there are some-the belated, the obstinate, the criminallyminded-who refuse to move up into the spirit of the new regime, upon whom force must still be used. But the general mass of human kind are capable of enlarging cooperation, and already mankind has gone too far on the road from force toward fellowship to turn back.

IV

Tolerance, patience, selflessness, faith, courage, fairness, tact, magnanimity-what fineness and strength of character are required by anyone who undertakes to be a cooperator!| Many a man finds it far easier to be individually useful. He enjoys the flattering sense of his own munificence, when he as one individual gives service to another. Charles Lamb once said that the happiest sensation in the world is to do a good deed in secret and to have it found out by accident. So does a superior's helpfulness to an inferior prove one of the most personally gratifying experiences which the superior enjoys. It increases his consciousness of superiority. But to be a good cooperator means the abnegation of pride, the esteeming of others better than oneself, the willingness to take a lowly place in the fellowship of common enterprise, the loss of anxious self-seeking in collective enthusiasm. To be a good cooperator involves the possession of a love that suffers long and is kind, envies not, vaunts not itself, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly, is not easily provoked, keeps no record of injuries, bears, hopes, believes, and endures all things.

Even in individual service this spirit of cooperation is indispensable to real effectiveness. A great industrial leader is said to have called to his office a young man in his employ who was going wrong with drink. The employe with shaking knees went up to his chief, expecting his discharge. The end of an hour's conversation ran like this: "My boy," said the chief, "we are not going to drink any more, are we?" "No, sir,' said the youth, "we're not!” “And we are going to send each week so much money home to the wife and kiddies, aren't we?" "By heaven, sir!” said the youth, “we will!" To serve folk not only by doing service for them, but working with them, is the very essence of the finest helpfulness.

When one's thought moves out from such individual relationships to the problems of philanthropy, the same truth

stands clear. Charles Kingsley once told Huxley the story of two mullahs who came to a heathen khan in Tartary to win his allegiance to their gods. The first mullah argued, "O Khan, worship my god, he is so wise that he made all things!" The second mullah argued, “O Khan, worship my god, he is so wise that he makes all things make themselves!" For an obvious and sufficient reason the second god won out. For, whether with God or man, to work upon another from without is not half so serviceable as to work with another from within. Parental dictatorship in a family is easier than comradeship, but it is correspondingly valueless. Welfare work in a factory, handed down from above, is easier than cooperative industrial democracy, but it is correspondingly ineffective. Munificent largess to a ne'er-do-well is easier than cooperative measures to encourage him in self-support, but only the latter amounts to much. No normal person wishes to be served by condescension; any normal person welcomes service by cooperation. "If I bestow all my goods to feed the poor," said Paul, “and have not love, it profiteth me nothing."

If the spirit of cooperation is so essential to the finest usefulness in individual relationships, and in family, factory, and philanthropy, how deep is the need of it and how searching its demands if one is to serve the coming of world-wide human brotherhood! No small, provincial soul can ever understand the hopes of international fraternity. The cooperative mind at its largest and its best is needed here. What holds back the coming of human brotherhood is not basic impossibility in achieving a world where reason and fraternity have taken the place of violence and exploitation; it is the provincial mind. All false pride of caste and class and rank, of race and nation, is provincialism, and provincialism is simply self-inflation in one of its most deadly forms. The Hottentots call themselves "the men of men"; the Eskimos call themselves "the complete people," but their neighbors the Indians "are louseeggs"; the Haytian aborigines believed their island was the first of all created things, that the sun and moon issued from one of its caves and men from another; to the Japanese Nippon was the middle point of the world, and the Shah of Persia yet retains the title "The Center of the Universe." That is provincialism. When Americans or British or Frenchmen or Germans talk in the same spirit, it is provincialism still,

a wretched survival of belated racial egoism—-one of the deadliest forms of selfishness known to men.

