monly are we assailed by such injunctions! Yet modern opportunities for money's use are more marvelous and enticing than "Arabian Nights" and more romantic than the folklore of any people. A Christian missionary, Armenian by birth, American by education, was slain by the Kurds on his sickbed in the presence of his wife. His family escaped. Once, no matter how dearly his American friends had loved him, no matter how ardently they had wished for his sake to help his children, they could have done nothing. But in this, marvelous era they at once reduce a little of themselves to monetary form, the most portable shape into which human personality can precipitate itself, and in that form they go straightway overseas to Persia and bring back their friend's wife and children to a safe home and a liberal education. One who can see in such an opportunity nothing but duty is blind. Who would not love to play with this new white magic by which a man can put himself at work around the world?

Once in an isolated settlement of the old world of slow communications, a man could hear of cruel need in the antipodes and could go home with nothing but sympathy to offer. Let no man in this modern world express sympathy with any need anywhere on earth unless he means it! The acid test can straightway be applied. For we can do something, no matter where the need may be. The agencies of human helpfulness now reach in an encompassing network over all the earth. The avenues are open down which our pennies, our dollars, or our millions can walk together in an accumulating multitude to the succor of all mankind. Each of us can take some of his own nerve and sinew reduced in wages to the form of money, and through money, which is a naturalized citizen of all lands and which speaks all languages, can be at work wherever the sun shines. It is a privilege which no one knew before our modern age. It is one of the miracles of science, mastered by the spirit of service, that a man busy at his daily tasks at home can yet be preaching the Gospel in Alaska, healing the sick in Korea, teaching in the schools of Persia, feeding the hungry in India, and building a new civilization at the head waters of the Nile. Consider, then, the shame of one who in such an era is still a spiritual inhabitant of an age gone by! Only a man who with generous, systematic stewardship is taking advantage of the new opportunities is fully abreast of his times.

What is true of opportunity for financial service is true of many new agencies for usefulness which the modern world has given us. Once our fathers living under absolutism could not control at all the processes of government; now a democratic state offers new chances of usefulness through citizenship and new obligations to employ them well. Once our fathers, never having dreamed of such an invention as movable type, had neither chance nor responsibility to use the printed page; now the printing press offers a supremely powerful agency of education and evangelization. Once nations, lacking all vital contacts with one another, could become international neither in their spirit nor in their political arrangements; now nations are woven by countless vital relationships into each other's lives and these accumulating contacts offer the supreme opportunity of all history to bring in the day of international cooperation. On every side new powers and new. possibilities are put into our hands. The best hopes of mankind cannot be realized save as these new powers are converted, baptized, Christianized, and harnessed for ministry to human weal. A belated mind, therefore, is fatal to large usefulness:

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's bloodrusted key."

CHAPTER X

The Great Obstacle

DAILY READINGS

We are to consider this week the difficulties which the Christian spirit of service faces when it encounters the economic motives and practices common in industry and commerce. There is a strange prejudice in some quarters that Christianity ought not to concern itself with economic questions at all. One would suppose that any system of faith and conduct, if it is to be good for anything, must concern itself with the most absorbing portion of man's life, his toil for sustenance. It certainly is clear that Jesus had more to say about money, its making and its spending, its perils and its uses, than about any other subject whatsoever. Let us inquire, therefore, in our daily readings, what the enormous stakes are which Christianity has in the economic problem.

Tenth Week, First Day

But they that are minded to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful lusts, such as drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.-I Tim. 6:9-11.

No one would deny that Christianity is chiefly interested in the conquest of sin. But sin does not exist in general, it exists in concrete, particular forms, and when one traces to their origin the iniquities that are most familiarly ruinous, one discovers how correctly this passage from First Timothy locates their source. "The master iniquities of our time," says Professor E. A. Ross, "are connected with money-making."

It is futile, therefore, for the Christian individual or the Christian Church to deal in general with a vague, diffused, undefined idea of sin, while all the time the concrete sins of the economic life are ruining men. And it is also futile to attack the merely personal transgressions of equity in business and avoid dealing with the organization of business itself which so often is the occasion of them. Consider this passage from St. Augustine's "City of God":

"That was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate whom he seized. For when that King had asked the man how he durst so molest the sea, he answered with bold pride: 'How darest thou molest the whole world? But because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled Emperor.'"

Surely the Christian cannot so lend himself to discrimination against minor economic sins in favor of great ones. Whoever sets himself seriously to be a Christian and to labor for a Christian world, therefore, must deal with the economic problem, in both its individual and social aspects.

O Thou, whose commandment is life eternal, we confess that we have broken Thy Law, in that we have sought our own gain and good rather than Thy gracious Will, who willest good unto all men. We have sinned by class injustice, by indifference to the sufferings of the poor, by want of patriotism, by hypocrisy and secret self-seeking. But do Thou in Thy mercy hear us. Turn Thou our hearts that we may truly repent, and utterly abhor the great and manifold evils which our sins have brought upon the nation. Break down our idols of pride and wealth. Shatter our self-love. Open our eyes to know in daily life, in public work, that Thou alone art God. Thee only let us worship, Thee only let us serve, for His sake, who sought not His own will but Thine alone.-M. P. G. E.

Tenth Week, Second Day

Come now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by

fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure; ye have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter.—James 5:1-5.

One has only to read such passages as Matt. 19:24, Luke 6:24, Luke 12: 15 f, Luke 16: 13 f, to see that James, the brother of our Lord, was true to the tradition which Jesus left, when he spoke these words. One reason why the Christian cannot avoid the economic application of the Gospel is because he is sincerely interested in character; and wealth, acquired as it often is, is ruinous to the characters of those who win it. Two per cent of the people in the United States own sixty per cent of the wealth. If by the poor we mean those whose possession consists only of clothing, furniture, and personal belongings to the value of $400 each, then one man in the United States owns as much as 2,500,000 of his fellow-citizens. That is perilous to the commonwealth; but it is also perilous to the rich. When we see a wealthy man, who, honorably fortunate, is as simple in his life and as sensitive in his conscience as when he was a boy, as amiable, approachable, democratic, fraternal, and generous as when his business life began, we have seen one of the most difficult and admirable spiritual victories that a man can win. But consider Henry Ward Beecher's vivid and precise description of the other type, which James also had in mind.

"There are men of wealth in New York, honored, because prosperous, who heap up riches, and hoard them, and live in a magnificent selfishness. They use the whole of society as a cluster to be squeezed into their cup. They are neither active in any enterprise of good, except for their own prosperity, nor generous to their fellows. They build palaces, and fill them sumptuously; but the poor starve and freeze around about them. No struggling creature of the army of the weak ever blesses them. And yet their names are heralded. They walk in specious and spectacular honor. Men flatter them, and fawn upon them. Dying, the newspapers, like so many trumpets in procession, go blaring after them to that grave over which should be inscribed the text of Scripture, "The name of the wicked shall rot.'"

We pray for our land. Let us not be left unrich in manhood. Destroy our ships; destroy our dwellings; but grant that poverty may not come upon manhood in this nation.