Jerusalem that Christ entered riding over a cloak-carpeted way
amid the deafening shouts of "Hosanna"? Did He not teach and
instruct and heal hundreds, if not thousands, in and about
Jerusalem? Was He not lionized at times by an admiring public?
Yea, truly; but one may admire Christ and yet not love Him. There
are many who at some "hard saying" refuse to walk with Him.
Thousands who have a keen appreciation of "loaves and fishes"
shrink from "leaving all" and following Jesus. A great concourse
is drawn and held spell-bound by a naive, graceful, eloquent,
artless preacher who uses "lilies," and the "grass of the field,"
and the "sower" of seed, and the "sparrow" in the air to enforce
his truth. But one may be interested, and yet not be saved.

THE AESTHETIC ELEMENT.

In some people religion appeals to the aesthetic nature, and to
that only. They festoon the cross with flowers, but never think of
dying on it. They are charmed by Gothic churches filled with "dim,
religious light." The waves of music from the great; sounding
organ awe their souls and fill them with a pensiveness which they
mistake for repentance. Pointed arches, sculptured capitals,
fretted altars, swinging censers, burning candles, white-robed
choir-boys, errorless order in church service--these auxiliaries
influence them so strongly in their sense of the beautiful that
they think, "Surely I love God. Why, of course I love God." But to
love God involves something practical. It means something more
than mere profession. It means rugged self-denial, Spartan
heroism, perhaps the loss of an "arm" or the "plucking out of an
eye." Base must have been the soul which was not attracted by One
who "spake as never man spake"; low-minded the man who did not see