Capernaum, and intimacy with Jesus is, after all, the one thing
needful for every disciple.

But whoever is red-hot will ceaselessly be thinking and planning for
the worst; that is to say, not only for those commonly called the
worst, whose wild career of sin strikes all decent people with horror,
but for the far more seriously in danger, who turn their very religion
into a form or an amusement, and care nothing for any real intercourse
with God. These are the people perhaps most difficult of all to get
at, the people whom we shall never be likely to make any impression
upon unless we combine with the greatest possible activity an
intensity of spiritual heat and power of which we suppose Fletcher was
one of the grandest specimens the world ever had. Do not let us resent
or run away from any reproach as to our own comparative coldness and
inefficiency which this story may bring to us. How much better to
writhe and be aroused under any such reproofs now than only to awake
to them when life is slipping away! Alas! for the readers who shall
close this book without resolving to be as holy and useful as God
commands us all to be!

LONDON, _April_, 1905.





THE LIFE OF JOHN FLETCHER.