Lord Lytton illustrates this magic force in his _Last Days of Pompeii_. He tells us that Glaucus, the Athenian, 'had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal as, by her intellectual and refining spells, she reversed the fable of Circe, and converted the animals into men.' Here, then, is something altogether good. It is clearly designed to minister new life to all who come beneath its spell. And yet the sordid fact remains that, through the degradation of this same high and holy impulse, thousands of young people make sad shipwreck.
But of all things designed to minister life to the world, the Cross is the greatest and most awful. Its possibilities of regeneration are simply infinite; and in its case the danger is therefore all the greater. 'We preach Christ crucified,' wrote Paul, 'unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.' It is the most urgent and insistent note of the New Testament that a man may convert into the instrument of his condemnation and destruction that awful sacrifice which was designed for his redemption. It is the sin of sins; the sin unpardonable; the sin so impressively forbidden by that ancient and thrice reiterated commandment whose significance Sir Walter Scott pointed out to me in the cave by the side of the sea.
_Christmas Eve, 1973._ Christmas-time once more! The season strangely stirs the memory, and the ghosts of Christmases long gone by haunt my solitary soul to-night. Somehow, a feeling creeps over me that this Christmas will be my last. Am I sorry? Yes, one cannot help feeling sorry, for life is very sweet. On the whole, I have been happy, and have, I think, done good. But oh, the loneliness! And every year has made it more unbearable. The friends of my girlhood have married, or gone away, or died, and each Christmas has made this desperate loneliness more hard to endure. Did God mean women to come into the world, to feel as I have felt, to long as I have longed, and then, after all, to die as I must die? None of the things for which women seem to be made have come to me. And now I have no husband to shelter me; no daughters to close my eyes; no tall sons to bear this poor body to its burial. I have pretended to satisfy myself by mothering other people's children; but it was cruel comfort, and often only made my heart to ache the more. And now it is nearly over; I have come to my very last Christmas. I have always loved to sit by the fire for a few minutes before lighting the lamp; and to-night as I do so something reminds me of the old days long gone by.