The doctor comes, not to coddle the disease, but to cure it.

By the same token, Arthur, who gave himself to the uplift of humanity, knew well by personal experience the nature of the temptations and discouragements that his followers must meet, but he knew, too, the strength and inspiration that was theirs for the asking, and gave voice not to personal regret, but to his best and highest thought for their encouragement. Arthur knew no personal regret. His was the strong nature that, having put hand to the plow, looked not back, but pressed ever forward "toward the mark of the high calling."

To Balin he says,

"Rise, my true knight. As children learn, be thou

Wiser for falling!"

Vivien he strives to influence by a seeming unconsciousness of her evil thought. He, being a man most chivalrous toward women, cannot bear to openly reprove her sin, but would have her

"Grow pure by being purely shone upon."

His treatment of Geraint is the very refinement of tact, and most touching is his thought for Lancelot, who stands with guilt half confessed,

"Nay-but thou errest, Lancelot: never yet

Could all of true and noble in knight and man

Twine round one sin, whatever it might be, With such a closeness, but apart there

Whereto see thou, that it may bear its flower."

"God hath told the King a secret word," chanted the knights on his marriage day.

Surely this word he gave to Guinevere at parting—

"and so thou purify thy soul, And so thou lean on our fair father Christ."

Having judged Arthur by his relationship to his fellows, it is good to recall the words of his speech that reveal the nature of a man in whom is established the perfect symmetry of self-control, and who measures every act of his life by God's secret word. He considers himself as he does the diamond crown to be

"the kingdom's, not the King's." and gives full recognition of the debt of strength to weakness in his estimate of the nature of his office.

"We sit King, to help the wronged." Almost we can see the flashing eye, the uplifted brow and hear the ring of the voice that says,

"Man's word is God in man."

"Accursed, who from the wrongs his

father did

Would shape himself aright!" "Accursed, who strikes nor lets the hand be seen."

The keynote of his own life is struck when he says to Gareth,"rather for * *the deed's sake my knighthood do the deed, Than to be noised of."

*

For Lancelot says of him that he figures little in the jousts and tourna

ments.

"Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives

No greater leader."

King Arthur's was a large nature incapable of display, equally incapable of the petty emotional fireworks that are the stock in trade of men of smaller mental caliber. Το him life was real and earnest, not a matter of mere words and false courtesies. He was to Lancelot as a beautifully grained bit of natural wood to a piece of poorer timber highly varnished.

Courtesy was with him no superficial gloss, but was ingrained in his life, the result and outgrowth of a fully awakened heart and conscience. His love for others is of a wholly unselfish type. He glories in their achievements and gifts. He delights in Guinevere's beauty, in Lancelot's courtliness, in the lusty youth of Gareth, the purity of Galahad, the devotion of Sir Bors. For himself

he asks no recognition, only the privilege of living his own life, of fighting his own battles with the granted grace of truth and honor from his fellows.

All this for Arthur's characterwhether he was an ideal man is a question hard to answer. Our ideals are progressions, not ultimate results, and our estimate of the character of King Arthur will be determined by the degree of progression from which we view him. Guinevere, his wife, at one time derides him as "that passionate perfection," and cries,

"He is all fault who hath no fault at all."

Judged by the standard of the young girl who longed only for

warmth and color, Arthur, heavy and grave with cares of state, was a miserable failure.

Later in her life, with a woman's eyes opened wide by sin and shame, she cries,

"now I see thee what thou art, Thou art the highest and most human, too,

Not Lancelot, nor another."

Indeed, Arthur was an ideal man up to the limitations that Guinevere herself set. The nature of his relationship with his wife was the natural result of her undeveloped character and his own past. Arthur married, realizing that man is incomplete for the willing or doing of any work without the added complement of woman's nature, but he failed to consummate the soul union for which he

longed because he did not understand his wife. How could he?

Consider the lonely isolated childhood devoted to the dreaming of dreams and seeing of visions that his later life should struggle to realize. The rarefied atmosphere of those early years stimulated brain and spirituality, but wholly failed to develop the part of his nature that needed the awakening touch of a woman's hand.

He knew not the tender mother care that would have healthfully fostered his emotional nature, and his companionship with the child, Bellicent, was too desultory to touch his heart, save for the sweet sympathy that he gave to all created things. All young and inexperienced and unawakened, he married, and if youth and inexperience may plead for Guinevere's sin, let them the more

plead for Arthur in his failure to understand his wife and save her from herself. In Arthur's nature In Arthur's nature there was no lack, but the loving forces lay latent and undeveloped waiting the touch of a sympathetic hand.

To youth in that age, as to youth to-day, marriage was a consummation, a result. It is only after years

of thoughtful experience that man or woman realizes marriage as a process. Then, as now, the word love sang in young ears a promise of perpetual bliss and unity, deafening them to the word cherish, which holds equal place in the marriage promise, and upon whose vital fulfillment depends the harmony or discord of married life.

