"This main miracle that Thou art Thou,

With power on Thine own act and on the world."

Tennyson, De Profundis.

 

"Thou seemest human and divine.

     The highest, holiest, manhood. Thou:

     Our wills are ours, we know not how;

Our wills are ours, to make them Thine"

Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue.

 

"Eternal life is not a theory; it is an art."

Father Tyrrell, Bread and Wine.

 

"But speaking truth in love, may grow up in all

     things into Him, who is the head, even Christ."

"For we are members one of another."

"We are God's fellow-workers."

Paul, Eph. 4:15; 4:25; 1 Cor. 3: 9.

Chapter VII

A MAN'S LIFE

AT every stage of our discussion thus far we ave noted the practical bearing is of our faith. It is a working faith that we have been considering, one whose every article has been a window looking out upon life. Now we must turn to the life itself and sum up the meaning of our creed. In the light of our working faith, what is a man's life? The answer, of course, can only be given in outline. It may be summed up in four words: fellowship, saintship, society, stewardship.

Fellowship — The Life with God

There are other words than fellowship to express our life with God: love, reverence, obedience, service. There is none that is so rich and true as this. The real wealth of any life consists in its personal relations. It is not possession or knowledge or power that makes us rich; it is our relations with personal beings. There is the love within the home, the fellowship with friends, the relations of community and nation, and the ideal relation with saint and seer and poet who come to us in the record of their words or the story of their lives. All else in life is its housing; this is its heart. And the relation which completes all the rest is the fellowship with God.

The thought of that fellowship comes to us in the Old Testament in some of the most beautiful passages of all literature. It is a fellowship of mercy and condescension on God's side. "In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old."¹ "For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit."² The prophets saw in such fellowship an essential part of religion. Micah's great definition of religion is characteristic: "To do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God."³ They insisted upon righteousness, but they intended no bald religion of deeds as some interpret them to-day. Back of this righteousness was a great fellowship of fear and love and trust in God. The Twenty-third Psalm is the most beautiful expression of that fellowship in the Old Testament, and its simple words have voiced the faith of men in all the days since then.

It was this great truth that Jesus brought out with unerring touch. Religion in His day, as so often since, was hidden beneath all manner of debris, elaborate rituals and formularies, and endless rules of conduct. All these He brushed aside. The eternal God is your Father, He taught. Even the hairs of your head are known to Him. He loves you, least and greatest. When you pray, say, "Our Father." There are other things that religion needs in order to assert itself in the world. It must live on in a community; it must express itself in form of organization and worship; it must shape its faith in word of doctrine. But the real fount of religion is in none of these. It is in the soul bowed before God in humility, looking up to Him in simple confidence, and saying, "Abba, Father."⁴ This is the final meaning for our own life of the study of God in His world with which we began. The great Power is a Presence, and the Presence is a Person, and the Person is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here the simplest faith and need of man join themselves to the highest insight into the meaning of this world and the power by which it is ruled.

But before we go farther with this thought of fellowship we must meet a problem that arises. Fellowship with God, Jesus taught, means likeness to Him in spirit. To be children of our Father, Jesus said, meant far more than to take from a good-natured God the gifts of health and bread and happiness. It meant to be merciful as our Father is merciful. Fellowship means righteousness. That is the gulf that opens before us. How can we ever meet such a demand as that? The gulf had been great enough before Jesus' time. The prophets had burned their message into the heart of all earnest men, such as the Pharisee Saul: Men must be righteous to have fellowship with God. Jesus deepened that thought. He made the demand more severe. Righteousness is the inner spirit; no outer deed can satisfy. Righteousness means the whole life; no part or section will do, no mere tithe of income, no one holy day in seven.

