failure for the establishment of principles more important and lasting than their own

success.

Every man who fails in public life merely because of his honesty makes it a little more difficult for the next man to succeed by means of dishonesty. Every man who fails in business merely because of his incorruptibility hastens the day when none shall dare succeed by corrupt methods. The fame of such failures would ultimately compass the ruin of dishonorable success. The story of such failures would be incomparably more brilliant in splendid recklessness and courage than all the annals of knightly chivalry, or pioneer bravery, or military conquest. To carry such failures to their logical conclusion would be to write the most thrilling chapter in the romance of humankind.

The greatest of all romances is found in the eternal truth of the Christian religion, which shows the God of the Universe Himself entering the lists for the glory of His Kingdom and the salvation of the world. Nothing that the romantic imagination can conceive is so wonderful as the truth of the

sacrifice of the Son of God upon the Cross, and the splendor of that shameful death.

If we have not been fully alive until now to the claims of Christian privilege, let us pray that some genuine apostolic fervor may awaken us, as S. Paul raised Eutychus to life, to seize the possibilities of romantic adventure in the Church, and in our home, and in our vocation.

II.

NATURE AND GRACE.

Unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.-EPHESIANS iv, 7.

ONE IS impressed by the bravery of the little company of men who fought the first battles of Christianity in apostolic days, with all the odds of the world against them. Among them there was a man who was originally a coward. When you speak of S. Mark, you remember that his symbol is a Lion, and that his name stands high upon the roll of mighty Christian heroes. But he was not always a hero. He was not of the stuff of which heroes are usually made. Nothing but the grace of God made him a Lion.

In the glimpses given of his early life both tradition and Bible history unite in representing S. Mark as on the run from some post of danger. He will make no high ventures. He will face no great peril. He will stake no great issue upon faith in a friend. When our Lord, in the discourse at Capernaum, declared that His followers should eat His

flesh and drink His blood, many of His disciples stumbled at the mystery of the saying, and would not wait for the explanation. They went back and walked no more with Him. Of these, tradition says, was S. Mark. On the night of the betrayal of Christ there was a young man, not with the disciples, who witnessed the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and who, when the Jewish servants of the High Priest laid hold upon him, left his garment in their hands, and fled away naked through the darkness. This, there is good reason to conjecture, was S. Mark. Some years afterward, when his cousin Barnabas, with S. Paul, took him upon a missionary journey, S. Mark became terrorstricken at the dangers of the enterprise, and turning his back upon perils of floods and robbers in the wilds of Pamphylia, fled to his home in Jerusalem.

The mother of S. Mark was a woman of wealth in Jerusalem. She had a house large enough to be used for the gatherings of the Christian disciples, whose cause she had espoused. It is not unlikely that her house was the one, having the large, upper room, in which Christ ate the Last Supper with His

friends, and instituted the Holy Communion. In the house of Mark's mother, at any rate, S. Peter was often a guest of honor, and when the storm of persecution burst upon the Christians of Jerusalem, always they found refuge in this home.

S. Mark's mother, therefore, was a distinctly courageous woman. By making her house a center of resort for Christians she put her very life in constant jeopardy. Certainly S. Mark did not inherit his timidity from this valiant mother. But, since temperament is often hereditary, it is not unlikely that he derived from his father a somewhat shrinking and timorous disposition. If the father were living at the time, it is significant that no mention of him is made in the sacred narrative. The mother is the bold and aggressive spirit of the household.

There is early evidence of the fact that S. Mark suffered from some physical deformity. It was remembered in Rome that he used to be called, "Mark, the stump-fingered," or "Mark, the cripple."

So we have the picture of this young man, not naturally strong either in body or spirit, brought up amid luxury at the home of his