ABSTRACT
Most martyrs have made a kind of religion out of not expecting anything of it, and of trying to get out of it. Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve hundred years—a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave for holiness, for the eternal, and for the infinite. Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the people who knew how to be good without being crucified. The spirit, or at least the shadow, of a cross must always fall daily on any life that is stretching the world, that is freeing the lives of other men against their wills. The whole issue of whether there will be a cross or the threat of a cross turns on a man’s insight into human nature, and on his quiet and practical imagination concentrated upon his work.
