clear Father-voice, though the road led straight across the regular
roads through thorn hedges and thick underbrush. Should not the servant
tread it still?

The word that John uses here underneath our English word _witness_ is
the word from which our English word _martyr_ comes. And martyr has
come to mean one who gives his life clear out in a violent way for the
truth he believes. But, do you know, that is easy. "Easy?" You say,
"Surely not, you're certainly wrong there." No, you are right. It is not
easy. To face a storm of lead, or feel the sharp-edged blade, or yield
to the eating flame,--that is never easy.

But this is what I mean. There's the heroic in it, and that helps. You
brace yourself for it. The terrible crisis comes. You pull together and
pray and resolutely, desperately, face it. A little while, and it's
over. You've been true in the sharp crisis. You have taken a place with
the noble army of martyrs. And we who hear of it have a martyr's halo
about your head.

But there's something immensely harder to do. Without making a whit less
than it is the splendid courage of martyrdom, there's something that
takes immensely more courage, and a deeper longer-seasoned heroism, and
that is to be a _living_ martyr, to bear the simple true witness
tactfully but clearly, when it takes the very life of your life to do
it, though it doesn't take your bodily life in a violent way.

You know they don't martyr people these days for their Christian faith.
At least not in the western half of the earth, the Christian hemisphere.
No, that's quite behind the calendar. That's rather crude, quite behind
the cultured advanced Christian progress of _our_ day. Our Christian