This Is the great gulf, and jet this is the gulf that Jesus bridged. This is the paradox of faith, but it is its very heart as well. Jesus solved it, not by logic, but by a message of life. He abated not one jot from His great demand of righteousness, and yet He was always bringing not saints but sinners into the fellow ship of God. His answer was simply this: God demands the highest, and gives what He demands. He asks that we shall be children like Him in inner spirit, and then He takes us into fellowship with Himself, that He may give that spirit to us. Long ago one of the Church fathers said, "Command what Thou wilt, and give what Thou commandest." That is the truth. We can understand it better if we take Jesus' analogy of father and son. What does the father crave for his son.? Not to feed him and clothe him. That much he will db for a servant. He wants a boy who will grow up into his spirit, his ideals, and life. Only so will he be the son. But the father does not say. First become like me, and then I will take you into fellowship with me. He takes the boy into fellowship in order that the boy may become a true son. Only one condition is necessary, and that lies in the very nature of the case. The son must desire the fellowship, and desire it so that he shall turn day by day from the things that stand in the way and give himself to the life with his father.

That is the great Christian doctrine of repentance and forgiveness. Fellowship is mutual. It is true we can not give to God as He to us. But He can not give to us except as we give the open heart to Him. That is why Jesus says so much of the spirit of the child. That is why He is more hopeful of the penitent publican than of the satisfied churchman praying in the temple. God gives His fellowship to those who with earnest desire and surrender of life turn to Him. And He receives us, not to make light of our sin or to lessen His demand, but in order that He may overcome that sin by forgiving it and that we may realize that demand through our life with Him. It was asked of Seneca once why he dined with his slaves. "I dine with some of them," he responded, "because they are worthy of it, with others that I may make them worthy." Of that last gift of life, the fellowship with God, we are none of us worthy. It is the most holy who see this most clearly, for their higher life gives them a clearer vision of that glory of God of which we men come short. But that ^as Jesus' great deed, at once to deepen in men the sense of their sin and to give them the courage to trust in the mercy of God and to seek His fellowship.

This conviction is expressed in Christian thought by the conception of the Holy Spirit. We mean by that doctrine more than the idea of the immanence of God, His presence sustaining all things. We mean that He dwells as a personal and loving fellowship in the hearts of men, informing their spirits by His Spirit, transforming their life by His friendship.

To discuss what this fellowship means on the human side, would lead us far beyond our limits. And yet its nature is simple enough if we will follow the suggestion of Jesus. For Him the fellowship meant to lead the life of a son with His Father. That life which He realized for Himself He set forth for His followers alike in His example and His teaching. The world had never known what such Sonship meant until it looked upon His life. It means first of all, as we have seen, the humble spirit and the open, eager heart. That belongs not only at the beginning, but at every stage of the Christian life. Luther meant this when he called repentance a life-task. He did not mean a mere bewailing of past sin, but an ever-renewed turning of the eager soul to God. The spirit of trust comes next. Anxiety in the judgment of Jesus is not a weakness, but a sin. "Your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." And third, with the trust must go reverence and fear. Our trust means little if we have not a God of power. And what does our aspiration mean except there be a God of holiness to whom it turns? It is the fear of God that sets men free from other fears, and without the reverence that bows us down there is no lifting up of life. Such sonship means, in the fourth place, obedience, an absolute surrender. No one ever made this demand so sweeping as Jesus. Hate father and mother. He said. Pluck out the right eye, cut off the right hand. How could He ask this.? Jesus demanded the great surrender because He saw the great gift. This life with God was the great treasure, the priceless pearl for which men might well give all. And He showed another reason. God was giving men not simply bread, but Himself, His own love. The answer to such a gift could be nothing less than a mean's own life, his inmost affection and his very will. Such obedience is not mere submission, but the glad passion of a life that has found its real end. It is not as a subject that obeys, but as the son who shares his father^s great purposes and takes them as the goal of his life.

Prayer is the expression of this fellowship with God. Have we the right to pray? What may we expect from prayer? If we are right so far, if man may have real fellowship with God, then prayer itself is as inevitable as speech is between friends. As to what we may expect from prayer, we need only recall the foundations upon which we have been building. God is not apart from the world, but in the world and in all its life. Nature and natural laws are but the thoughts of God, the machinery by which He is working out His purposes. Natural order is God's instrument, not something by which He has tied His hands. It is the personal, not the mechanical, that is the supreme fact of the world and its final power. How God answers man's prayer is not our concern. It is not done by reaching into the world from without. He is in the world, and the world has no life or being apart from Him. Can He not work through that which is His own? If we earthly fathers, in this world of law and order, can hear our children's plea and give them good gifts, how much more shall He not be able to give good gifts to those that ask Him? There is only one ^ay in which men may show that such praying is "scientifically" impossible, and that is by proving that there is nothing real except the world of matter and motion, that there is no personal or spiritual in our world, and that there can be none above our world. But this is impossible from the nature of the case, and, on the other hand, we have seen the compelling reasons for holding not only that the spiritual is real, but that it is supreme.

