly credit the intensity of this English feeling. What has happened is too big a thing for us to attempt complete analysis of it, or to care for much interchange of compliments on the occasion. Yet some desultory reflections about it may have their use in England or in America.

Why did not America go to war earlier? This is a question which weighs more with the Americans who know Europe well than it is likely to

weigh with Englishmen. On the whole, Englishmen, who were disappointed and greatly puzzled by the long delay, reflected that the American Government had its own difficulties of which they could not judge. This was partly because a country fighting for its life has little attention to spare for the study of non-combatant nations. But great credit is due also to our chief newspapers. The Times, in particular, had, in regard to English and American relations, a stain upon its record to efface. It effaced it, and it did more. Perhaps, too, we know that we must criticise others as having ourselves acted an honest, but not at the outset a heroic or an immaculate, part. We realized that the causes which, in our case, palliated a very unheroic hesitation were still stronger causes in the case of America, though it is hard for us to realize how vastly stronger they

are.

Till the violation of Belgium was an accomplished fact a powerful section of opinion (in Parliament at any rate) was in favor of standing by while France was feloniously assailed and perhaps beaten down. Abstractly considered-that is, considered without sympathetic understanding of the precise illusions which made it possible-this policy might seem to have been begotten by the completest baseness upon the completest folly. But something happened which, in our moments of selfrighteousness, should force us to say: "Not unto us be the praise." The German invasion of Belgium need not have enhanced, and did not enhance, our sense of national peril; any Englishman, reasonably alive to that peril, knew that it mattered little by what road the Germans got to Calais and Boulogne. But our

actual treaty obligation to Belgium, though no stronger than our moral obligation to France, happened to be far better understood at the time, and Belgium was obviously a weak nation and obviously unoffending. So the violation of Belgium was exactly what was needed to set in motion the imagination of the British people. We took notice, very late in the day but without further doubt, of that enmity to all hitherto recognized conceptions of right, which Germany has declared. The old Puritan, concealed in the honest British pacifist of three years ago, opened his eyes quite suddenly, and those eyes saw red; or, to be more exact, they saw, yet through a veil of blood and tears, and other unspecifically dirty and miserable things which his pacifism had taught him to contemplate more firmly, the nearer vision of the Lord. So the old Puritan set himself side by side with his old enemy, the other principal character in the drama of English history, the Cavalier who had known Sidney and had fought beside Falkland. both with equal gladness found themselves united with their gallant French antagonist of so many centuries past.

And

The great guns which, crawling up to demolish the forts round Liége, demolished on the way something else, were the precursors of an equally remarkable achievement some two

years later. German submarines, gliding under the Atlantic, glided also under a thick fog which overlay that ocean, and which hid the staring significance of European events from the eyes of so many Americans. In spite of several obvious differences the process of conversion in our countries has been in its essence much the same.

The higher minds of America, which there, as in England and in every other democracy, eventually govern, had been divided. There were those Americans whom we know and

understand, whose real knowledge of Europe made them from the outset as passionately devoted to the cause of the Allies as any Englishman or Frenchman, and whose splendid services from the first ought to dwell forever in French and English memories; and there were the sincere devotees of peace, whose illusions on that subject were more widespread and more inveterate than the corresponding illusions which prevailed among so many sincerely religious men in England. Motives of money-making and the like played exactly the same conspicuous, but entirely subordinate, part that they would play in like case among ourselves. America would not go to war while the honest pacifist remained unconverted; when he was converted she could go to war at once. It would be foolish and impertinent for us to suppose that we can appreciate exactly what passed in the minds of Americans, but several things we can appreciate. Not being at the outset immediately concerned in the war, or closely acquainted with its causes, or for a long time able by any possibility to take part in it, many earnest Americans turned very seriously to the hope that their country might fulfil a great mediatory mission after a while. It is to their credit that they did not easily let go this quite illusory hope. Moreover, there was something entirely honorable in the very features of their conduct which to us were most unintelligible. Outrages which could possibly be counted as, in some sense, isolated acts did not drive the American Government from the course it meant if possible to pursue. Flagrant insults to the American nation were, not from insensibility, but on simple Christian principle, ignored. But when the German Government had completed its demonstration that it was actually at war against the fun