discernible part with Wagner's. And on the other hand such natural incentives to action and joy as love and fellowship, the spell of beauty, the magic of nature,— "song of bird and purl of fountain," the love of adventure, and, above all, a ready, self-forgetting, brave, impulsive sympathy for the weak and down-trodden,—these, which quicken Wolfram's hero, do not move Wagner's, and exercise no contagious power upon us.

To be sure, Wagner gains certain advantages by his dramatic form,-his swift dramatic action,—as compared with the slower epic movement of Wolfram's poem. There is a concentrated intensity, a clear-cut outline which reaches home, as Wolfram's leisureliness cannot. Then there is an effective and impressive symbolism in his narrowed world which adumbrates large meanings for the imaginative mind; there is a striking confrontation of the two worlds of the spirit and the flesh,-the Grail Kingdom and Klingsor's,-a definite yet suggestive presentment of man's divided allegiance in Kundry; of man's frailty and fall in Amfortas; of man's unregenerate and vanquished ignorance, and his victorious conquest over it through bitter strife, in Parsifal. And yet these advantages cannot outweigh the disadvantages which inhere in that mistaken ascetic attitude toward life which discolors Wagner's world.

Other faults might be dwelt upon,—especially the triviality of Parsifal's initial offence in killing a swan as typifying his original depravity, but they would rather divert from the fundamental and crucial difference upon which we have dwelt-the difference between Wolfram's very varied human world and very human hero, and Wagner's transcendental, ecclesiastical world of miracle and sorcery, and his very symbolical, churchly hero incarnating the Christian drama of Atonement and Redemption.

Such, then, are the two contrasting readings of this great parable of the Grail,-the ascetic and the humanistic. They embody two rival gospels: one the gospel of renunciation, the extinction of that self of carnal desire which taints the pure white selflessness of the spirit; the other, the gospel of reasonable, brave and faithful devotion to frankly human ends of love and service. In Wagner the emotion of self-abnegation is linked with one of profound compassion, of poignant pity for those woes and sufferings of man from which he is to be freed only by the ascetic self-renunciation demanded in the teachings alike of Buddhism, ascetic Christianity, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer. In Wolfram the dominating emotion is one of strenuous and active service, patient to endure and brave to dare all that thwarts its purpose, but exalting and purifying instead of extinguishing human love and the passions that bind men to earthly beauty and earthly aims and hopes.

But let us not misunderstand. We have not here the familiar opposition of the two extremes of epicurean selfpleasing and stoic self-suppression. To the Parzival of Wolfram life, for all its meed of human joy, is no primrose path of pleasure; it is a mission, taxing his powers to the utmost. Dragons are in his path, and must be laid low the wiles of the sorceress and the strains of siren voices lure him to veiled destruction, and must be withstood. No, the contrast which we have presented to us is between a religion which works itself out through our ordinary human relations, and in triumph over the burdens and the temptations which these bring with them; and a religion which involves withdrawal from this field of ordinary human relations for the practice of a mortification of the fiesh that is the deadly foe to true holiness.

There can be no question as to which is the more serviceable ideal. The Galahad of Tennyson remains a dis

tant and pallid figure-an abstract perfection, altogether outside the warm circle of our human activities and cares. The Parsifal of Wagner tastes of these, and is submitted to one great temptation through them only to discover their illusoriness and vanity. By his folly and temptation he is brought much nearer to us than is Galahad; but he recedes again when he commits himself to the repression and extinction of all passion, rather than to its wise control and happy use. The Parzival of Wolfram is one of ourselves, carrying to our activities both a loyal love of things human,-wife, child, friends, fellows,-and a noble, victorious devotion to the ideal of stainless truth and right and charity, of which the Grail of his search is the symbol.

So it is that this old legend, presenting in so many hues and at so many angles of vision the problem of our life, is one which speaks anew to each succeeding age. With its varying emphasis on the trials and frailties, the glories and encouragements of our human state, it makes appeal to all sorts and conditions of men.

The Grail is still with us. It has been handed down to us through the centuries by those valiant spirits who have not failed the race in any generation. It may still shed its light about our path through appalling darkness and gloom. It still calls upon its knighthood of dauntless seekers and guardians. The Grail of the spirit, it is the ideal and vision of a perfected human life,-a perfected social order and a perfected manhood and womanhood. And it still has the power to feed him who is worthy of its service with the true bread of life, to open his eyes so that he may see into the future; to be to him a touch-stone of good and evil and a protecting power against any material foes and misfortunes.

Associated with it and its true servant, is that figure of the wounded and erring Amfortas who failed in its ser

vice; for us the figure of a stricken and suffering humanity crying for help and healing, and to be redeemed only by the power of compassionate understanding. By nothing, indeed, is it so truly a sign of the highest as by this that it leads us to the shrine where is stretched the pathetic and tragic figure of suffering man, asking sympathy and service. It is no solitary place to which this Grail leads to no lonely self-communion; to no task of isolated self-perfection. It leads into the peopled presence of man crucified.

And as it was near to Parzival at his starting, and as he was actually brought early to its presence but knew it not, so it is always near to us, to be seen if we have but the understanding heart. It is not to be sought in far off lands, but up and down the steeps of daily travel, by the cross roads of daily temptation, and along the level of what is daily commonplace, until touched by its illuminating light. Aye, even here, in these city byways, rings out the old summons that startled the silence of the midforest, calling us to the rescue of the oppressed or to enter the perilous lists against giant injustice and wrong.

Yes, the Grail moves among us still; a possession, and yet an object of endless quest; a benediction, and yet a summons and an exhortation. At moments the quest seems to be won, and we may be blessed with a light as of the beatific vision when we are lifted on some high wave of love for man or woman, husband or wife, child or friend, hero or saint, or by that mystic presence of humanity with its halo of tragic light. And yet its beams. will fade and the vision pass; for not every day is the Grail fully unveiled, but only on those rare Good-Fridays of the soul. We must continually re-earn the right to feed eyes and heart on its beams, and to be blessed by it once more in the congregation of the faithful at what we may reverently call the Eucharist of Man.

SPIRITUAL RENEWAL.

AN EASTER ADDRESS GIVEN BEFORE THE SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE OF NEW YORK, APRIL 3, 1904.

BY FELIX ADLER.

In announcing my address to-day, I spoke of Easter as the Great Festival. I did so, not because it is the day on which, according to Christian doctrine, Christ rose from the dead; nor because, according to the Jewish Festival which is celebrated at this season, a people of slaves were miraculously delivered from the house of bondage; but primarily because Easter means Spring. Spring with "a nameless pathos in the air which thrills with all things fair"; Spring, with its golden sun and silver rains, is with us once again; and the universal life that stirs in field and wood and stream stirs also in our breast, and the universal joy that thrills through nature thrills also in our pulses. We feel the need of expressing this; so that when we come together on this first Sunday of Spring, if there were a poet among us, we should bid him sing some song celebrating the joy and wonder of the Spring; and if there were a great composer among us, we should bid him sing to us some mighty strain reflecting the power of the Spring, the birth-throes of it, the storms by which it is accompanied, and all the pomp and glory and the marvelous revelation of it. But as we have neither poet nor musician, we must in poor and inarticulate fashion express, as best we can, the sense of this new life and this new thrill in universal nature, and be the harbingers and the heralds of it. This is our first word to-day-just a word of rejoicing; for inasmuch as we are children of nature we cannot help feeling the

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