More important is it that we shall understand the nature of prayer. The danger in such discussion as the above is that men will think of prayer simply as asking and getting. The real meaning of prayer is seen as the expression of that fellowship which we have just considered. As such it is not an incident in religion, but its very heart. It is not something which God merely tolerates, as the king does his subjects who come with their petitions. The prayer of men is His great desire. For such fellowship He made the worlds. But this ideal of fellowship determines what our praying should be. Shall we ask God for what we need? Yes. May we ask Him for material gifts? Yes. To the true father everything is of interest that concerns his child. But if our asking is to be real praying, real fellowship, then two elements must be present: first, the spirit of utter trust, so that our deepest joy will be not in the gift that may come, but in the confidence with which we leave all our life with Him; second, the spirit of entire surrender, not grudging, but glad, that makes His will our final desire beyond all other wishes. There is a great deal of misleading talk about faith in prayer. It is not faith in prayer that we need, but faith in God. Faith in prayer is pagan. Its question is: What will my prayer get for me? It is like the Thibetan's trust in his prayer-wheel, like the pagan confidence in magic rite or sacrifice to persuade an unwilling god. Too much of our talk about prayer is like calculating what some friendship might yield us. For real faith in God prayer comes as simply and inevitably as the very life of love and trust out of which it springs. Such prayer is as wide as life itself, for all Christian life must find expression in it. Here is reverent awe that bows in worship, and joyous praise that remembers all its blessings, humble contrition that brings its confession, the cry that calls for help, the Christlike plea for other men, the prayer for the coming of the Kingdom which is not so much petition as it is a devotion of ourselves to God's purpose, and that simple desire for God which is like the heart of a child that loves his father's presence beyond his father's gifts.

Such prayer will not be the same for all. Because it is life, it can not be learned by rule. No one has the right to lay down the method by which another should pray. And yet just as life is an art, so there is an art of prayer. It is right to ask, as they of old did, "Teach us to pray." We may learn to pray. The psalms will help us. The lives of men who prayed will help us, such a chapter as that which shows us Livingstone, the unresting man of action, ending his life on his knees in that mid-African hut. And widely different from either, we can get help from such a little book as that of Brother Lawrence, "The Practice of the Presence of God." But most of all it needs what friendship always demands, time and thought and desire.

Saintship — The Making of a Man

Saintship expresses the second aspect of life which we take from our working faith. It is an old-fashioned phrase, and it might be better to take some word like character, that were less liable to misunderstanding. Rightly understood, however, it has a richness and an inwardness which other words do not possess. We do not, of course, have in mind the traditional saint, with cell and halo and dreams of another world. What we mean is this: the first great end of our life is the making of a man, and our fellowship with God is the great means to that end. Life is not simply a probation to be passed or a work to be done. It means growing a soul. Saintship in the New Testament means two things. It includes, first, a belonging to God. The saint is the devoted man, the loyal man, the man who has found the high meaning of life and has given himself to it. It means, second, not simply the surrender to an ideal, but its achievement. It means not simply the man who belongs to God in this fellowship, but the man who is living after the spirit of that fellowship and is being made over by it. The word has suffered in common use. The mediaeval Church limited it to the few and gave it an other-worldly flavor. The New Testament uses it for every man who belongs to Jesus Christ. It is worth our while to restore the word to its larger use. And it expresses for us the two elements of our moral problem that we wish to consider: a mlan's right attitude and his moral transformation.

