is respected, where opportunity for the exercise of every talent is given, he owes all this not in any way at all to himself, but to others. And, if in the midst of this world he himself is to have worth and significance, joy and peace, he must turn from himself, and seek a better self through devotion to his fellow-men, whether they be in his home or in his church or in his nation or anywhere on God's round earth. He can have no real importance unless he ally himself with truth and justice and love, the knowledge and practice of which are within his reach because he is a member of a social organism. He is not self-made: he is a product of all the forces which have been at work in the universe from the beginning. He partakes of what nature provides, and he gathers the fruits of the seeds that saints and sages and heroes have sown up and down the world from immemorial ages. He is made strong and enduring by the struggles and labors of the race to which he belongs.

For him the martyrs have died, for him the poets have sung, for him the patient, tireless investigators have revealed the secrets which have given to the mind control of the forces that lie in the heavens and in the earth. Mankind has lived for him: it is his duty to live for whomsoever he can help. His proper home is above nature in the domain of reason, in the realm of freedom, in the kingdom of righteousness, in the spiritual world where that which we communicate becomes doubly our own, where knowledge begets knowledge, where love kindles love, where charity burns the more, the more it becomes self-diffusive. A man cannot be wise or good or strong for himself alone. He is formed and confirmed by the virtues he imparts even more than by those he receives. If his heart is set on material things, he may gather them for himself, may grow hard and exclusive, ignoble and base; but, if his supreme desire is for the things of the soul, he must communicate the blessings he gains, or they will vanish. In the home, in the church, in the nation, the important thing for each one is the help he gives, the benefits he bestows. He who is not a source of faith, of courage, of joy for those about him, has no wellspring of divine life within himself. He must educate if he would be educated, he must ennoble if he would be made noble, he must diffuse religious thought and love if he would become religious.

Every worthy form of individual activity is altruistic. The money paid is never the equivalent of the work done; and whether the la

borer be farmer or builder, physician or teacher, he must look beyond the price he gets to the good he does, must interfuse good will and the desire to be of help with all he does and with all he receives for what he does, or he will shrivel into something that appears to be alive, but is dead. It must be his object to realize himself, not chiefly in his primitive physical self with its material needs and sordid interests, but he must bend all his energies to rise from the low bed whereon nature has laid him to the sphere where God manifests himself as Truth and Love, as Beauty and Righteousness, as Life Everlasting. Then he shall find himself in accord with the things that are permanent, with the good that is absolute. Then shall he learn sympathy with all who live and are hard pressed and beset with doubts and temptations, who are overburdened, whose feet are caught in the meshes of sin, whose hands hang helpless because joy in work is denied them.

Then shall he forget altruism and awaken to love, to the love that poised the heavens and holds the stars in place, that speaks to us when we look on flowers and ripening harvests and the faces of the fair and innocent, when we think of home and country and the graves of the dear ones who have fallen asleep,--to the love which drew the eternal Father from the infinite unseen to clothe himself with the flesh, to walk with his children, to die for them, that henceforth every soul might understand that love is the absolute fact behind, above, and beyond all that appears; that it is the charity of God, yea, God himself. What is a way of believing and thinking may be made also a way of feeling and acting. A passionate devotion to the salvation and welfare of men is aroused in innumerable souls, who, smitten with a sacred enthusiasm, leave father and mother, and home and country, that they may become the servants of the outcast, the abandoned, the fallen, of all whom inevitable circumstance and pitiless law overwhelm and crush.

To this new mood and temper no condition, no state in which a human being may be placed, appears to be hopeless. The saving power of infinite love is infinite. When reason despairs, the heart still believes and hopes; and the best and the noblest are not they who calculate, but they who with divine confidence yield to the impulses which descend from worlds to which the understanding cannot rise. This is the power which moves and consecrates the lives of mothers and of all true lovers, of patriots and saints, of virgins

and martyrs. Life is not a balance sheet: it is a breathing of God, awakening souls to service and to love. When a man is prepared to live and to die for some good cause, which is all the world's, and not alone his own, he has become a dweller in realms which lie beyond the reach of the mere intellect. To these heights the life and teaching of Christ have lifted innumerable souls, enabling them to love and serve, not merely the beautiful, the brave, and the generous, but to love and serve those who have nothing amiable in themselves, who are stricken with poverty, vice, and disease, who distrust and hate us, who are our enemies and their own. His coming is like the coming of spring. The snows melt, the icy bands break, the waters leap and sing, the earth awakens from its death-like lethargy and clothes itself in many-tinted vesture, the young are joyful, and the old grow young again. So in the human world of faith and hope, of thought and conduct, of love and service, Christ unseals the fountains of sympathy, helpfulness, and mercy which lie in the heart of man, but which cruelty, greed, and tyranny had congealed. In the ancient world, patriotism, which was its special virtue, consecrated the instinct of hatred for the foreigner. The earth was divided among savages, barbarians, and civilized men whose moral code was founded on a philosophy of selfishness. Man's divine origin and destiny were forgotten, the sacred meaning and worth of life were ignored. The gods were not believed to take interest in human morality or welfare; and for the best of men there was no refuge from the ruin wrought by greed, lust, and tyranny, save in a kind of Stoic indifference and despair. The virtues of mildness, mercy, serviceableness, chastity, and lowly-mindedness were considered weaknesses and defects. When Christ embodied in his deeds and words the vital truth that God is a father, who verily loves his children, that he is all-holy, that righteousness is life, that only the pure in heart can know him, that they who hunger and thirst to do his will enter his kingdom, which is open to the meanest and most abandoned, if they but repent and have faith and charity, there was a revelation from heaven, the opening of a fountain of immortal life in time and in eternity.

