this reason many have hailed their author as a great religious teacher. But as a fact there are few writers of poetry and fiction in whose writings religion, or even ethics, has so subordinate a place. Aside from a dozen or so of his poems, one would hardly know from his books that such a thing as religion existed in the world.

Few of his characters are religious, or even very moral. He likes best to paint soldiers; but these are seldom of a high class; indeed they are generally of a decidedly low class. But with all their ignorance, their drunkenness, their vice, their brutality, he makes them in a way attractive by giving us a glimpse of some winning trait in them. This man is brave; this man has a fine dash of the chivalrous in him; this one is a genial companion; this one is faithful and uncomplaining in duty; this one is a good fighter; this one is loyal to the "Widow at Windsor"; this one stands by a comrade in a hard place. Thus we are made to judge leniently of lives coarse and low and often brutal and rotten. Nor are Kipling's higher-class characters, as a rule, much better. Even if they have money and social position, and dress for dinner, a painfully large number of them drink and race and bet, possess very little intellectual life and indulge in very loose morals.

I do not mean to say that Kipling handles his characters or tells his stories in such a way as to make his books positively immoral or irreligious; but I do mean to say that if we in this generation have no higher moral standard or better religious teaching than most of Kipling's writings afford, indeed I may say all, outside of a dozen or so of his poems,

-we shall not rise to any moral or religious height which we shall have reason to be very complaisant over.

Kipling brings into the thought of our time a strong force; but morally it is an uneven force. His religious influence is not harmonious or consistent; he has not thought himself out into clearness in religious matters.

Some of his religious conceptionsfor example, those of God and justice. and duty and heaven and hell and retribution-are crude; for enlightened men to-day to accept them would be to go backward. His ideals of life are by no means invariably the noblest. Many of them give unmistakable signs of the debasing influence of the camp and the barracks.

His religion is preeminently the religion of power. With the power is associated some sense of responsibility, some awakenings of conscience, some traces of retributive justice, as related both to individuals and to nations; but higher than these he seldom or never rises. A religion of love he seems to know nothing whatever about. His religion is the religion of the Old Testament, not of the New, or rather it is the religion of the earlier and less ethical parts of the Old Testament. His God is the Jehovah of might and wrath and war, whom we find depicted in the books of Joshua, Judges and Kings. Hence the opening lines of his "Hymn Before Action":

"Jehovah of the thunders,

Lord God of Battles, aid!"

The God of love, of the Gospels and the Epistles, especially the Heavenly Father of Jesus, seems to be a conception wholly foreign to his thought.

Kipling is not a spiritual seer, and he is not a great religious thinker. To some extent he feels the religious confusion of our time; but he does little or nothing to illuminate it. With the great religious problems. which confront thinking men to-day he gives no evidence of having grappled; he can therefore afford us little help in the solution of these problems. It is this that differentiates him so widely from poets like Browning, Tennyson and Wordsworth. These great thinkers and seers all have the power to take their readers strongly by the hand and lead them straight up out of the valley and the shadow, out of the fog and the dark, out of fear

and doubt and spiritual uncertainty, to the mountain tops, where there is light. Tennyson helps us to "beat our music out"; to "fight our doubt and gather strength"; to "face the spectres of the mind, and lay them"; and thus at length "to find a stronger faith our own. Wordsworth opens our eyes to see "the light that never was on sea or land"; teaches us "truths that wake to perish never"; shows us how to put our ear to nature, as a child to "a smooth-lipped shell," and there hear voices, murmurings,

"Though inland far we be,
of that immortal sea.
Which brought us hither!"

Browning teaches us to sing,

"God's in his Heaven;

All's right with the world!

Thus do these men who can think as well as sing-these great seers and interpreters of God and the human soul-lead in solving the religious problems that press upon the modern world, and lift men from despair to hope, from doubt to faith, from weakness to moral power, and give new meaning, new incentive and new glory to man's life.

It is here that Kipling is weak. It is here that his religion shows itself so much below the highest. It can make men fight; it cannot make them love. It can make men plod and drudge with faithfulness, and even with courage; it cannot give men wings; it cannot make the soul sing songs of faith and joy and victory. And yet I believe that Kipling has a religious message for our time. Some of his poems have been born out of his deepest soul, and go

straight to the consciences and religious needs of many men. God speaks to the world through many voices. I believe one is that of Kipling. Let us turn to those poems in which he has let the best that is in him find utterance, and see more exactly what his message is.