Let us turn to the second element first. Our real problem is not that of the ideal, but of the power of achievement. So fine and masterful a spirit as Huxley could declare, that if any beneficent being should promise him that he should never go wrong on condition that he would submit to being wound up like a clock, he would close with the offer at once. What earnest man has not felt the problem? The ideal lays hold of us. We would be such a man as that. But there is a deep gulf between that ideal and the real man that we are. "The good which I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice."⁵

The answer to this we have already touched upon. It is given to us in the fellowship which God offers to us. What we need to see clearly here is this: the fellowship of God is not only a gracious gift, it is the supreme power for making men. Life alone can mold life. We know what intimate human fellowship means, the influence of father, mother, brother, wife, friend, hero. Such a relation will set ideals and mold ambitions, will enter a man's life and unseal the fountains of its deep, will strengthen men by the trust it imposes, or by some noble passion kindled in them will stir them to a whole life of achievement. When such a fellowship touches the moral ideals and passions, it becomes the greatest transforming power known. But here is the highest life, the life of God, brought to bear upon our own. Here is an intimacy of fellowship that no other relation can reach. Here is a friend that lays claim to the very citadel of our soul. Life in that fellowship means a daily aspiration and a daily surrender to the highest that man can conceive. The strongest motives of gratitude and affection are joined to a trust that grows stronger with the experiences that justify it. Morality, weak when it is a mere effort, gains here the strength of a passion. We sum it up and complete it by saying in simple religious speech: God gives His Spirit to us as our life, and thus makes us His children.

It is easy to cry out at all this as mystical and impossible and inconceivable. It is inconceivable if by that you mean that we can not picture it. But it is just as hard to understand how friend and friend on earth may have commerce together and mold each other. It is easy to object; but what has been the actual result of this fellowship? Speaking soberly, thinking of men and of nations, we can say nothing less than this: Here is the supreme moral force of history; this is the power that has transformed the world. The story is a long one. It might begin with the little company of Galilean peasants who became the teachers of the world. It might end with the tale of the last besotted wretch made over into manhood, of the fruitage of ten thousand years of paganism in some Fiji isle lifted to Christian level in a generation, or better still, the picture of just one out of myriads of Christian homes with its reverence and peace and its fellowship of joyous love informed by the spirit of Jesus Christ.

This is one side of the making of the man, the side of grace, of mercy, of God's forgiveness, of His down-reaching. God receives men into the fellowship of sons in order that He may make them over Into true sons of His spirit. The moral demand of this fellowship makes the other side. That moral demand unfortunately has often been slighted, and the fellowship itself has been by so much cheapened. We have seen that the fellowship is God's gracious gift through the forgiveness of men. But too often the tremendous moral meaning of forgiveness has been overlooked. God's forgiveness Is the freest of gifts and the costliest, and it costs man as well as God. At the very gate of forgiveness by which we enter into fellowship there stands the moral demand. God gives Himself; He asks for the man in return. Affection, obedience, confidence, the last thought and motive and desire—all these He requires. How searchingly, even sternly, Jesus put the demand. The real fellowship with God is something inner and intimate and personal. It can come only as the life Is open to Him. And the demand comes daily, not simply at the beginning. The very gift Itself Is a demand. The life He gives us Is one that we possess only in the living. The same life is both gift and task: "If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk."⁶

Society — The Life with Man

Society is the third word that we use to suggest the meaning of life. The social point of view has appeared in every chapter of our discussion, and so, despite its importance, may be treated the more briefly here. We may consider it under four words. Man is social in his nature, in his training, in his task, and in his end.

Man's nature is social. Our life comes from God, but it is given to us in the great stream of human existence. The story of the whole race is in the heredity of each single life. The history of ages of prayer and thought and toil is in the environment that insensibly but surely molds each one of us. Man's training is social. The qualities that Jesus emphasized are social qualities, truth, patience, kindliness, good-will, love. These are not the virtues of the cloister, and we gain them only in the fellowship with men. Man's task is social. Jesus, like the prophets, found man's service of God not in ceremonial performance, but in the service of men. The great task is to build up all the relations of men in love and justice, and to set up a Kingdom of righteousness in all the earth. Man's end is social. God's purpose for the race is not to gather out a company of single souls from the wreck of the years, but to establish a new society, a fellowship of mutual love, a Kingdom of righteousness.

Stewardship — Life as Trust and Task

The word stewardship suggests the final meaning of life in the light of our working faith. All the elements in this conception of our life, as we have seen, flow from the thought of God and His world. Because God is person, and loving person, the Christian life is fellowship with Him. Because this God is holy. His fellowship demands holiness from men and works holiness in men; that is the question of character, of saintship. Because human life is one and the single soul lives only as part of the great human current, therefore our life is social in nature and demand and duty.

