responsibilities, the more superb the opportunity for measuring ourselves with these, and proving to the world by our victorious strength how great and good we are. We cannot, I think, exaggerate the seriousness of the situation. The greater, for this reason, the event, if we are equal to the necessity that is laid upon us in this day of trial.

"Great Master of earth's mighty school,
Whose children are of every land,

Inform with love our alien rule,

And stay us with thy warning hand

If, tempted by imperial greed,

We in thy watchful eyes exceed.

"That in the days to come, O Lord,

When we ourselves have passed away,
And all are gone who drew the sword,
The children of our breed may say,
These were our sires who, doubly great,

Could strike, yet spare the fallen state."

THE WISDOM OF FOOLS.

AND yet not so much “the wisdom of fools" as of such as are accounted fools by those who account themselves particularly wise, the prudential moralists, the hard-headed, matter-of-fact utilitarians, who would measure everything by its money value or by its equivalent in things good to eat or wear. Wisdom is justified of her children, said the good Galilean; and what I should like to show and to illustrate is that this wisdom which is accounted foolishness by many is justified of her children; that, given an outlook sufficiently broad and inclusive and intelligent, it will be seen to be a higher and a better wisdom than the penny-wise, pound-foolish prudentialism whose votaries think they are the people, and that wisdom will die with them.

Not without serious purpose have I read to you this morning the pathetic story told in the New Testament of the woman who anointed Jesus with the costly spikenard, and thereby excited the wrath of the stout utilitarians, who objected that it might have been sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor. This story is told in every one of the four Gospels, but never twice in quite the same way. The total range of difference is great, and is significant of the uncertainty attaching to the New Testament story of Jesus in its every part. Thus in Luke the woman is represented as "a sinner," meaning what Desdemona could not speak; while in John she is identified with Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who had chosen the better part which could not be taken from her. Wonderful has been the ingenuity which the harmonizers have shown in straightening out these things.

There is one device that never fails them;

namely, to conceive that the different narrations refer to different events. By this device the character of Mary of Bethany is saved; but at great expense of critical credulity. It is most unlikely that we have here anything but several distortions of a single event in the life of Jesus. For my present purpose, it boots not to consider which of them is the most trustworthy. They all agree in the one incident of the waste of the ointment, and three of the four in the serious and solemn reprehension of this waste by some of the people who were witnesses of the distressing scene, and also in the particular that Jesus justified the woman in her act of generous devotion and uncalculating love.

And in the situation here depicted with so much naïve simplicity I seem to find a parable of things which are continually happening in our modern life. Ever the alabaster box of precious nard is being broken, and its contents lavishly poured out; and ever there are those among the lookers on who mourn the foolish waste; and ever, too, there is some one of a different spirit to come to the rescue of the doer of the reprehended action and say: "Let her alone! She has done a good work."

What I wish to do this morning is to throw myself not carelessly and violently, but firmly and unquestionably, upon the side of the so-called unpractical in this division of opinion, to "stand up for Jesus" in this particular aspect of his life, and for those who, in the line of his behavior, dare to justify something and much of what is commonly accounted waste of money, labor, power, affection, genius, life. Fain would I plead for what my friend Lloyd Jones calls "the uncalculating soul," and enlist your sympathies with mine and those who think with me as to the relative wisdom of the New Testament woman and her critics, as to the relative wisdom of their respective followers all the centuries down.

I have used once or twice the word "utilitarian "

to designate the narrow practicality which objects to any expendi

ture of power or money which is not justified by its immediate concrete results. But there is a higher utility, and a lower; and, if the lower does not take my fancy or elicit my approval, the higher claims my warmest admiration and my most profound assent. We have no use for a morality which is of no use to anybody. Those who declare that we should do right because it is right, do but seek to put us off with an identical proposition. Right is not made more august by being found to be without any foundation, any rationality. It is that which is essential to the good of life, the art of men's living happily together. But there is a utilitarianism of the Franklinian moralist which is quite another matter from that which finds the essence of morality in its contribution to the fulness and the worth of life. The higher kind is broad enough to include many things on which a cheap expediency would coldly frown, high enough to include many things that are accounted rash and dangerous, deep enough to include many things that have no obvious utility.

I take this line with greater confidence because I have recently been reading a study of Nansen's venture farthest North, by Mr. Leslie Stephen. Now Mr. Leslie Stephen, as some of you know well enough, is one of the great utilitarians. His opus magnum, "The Science of Ethics," is one of the most complete and irrefragable statements of utilitarian ethics that have ever been produced. But his utilitarianism is not that of Simon, the Pharisee; it is not that of the utilitarian who will dare nothing, who must see all the results of his action before he will take a single step, who measures the utility of the action by the immediate practical result. If his utilitarianism were of this kind, there would be nothing in Nansen's venture in the "Fram," and across the ice and water, during those long interminable months, that would appeal to his sympathy and admiration. And yet it does appeal to his sympathy and admiration in a very marked degree, and this, too, without any inconsistency,

without any sacrifice of his essential principle. Why and Not because he finds in Nansen's how does it do this? venture any increment to scientific knowledge that justifies so much "expense of spirit," the jeopardy of so many lives, each one of them capable of work manifestly serviceable to human needs. Even such gain to science would impress our utilitarians of the baser sort as a miserably inadequate result. If Nansen could have opened a passage all the way through Bering's Straits to Greenland, and seen to it that it did not close behind him, that would have been something like. That might have indefinitely facilitated the killing of seals and the selling of their pelts at a good profit where it In fact, about nine-tenths of is now comparatively small. all our scientific exploration is, from the lower utilitarian point of view, a waste of the ointment. affect Mr. Leslie Stephen's admiration of Nansen and his arctic toil and strain, and for the reason that in that toil and It was Schiller who strain he sees a kind of glorious play. "the play defined the æsthetic element in human nature as

But this does not

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impulse." But Mr. Stephen would credit to this impulse a great many activities of the mind and will that are not æsPoetry thetic, that have not the beautiful for their goal. or music or painting, the fine arts in general, suppose a form of activity in which a man devotes himself not to any further result, but to the expression of his own emotions and the cultivation of pleasurable sentiments." They are, then, by this sign, a kind of play. Have they, then, no utility? To say Yes "would be to suppress all the elevating and refining impulses, and to look forward to a state in which everything except the gratification of the instincts necessary to the lowest kind of existence would be suppressed." But not only is art in all its forms a kind of play, but every kind of activity which exercises the mind and will And all without reference to immediate practical ends. must have play as well as work for the completeness of humanity. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."