Kipling's best known religious poem is his "Recessional." Hardly any other piece of verse written in our day has been so quickly and so widely taken up. The reasons for this were two. First, it was a very strong poem. This everybody admits, although it seems that the author himself did not at first think much of it, and actually committed it to the wastepaper basket. But it had a simple and noble grandeur about it that impressed all serious minds. The second and perhaps most important reason for its quick popularity was its singular opportuneness. England was celebrating her great jubilee in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the crowning of her sovereign. The mightiest fleet of war vessels that the world ever saw had been assembled along her coast. Representatives of her armies, her colonies and her subject peoples had been gathered from all parts of the world. London was ablaze with flags and decorations and marks of gayety and signs of England's wealth and pride and power. There were great civic and military processions filled with the royalty and nobility of Britain, representatives of the leading royal families and governments of the world, subject princes from Africa and India, generals, statesmen, diplomats, men of fame in many walks of life. The metropolis and the whole land were wild with excitement, were drunk with pride and display and boasting over the material greatness of the nation. At last the end came. The vast assemblies dispersed; the pageant faded: the delirium, was hushed. It was time for serious thought as to what it all meant. Then rose a voice calm and strong, that sounded far, and smote

the conscience of England almost as if God had spoken from heaven. It was Kipling's solemn and mighty hymn. Its first three verses are the best. I will quote only these:

"God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine,Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget-lest we forget!

"The tumult and the shouting dies;

The captains and the kings depart; Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,

A humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget-lest we forget!

"Far-called our navies melt away,

On dune and headland sinks the fire;Lo, all the pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget-lest we forget!"

I hardly know of anything in the history of literature so dramatic, so powerfully and nobly dramatic, as was this hymn of Kipling's, coming at that opportune moment to stir England's conscience, to rebuke England's pride, to warn her against putting her

trust

"In reeking tube and iron shard

All valiant dust that builds on dust,"

and forgetting justice and humility and duty and God.

Who shall write America's Recessional? Would that some Kipling might arise to sound a similar note of warning to us in our growing pride in material things and our new delirium of ambition for military greatness and unholy conquest,-forgetting justice, forgetting the great mission to which we have been called as a nation, forgetting God.

The poem of Kipling that has had the widest reading, next after the "Recessional," is probably is probably "The White Man's Burden." This poem has caused a great deal of discussion. It has called out strong assent and strong dissent. It is a message from Kipling to the American nation, writ

ten seemingly with a twofold end in view: first, to urge us forward in the direction of imperialism, with which Kipling, in common with most Englishmen, seems to sympathize; and secondly, to warn us that we shall not find the new road upon which we are entering a smooth or a short one, but one that will lead us farther than most of us can see, and rough enough to test us to the uttermost. Of course he writes in the light of England's experience in the same line. The poem is so familiar that only a single verse need be reproduced:

"Take up the White Man's burden;
Send forth the best ye breed;-
Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captive's need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child!"

Two important thoughts are suggested by this poem. The first is, what will be the effect upon us as a breed" to be sacrificed in schemes of nation of sending forth the "best we imperialistic conquest and colonization in the tropics? Is our best young blood to be lightly prized? Is the loss of such blood from the nation's veins, by being poured out on foreign soils, a small matter? Suppose we kill off the fastest and best young horses in this country, for a series of years; how long a time will have passed before there will be a sensible degeneration of the horses of the land? Can we afford to enter upon a career which means the steady and systematic killing off, by bullets and tropical fevers, of tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands, if the experience of Spain and Great Britain is any index) of our best young men, and the consequent loss and degeneration to our own nation which this implies? Let us face the fact that "sending forth the best we breed" to "serve the need of new-caught, sullen peoples" by fighting "the savage wars of peace" in the tropics means and always must mean just this. Is this

a burden which as patriots we should be eager to take up?

The second thought suggested by the poem has to do with the value of this kind of help to the peoples to whom we offer it. Do we benefit peoples who aspire to liberty and selfrule, when we conquer them and make them subject peoples? Let no American believe it. Instead of benefiting them, we arrest the process of their true and natural development. We rob them of their dearest right. The true preparation for liberty is liberty.

We cannot shoot civilization into peoples. We cannot Christianize them at the point of the bayonet. We cannot give them good government by killing off their men and making their children and children's children hate us and everything connected with us for generations to come. The kind of burden that we should bear for other peoples less favored than we is the burden of kindness and good will and helpfulness. What we should carry to them is not machine guns and unscrupulous greed, but schoolteachers, missionaries, honest trade, the spirit of Christianity, protection, the sympathy which a strong, free, noble nation ought always to extend to weaker peoples struggling upward to enlightenment and self-rule. The trouble with the kind of White Man's Burden which Kipling talks about is that it really means the Brown Man's Burden. It means the white man taking his own burden and putting it upon the brown man's back and compelling the brown man to carry it. That is what English imperialism means. That is what all imperialism means. Surely we do not need any Kipling to exhort us to move in that direction.