Enthusiasm, devotion, and love have no real object, no meaning, no worth, if man's life be but an apparition, an exhalation from a charnel-house, a pathological growth, a mere dream of life in a universe essentially and eternally dead. One who believes not in God

must cherish a thousand lies to save himself from despair. How can he who beneath the universal appearance that lures him sees but the deception, the trickery, the vileness, the vanity, which it veils, have a great mind or a loving heart? But this is what he must see if in all and above all he sees not God. Now in Christ the eternal Father is made visible, and henceforth all may know that he is, and that he is love. The more we love one another, the more plainly is this truth revealed to us. Love is the vital element of holiness, the spring and secret of righteousness; and there is no blessedness except in living and serving in the spirit of Christ.

Whatever change time may have wrought in opinions and in social conditions, whatever progress may have been made in scientific knowledge, whatever new machinery, whatever hitherto unutilized forces, may have been placed at the disposition of man, it is still and must forever be true that nothing but the spirit of Christian love can give us the power rightly to cheer, console, strengthen, guide, uplift, illumine, and purify one another. The money man spends on his lusts and vices might abolish poverty and fill the world with beauty, but not unless it were administered by hands of intelligence and love. None of the many schemes to overcome the misery and degradation which spring from vice, crime, and pauperism, can attain the end without the ceaseless aid of right loving men and women. Love not only bears all things, hopes all things, but it rejoices with the truth, and is quick to discover how help may be given.

Let the lovers of God and of man stand forth, and let the first word we speak to them affirm that without knowledge and science and wisdom and skill they can do little, are more apt, with all their zeal and fervor, to do harm than good. They do not love truly who neglect any means whatever whereby they may make themselves more able to be of service. It is easy to give money, but love cannot be bought; and the giving of money is not sufficient proof of love. Men spend lavishly to gratify the animal passions, which are the destroyers of love.

They alone love who take a personal interest in those whom they would benefit, who re-enforce their failing lives, not with bread alone, but with sympathy and affection, with faith and courage, with joy and gladness. We feed domestic animals, but we are useless servants if we do nothing more than feed God's poor who are our brethren. We must put ourselves in their place. Like students, we must ac

quaint ourselves with their origin and environments; like friends, we must enter into their failures and sorrows; like true men and women, we must consider that whatever afflicts them concerns us also. Love overcomes all, subdues all things to its own divine purposes. It makes use of the sciences and the arts, of institutions and mechanical contrivances, to prevent or cure disease, to mitigate suffering, to make the air and the earth wholesome, to construct and build, to irrigate and drain, to improve in all possible ways the conditions and environments of human life. We may not be able, like the apostles and early disciples, to work miracles; but centuries of Christian thought and endeavor have, as the Saviour foretold, given us the power to perform even greater wonders. Knowledge has increased the efficacy of faith. Science has widened the boundaries of the empire of love. The change which has taken place in our attitude toward the criminal is but an instance of a general transformation of opinion with regard to all who are bound by the chains of ignorance, vice, and poverty.

We do not, like the savage and the barbarian, deal with the violators of law in the spirit of retaliation and vindictiveness; nor do we think it enough to immure and render them harmless, but we hold it to be our duty to reform them. And above all, so far as this may be possible, we consider it a sacred obligation to do away with the causes which breed crime and misery. To do good to enemies is now recognized to be the duty of society not less than that of individuals. We have come to understand that the real criminal is often the social body itself rather than the man or woman it corrupts and then punishes. Here is an ascent into the world of reason, mercy, and righteousness, an unfolding of the divine purpose as made known by the Saviour, who revealed the sovereign nature of truth and love. His influence, more than all other causes, has lifted the multitude to a higher plane, where the spirit of sympathy and helpfulness breathes unhindered. We hold at least in theory, however we may fail in practice, that mankind are a family; that both the church and the state are a home, where all should be cherished; that, the greater the weakness and misfortune, the greater should be the care. We have abolished legalized slavery, and the better among us are urged as by a divine voice to think no sacrifice too great whereby the condition of multitudes of toilers may be made more tolerable, more hopeful. We recognize that the rights of man are the rights of woman also,