I am not discussing here whether they are
right or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figure
a type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness.
Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterances
that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching.
Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely
poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has
a joy in life and living things like that of Shelley or Whitman,
combined with a return to simplicity beyond that of Tolstoy or Thoreau.
Indeed I rather wonder that those, whose merely historic or humanistic
view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity,
have not made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structure
of such passages. Certainly there are few finer examples of the swift
architecture of style than that single fragment about the flowers;
the almost idle opening of a chance reference to a wild flower,
the sudden unfolding of the small purple blossom into pavilions
and palaces and the great name of the national history; and then with
a turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grass
that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven.
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