One poem of Kipling's seems to me execrable, utterly unworthy of any man who cares for the good of mankind. I refer to "The Truce of the Bear," written soon after the manifesto of the Czar of Russia calling a Conference in the interests of peace. In this poem Kipling uses all his

power as a poet to throw discredit upon the sincerity of the Russian Emperor and to induce England to refuse to have any part in the Conference. What right has Kipling thus to impugn the motives of any man? What right has he to put the worst possible interpretation upon the Czar's conduct, especially when to do so means aid to the terrible war spirit and hindrance to the peace spirit in the world? Kipling has a heavy responsibility to bear for his conduct in this matter.

While Kipling writes primarily to entertain, there are evidences enough that he does not write without a sense of responsibility. Perhaps this feeling of responsibility is most clearly defined in the dedication of his "Soldiers Three," and in the "Envoi" to his "Life's Handicap." his "Life's Handicap." In the former he writes:

"Lo, I have wrought in common clay Rude figures of a rough hewn race! For pearls strew not the market place!

Yet is there life in that I make?
Oh, Thou who knowest, turn and see.
As thou hast power over me,
So have I over these,

Because I wrought them for Thy sake,
And breathed in them mine agonies.

"Small mirth was in the making. Now
I lift the cloth that cloaks the clay
And, wearied, at thy feet I lay
My wares, ere I go forth to sell.
The long bazaar will praise-but Thou-
Heart of my heart, have I done well?"

It would be difficult to give to any work a nobler dedication than this. If all tasks were wrought in the spirit of these lines, how it would lift up human lives! The "Envoi" is not less earnest or devout. The author's book is finished, and at the end he writes:

"By my own work before the night, Great Overseer, I make my prayer!

"If there be good in that I wrought,

Thy hand compelled it, Master, thine; Where I have failed to meet thy thought, I know through thee the blame is mine.

"The depth and dream of my desire,

The bitter paths wherein I stray, Thou knowest, who hast made the fire, Thou knowest, who hast made the clay.

"One stone the more swings to her place In that dread temple of thy worth; It is enough that through thy grace

I saw naught common on the earth!"

We have here not only a feeling of reverence and a sense of responsibility, but in the last line we have another thought which reveals Kipling at his best:

"I saw naught common on the earth!"

However far apart they may be in other respects, in one thing Kipling is like Emerson. Both see the glory of the common. To both

"In the mud and slime of things,
Ever, always something sings!"

I am disposed to think that Kipling's greatest poem of a religious character-not the noblest, but the one in which he shows the greatest poetical genius and power-is "McAndrews' Hymn." McAndrews is a rough diamond. He is an old Scotch engineer on board a great ocean passenger steamer. Theologically he is a Calvinist. He has been more than forty years on the sea. He confesses to some wild ways in his earlier years; but he comforts himself with the thought that he has never doubted the good old Calvinistic doctrines of election and foreordination. Even if he has sometimes lost his character, thank God he has never become a "Pelagian." The fine thing about him is his affection and reverence for his engine. He loves it almost as a wife; he well-nigh worships it; he sees God in it, as others see Him in the starry heavens or the human soul; to him it is a psalm, a symphony. He sighs for a Robert Burns to arise to sing "The Song of Steam." One of Kipling's religious poems not to be overlooked is his "Hymn Before Action." I have already referred to it as illustrating his view of God. A

striking and powerful poem is his "Tomlinson." There may be some question as to whether its ethics is Christian or Satanic; but its scorn of weakness is tremendous; both heaven and hell refuse admission to the man who lacks strength. Kipling is robust in his religion, as in everything else. His religion is preeminently one of work, of deeds. We could only wish it made more difference with him whether the deeds were good or bad.

Many poems of Kipling, while not religious or even ethical, have in them a pathetic strain which reaches our hearts and draws us a little closer to our common humanity. A good illustration of this is his "Ford o' Kabul River."

In the "Widow at Windsor" we have portrayed in a humorous and yet effective way the awful cost of Britain's wars, the ceaseless demand for soldiers to be offered as victims and to leave their bones to bleach under every sky. It is hard to conceive of anything more touching than the line, "Poor beggars!-they'll never see 'ome!"

Our country is just now eager to build a great navy and to become a great sea power. If any one would know what that kind of ambition costs let him read Kipling's "Song of the English":

"We have fed our sea for a thousand years, And she hails us still unfed!

There's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.
We have strewn our best to the weed's

unrest,

To the shark and the sheering gull; If blood be the price of Admiralty, Good God, we have paid it full."

One of the simplest, and yet one of the tenderest and sweetest bits of verse that we have from Kipling is a little poem of eleven lines entitled "Mother o' Mine."

"If I were hanged on the highest hill,

Mother o' mine! O, mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still, Mother o' mine! O, mother o' mine!