In the same way our thought of life as a stewardship rests upon our conception of the way in which God is carrying out His plan with the world. It is true that there has not always been agreement on this in Christian thought. In other days men laid the stress upon the single soul and the preparation for the next world. Life then became simply a probation, this world and its affairs of little consequence; man's chief business was to keep away from evil, and his chief concern to make sure of heaven. If our conception of life is very different from this, it is in part because we have a very different idea as to God's plan and method in His world. We do not look upon the world as a work of God once finished, then marred by sin, out of which now a remnant is to be saved. First of all, it is a world in the making. Second, as we have seen, in this world-making God is working from within; not as an external force, but as an indwelling and moving spirit is He shaping His world. Third, this indwelling spirit is not a mere atmosphere, nor a stream of tendency, nor a vague force. The spirit is Person, a person calling other persons into fellowship with Himself, shaping their lives and using them in His great ends. And finally, the end of the work is a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, the Kingdom of God.

If this be a true vision of God and His world, then life gains a new meaning and a new perspective. We are not spectators in the world, nor mere servants, nor simple beneficiaries. We are friends who know what our Lord is doing. We have been honored with vision and with a task. Life is a trust, a partnership, or, in Jesus' phrase, a stewardship. Man becomes a co-worker with God, a co-regent in the world. And the world itself and our every life become charged with eternal meaning.

It will be seen at once that this conception determines the judgment that our working faith is to pass upon the world. According to Jesus there are three attitudes that a man may take in relation to the world. He may fear it or love it or use it. The fear of the world is one of the great sins against which Jesus solemnly warns. Its root is the spirit of paganism. There is no place for fear in faith, for we are in the Father's house. The world is not the dominion of the devil, which men are to flee or of which they are to be afraid. Its beauty is from His hand; He gave color to the lily. Its harvests are His gift; He makes the rain to fall. Like the fear of the world, so the love of the world was a sin with Jesus, and nowhere are His warnings so stern as here. It is the sin of men who seize the gift and forget the Giver, to whom the good becomes evil because it keeps them from the highest good. Above all, such men fail to see the spiritual meaning of material things, that beauty and health and wealth and life are only the tools for higher ends. That is the higher meaning which our faith gives to the world: it is the place ordered of God for the molding of men and for the establishing of a fellowship of righteousness and love.

Of the many practical questions that press upon us here and that concern deeply our daily life, only a few can be touched. Here is the question of pleasure and comfort, the whole aspect of physical life and enjoyment. We see at once the two extremes that we must shun. This world is not something that is to be feared and fled. We will rather take the beauty and the joy of life as good gifts of God. Asceticism is not our rule of life. Neither is self-indulgence, however, and that is our greater peril to-day. Shall we steer, then, a middle course, taking just so much of pleasure as to avoid excess and yet yield us the greatest good? This maxim, too, fails of the Christian standpoint. The world of health and wealth and beauty are here for the giving of life and the making of men: that is our principle. There is nothing narrow, however, in such a principle, as we can readily see by a few applications. Consider the question of recreation. Too often serious men have frowned upon pleasure, looking upon it at most as a concession to human weakness, especially in youth. Wise men know today that play is a vital part of the education of childhood, an instinct that God has implanted. The child that is cheated of its birthright of play is father to the ambitionless, spiritless, inefficient man. The mingling of youth of opposite sexes is a part of this same plan of education. The big city of to-day sins against God and its youth by turning over this God-given instinct of social recreation to be exploited by greed in the commercialized places of pleasure.

It is the same way with the world of work and business and wealth. They are all schools for the development of life, or may be made such. Sobriety, industry, self-restraint, loyalty, the spirit of co-operation, these and other fine qualities come to the man who does well his work in the world of labor and business. Or take a man's physical life. The body is not the prison house of the soul, nor the dangerous seductress leading us astray by her pleasures and passions. Life is one, and the finest health of soul comes usually with the health of body, while the body itself becomes not master of pleasure but minister in service.