This does not mean that a man should not love his own people best of all. A man should love his own people, as his own mother, with a unique devotion. Ties of nature are there which it is folly to deny. A man can mean to his own mother and she can mean to him what no other man's mother can mean to him or he can mean to any other man's mother. What is true of mothers is true of motherlands. We are bone of their bone, blood of their blood, bred in their traditions, and suckled at their breasts. We can do for our own people and they can do for us, what no other people can give to us or claim from us. | Unique relationships are sacred because they offer the opportunity for unique service.

One primary effect, however, of such devotion to one's own mother should be the making of all motherhood everywhere infinitely sacred. He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers. He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flags and their fatherland. Local patriotism should be the open door into universal sympathy. Nationalism should not hold back from but lead to internationalism. He who thinks that loyalty to his family means dislike of his village is a fool. A good family and a good village are fulfilled in each other; so are a good nationalism and a good internationalism the complement one of the other. But it requires a conquest of self-inflation by the cooperative spirit to perceive it. Such a victory over his own provincialism is one of the first necessities for the man who seeks to be useful to his generation's deepest need and greatest task. He must rise above inveterate racial prejudices and animosities, above the scorn that embitters the color line, above the petty pride that is contemptuous of strange customs, strange clothes, strange speech, above the jingoism of perverted patriots. He must learn to say our in friendship and family, in factory and philanthropy, in world-wide sympathy and good will, or else he ought forever to forgo the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father who art in heaven."

CHAPTER IX

New Forms of Service

DAILY READINGS

"Truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain," wrote Milton. "If her waters flow not in perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." What is true of man's ideas is true also of their practical expressions. Methods of work change. To print from Gutenberg's movable wooden type after the Hoe multiple press and the linotype machine have arrived, is misdirected energy. Methods of service also change, or, refusing to progress, may harden into set forms which a new generation will find inadequate. In this week's study let us see the application of this general truth to our own generation's problems.

Ninth Week, First Day

Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.—James 1:27.

But whoso hath the world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth.-I John 3: 17, 18.

Some people still need to see with unmistakable clearness that Christian service is not simply a spiritual ministry to men's souls. A certain type of mind always is tempted to conceive this present life as a short, narrow-gauge railroad, whose one objective is the junction of death, where the through express of immortality is met. All questions of comfort, health, and wholesome circumstance upon this present shuttle-train seem negligible. We shall not be here long. To achieve a fortunate immortality is the one absorbing and exclusive aim of religion. But long since it has become evident

that the spiritual interests of men are powerfully affected by outward circumstance. "Here then is Africa's challenge to its missionaries," writes Dan Crawford in "Thinking Black": "Will they allow a whole continent to live like beasts in hovels, millions of negroes cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease? No doubt it is our diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul. But God's equilateral triangle of body, soul, and spirit must never be ignored. Is not the body wholly ensouled, and is not the soul wholly embodied? . . . In other words, in Africa the only true fulfilling of your heavenly calling is the doing of earthly things in a heavenly manner." In view of the plain insistence of the New Testament, is there any other way of fulfilling our heavenly calling in Britain or America?

Pour into our hearts the spirit of unselfishness, so that, when our cup overflows, we may seek to share our happiness with our brethren. O Thou God of Love, who makest Thy sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendest rain on the just and on the unjust, grant that we may become more and more Thy true children, by receiving into our souls more of Thine own spirit of ungrudging and unwearying kindness; which we ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.-John Hunter.

Ninth Week, Second Day

I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that_watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: but each shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow-workers: ye are God's husbandry, God's building.-I Cor. 3:6-9.

Many folk need to achieve in a modern way this happy blending of dependence on God with energetic work. For many are still living in the pre-scientific age before the lawabiding forces of the world were so largely delivered into man's hands, and they are tempted to trust God to do for them what he is waiting to do through them. Before medical science came, a plague was the occasion of public penitence in the churches. Men knew no other help for a pestilence than dependence on God. Now, however, we know that God has