I like the word cherish in its fullness of meaning to hold dear, to treat with tenderness and affection, to foster, nurture, support and encourage, to shelter fondly, to nurse, caress, to invigorate, strengthen, and

warm.

Such a mutual ideal of mar

riage would have saved Guinevere's downfall and Arthur's agony. Such an ideal established in our homes to-day and inculcated in our children's lives would lessen the future statistics of the divorce court and preserve our nation to the noble future that can only be built upon the strong foundation of Christian homes.

One critic declares this love story of Guinevere and Arthur wholly unnatural, but have we not seen it lived ourselves? Somewhere we know the young wife who needs but her share of responsibility and care, the tender touch of baby hands, and the hus

band's wise, strong, expressed love to awaken her noblest attributes of womanliness, but who is as yet impulsive, thoughtless, pleasure-loving and unformed.

We know, too, her husband, who is steady and loving, whose very life is a song in its purity of motive, strength of purpose, honor, and devotion to herself, but who, being undemonstrative and reserved, appears wholly absorbed in business care.

Left to themselves, these two may work out the process that is to make them wholly one, the very difference in their natures giving to the union double strength and inspiration, but some of our modern love stories have ended quite as did this older one, for the false friend is still in evidence.

Hillis says, "What fire is to an opal, that love is to man's life. Wisdom can inform man, but love alone can mellow and mature him." Surely love that wins love gives to life its glow and beauty and the loveliness of varying moods, each sparkling and glorious. It emphasizes its perfections and minimizes its faults. This development Arthur missed, not through fault or intention, but through misfortune which he might perhaps have averted, but for which he was not to blame.

Balin, speaking of Lancelot's

graces, says,

"But this worship of the Queen, That honour too wherein she holds himthis,

This was the sunshine that hath given

the man

A growth, a name that branches o'er the rest,

And strength against all odds, and what

the King

So prizes overprizes-gentleness."

Rough Balin was right. In every man there lies latent something indefinably gracious and worthy, that, awakened by the sunshine of a woman's love, does give to him

sworn.

"a growth, a name, *** And strength against all odds." Guinevere came to Arthur foreAt the marriage altar she could not lift her eyes. Her vows were false as she spoke them. What wonder Arthur's life seemed cold, and failed of sparkle and glow and success, when the sunshine that should have warmed and inspired him glowed for another, while he lived ever in the depressing mist of a gray dawn?

Guinevere was an unsatisfied woman, I grant, but how could Arthur know that? She hid her real self from him, and from the outset took refuge with Lancelot, when she alone could be her husband's interpreter of a woman's nature. It is not strange

that he did not sooner see how matters were trending. He gave to Guinevere the perfect love that casteth out fear, and, moreover, we must remember that he was bound

"To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it."

Even among his knights were those who could not believe in Guinevere's perfidy, and who would have said with Balin,

"Pure as our own true Mother is our Queen."

How much more must Arthur believe in her,

"selfless man and stainless gentleman Who wouldst against thine own eye-witness fain

Have all men true, and leal, all women pure."

How dearly Arthur loved Guinevere we only learn when, foreseeing the end, he is absorbed in the question of her salvation and the possibility of a future union with her, and bearing a message of forgiveness and pardon and hope, he goes at night to the monastery where the Queen has long been hidden.

It is in his last speech with Guinevere that Van Dyke finds strongest evidence of self-complacency, but indeed his words are sweet with pity, forgiveness and a renunciation most pathetic, in that, not knowing that Guinevere loves him now, Arthur is relinquishing treasures that he feels he may never claim.

Read his last words to her, putting yourself in his place, knowing that you were never truly loved by wife or friend, that the life work of which you dreamed, and for the completion of which you prayed and planned, has been utterly wrecked by those who should most have helped in its doing. and say if you do not find instead of self-complacency—a man, tender and human, but so filled with pure love and mastered by holy faith, that even in his hour of supremest pain he is strong to reprove and inspire her whom he loves and would save.

Surely Guinevere, who suffers beneath his scathing denunciation, may best interpret him, and to her this hour brings transformation. She feels and sees her sin in all its hor

ror, her past life becomes loathsome to her, and she is overwhelmed with shame and despair, then, swept with a sudden consciousness and understanding of his tenderness, his truth, his hope, his still living affection, she cries,

"I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.

Let no one dream but that he loves me still."

She rises to new life of womanly purity and mercy-only a woman still, but a woman redeemed.

"Then," says Hillis, "sounds the note of final victory. Adversity, war, ingratitude, the faithlessness of friends within, the hatred of enemies without-all these had conspired to break the King's spirit. But, rising triumphant over every enemy, this flower of kings, this knightliest of all brave men, snatches faith from faithlessness, keeps love midst hate, meets dishonor with forgiveness." But the crowning moment is yet to come, when, unconscious of his victory, the great King moves toward death. Sir Bedivere, overwhelmed by all the losses and change, cries out,

You a song,