While all this is true, there is another aspect which needs to be enforced. It is indeed our fundamental principle. We have taken pleasure and friendship and the body with its joy of health and its passions and business and possessions, and have declared that all of these are good. Now let us add, they are good only as they minister to life, and to life at its highest. We know how easily every one of these may be perverted. Pleasure may become a minister of sensuality and cruelty. Business may become a monster of oppression. And the danger does not lie in what is openly evil. The business may be honest, only its crowding cares may leave no room for beauty and truth and friends and God. The pleasure may be pure, but it may become the single passion which leaves life shallow and selfish and unsatisfied. What does our principle of stewardship mean here? It means that all these goods are a trust, are so much of the capital of our life. We are to use and to rule so that life shall come out of it. Out of the friends and the play and the toil and the wealth should come in the end the stronger hand, the kindlier heart, the richer mind, the pure thought, the efficient life, the soul that is full of good-will and peace, for which the vision of high things is clearer and the purpose to attain more strong. All this is just one step in which we work with God in His great plan of spiritualizing this world and of making men.

So far we have discussed this principle of stewardship only as applied to our own individual life. It is the social application that gives its largest meaning. We are workers together in the world's life, not only in our own. All that we have: health, skill of hand, gift of voice, wealth, social position, is ours not in fee simple, but in trust. There is only one absolute owner; that is God. We are administering a portion of His world. The final test of life is loyalty in that ministry: Are we working out His ends? It is not a question of tithing an income, or keeping a day holy. That is legalism, the ethics of the servant. The servant does his task and is done. The son belongs to his father all the time and in all his life.

It is easy to take the principle when put in general terms. It will cut quick enough and deep enough if we once seriously apply it. Look at it in relation to our industrial life of to-day. No age has ever seen more generous men of wealth than this day. We are living in the age of philanthropy. But philanthropy is not stewardship. Philanthropy has to do with the spending of money. Stewardship includes the method of its making as well. It is not enough to look at donations to universities and libraries. Where did the money come from? Were competitors crushed by unfair means? Did the millions from steel mean twelve hours a day and seven days in the week from thousands of laborers.? Then that is not a good stewardship in sight of God and man, however many libraries and peace palaces may arise. If God were really the chief partner in the business, I think He would care more for men.

Or suppose we apply the principle to our industrial disputes. What shall we say to the manufacturer or mine owner who declares that his business is his own, that he will brook no interference, that his workmen have no right to say anything as to how the business shall be conducted, that they have the right to work or to quit, but not to organize and demand that he shall treat with them as a whole? To such a man, from the point of our faith, we shall simply say: No title to property is absolute. What you have belongs to God. He is giving it to you to hold and use for men. The question is not of your right, but your duty. Does your direction of this business make for justice and peace and general welfare.?

The principle must be applied to the spending of money. No man has a right to spend his income on himself and his family as a mere matter of course. That income, like the business that made it, belongs to God. Our sole question is. How shall I spend it so as to further what is good, to advance that for which God cares .f^ We need, first of all in this day, a new appraisal of the meaning of money. It is a root of all evil only when planted the wrong way, and that wrong way is either the selfish hoarding or the selfish spending. Money itself is not evil. It is only so much power; its moral quality waits to be determined. It is so much stored up personality, so much of brawn and brain and tears and sweat, so much even of human blood. The supreme question is. On which side of the eternal conflict shall the power be ranged, and how wisely shall it be employed? Our own day is giving us clear examples of what this power may do. There are individual men whose fortune is large enough to stamp out the scourge of tuberculosis in New York. That money would mean information, education, better laws through public enlightenment, disease-breeding houses torn down, better homes erected, hospitals and sanatoria, and the service of hundreds of scientists and physicians and visiting nurses set free by such support for the great task. Education, health, the work of the Church on the foreign field, the work of the Church at home, all give illustrations of what wisely-placed wealth can do. There are many things that wealth can not buy, we say, and that is true. But in our world of to-day there are thousands of splendid, capable lives waiting to enlist in any service if men of wealth will meet their charges and set them free for the task.

We call this the day of philanthropy, and yet men have only just begun to see the stewardship of wealth. There are rich men with large gifts. So far, however, we have been looking at the size of their gifts. The fairer test would be to ask how much they have retained for themselves. And what fair test of stewardship will excuse the man who leaves his thousands or his millions to children beyond all real need of theirs, and forgets the needs of the Kingdom and the claims of countless fellow-men who are his brothers. Some time we shall see that such a deed is as plain a denial of God as any atheist creed.

More important still is it that the rank and file of men of modest means shall apply this principle in their lives. It should be done in practical fashion, for this is business which demands not less good sense and order because it is the world's greatest business. To set aside some fair portion of a man's income, to study where it may best be invested in the Kingdom of God, to let prayer and knowledge and gift go together, this is the stewardship of giving. And the stewardship of business is just as needful for the common man, for it is not some few men of power upon whom justice and peace and good-will wait in the world, but in the main just upon you and me and our neighbor. And you and he and I need for our lesser task in life the ennoblement and inspiration that come when we realize that the least of honest work may mean a real partnership in the eternal plans of God.

There is one other sphere of stewardship to which we must apply our principle, and that is the personal life. The investment of our own life is what finally determines the character of our stewardship. That is the supreme treasure that God has put into our hands to use. No other gift will compensate if we hold this back. Nor is there any other need in God's Kingdom so urgent as this need of the investment of life. It is the same need that fronts us wherever we turn. Our public life suffers to-day not from the strength of the gang, but from the indifference of the respectable citizen. A city official recently upon the same day took an independent stand relative to two public questions. One concerned telephone rates, and the next morning's mail brought him twenty letters of approval. The other was in opposition to the liquor interests, but it brought forth not one letter from the forces of righteousness. Our public life needs more than a few leaders plus an occasional spasm of reform on the part of the masses. It demands some investment of our life, of thought and time and interest. It is so in matters of moral reform. Evil is cowardly. The courage of a few men will often put a host of evil forces to flight. But the men are wanting, and the evil stands.

The question of vocation comes in here for the young man and woman. Where shall I invest my life? Only the great principles can be touched upon here. First, it is the spirit that counts, and all true service is sacred. There is no one calling that is holy.

"Who sweeps a room as by Thy laws

Makes that and the action fine."

Second, the common callings are holy only when followed in the uncommon way. The talk of the sacredness of all life too often means that we drag everything down to the level of the common instead of lifting up the rest to the plane of the highest. Business and law may be made a holy calling, but it takes more spiritual power than most men seem to possess. Third, there is a growing field of callings in which men are set free for more direct service. It is not that the spirit is different here from what it should be in other callings, but it is possible in these to bring one's life to bear more directly upon the needs of men than is usually the case in other vocations. Various forms of social service have notably enlarged this field of late years. In this field the ministry of the gospel still leads. Not that it is unique as a "holy" calling, but it gives opportunities of leadership as no other one field; it moves upon men with the most powerful appeal; it is the supreme teacher of ideals for men and communities through the gospel which it brings; and it bears to men the highest good in answer to the deepest need. The larger and more vital conception of religion which we have been considering will make the ministry more important to-morrow than in any day of the past. Finally, there is the question of location as inseparable from that of vocation. It is not only the deed that counts, but the time and the place. Livingstone in England might have been simply a good physician like ten thousand others. Livingstone in Africa wrote a chapter of history for God's Kingdom. That is the great appeal of the foreign mission field, especially in this day when great peoples like the Japanese and Chinese, the Koreans and the Indians, are emerging from age-long stagnation. To-day their plastic life is waiting new ideals and forces to mold it. To-morrow it will have taken its bent for long years of development.

What is true in the history of these nations is largely true of the world of our day as a whole. Men smile at the common-place remark that we are living in a crucial age. It seems like a bit of delusion that comes to each generation. The delusion, in fact, lies on the other side: this age does not realize what history it is making. In creed, in Church, in State, in industry, in the whole social organization we are moving from an old epoch into a new. The progress is unequal. We do not know how long its day will be. We can not tell how wise will be the change, for movement does not always mean advance. But so much we may see, that it is a day in which men may thank God for the chance to live and work. From the remote home of her hard Siberian exile, old but dauntless, Madame Breshkovsky wrote not long ago to an American friend: "Life is growing more and more interesting. I wish to witness it." To witness it and to play bravely and truly our part in this great day of God, that ambition should belong to our working faith.