230 MOXEY AXD THE KINGDOM. 



maintain personal security and liberty. Architecture, 

 arts, constitutions, schools, and learning have been 

 largely Christianized. But the money power, which is 

 one of the most operative and grandest of all, is only 

 beginning to be; though with promising tokens of a 

 finally complete reduction to Christ and the uses of His 

 Kingdom. . . . That day, when it comes, is the morn- 

 ing, so to speak, of the new creation." ^ Is it not time for 

 that day to dawn? If we would Christianize our Anglo- 

 Saxon civilization, which is to spread itself over the 

 earth, has not the hour come for the Church to teach and 

 live the doctrines of God's Word touching possessions? 

 Their general acceptance on the part of the church 

 would involve a reformation scarcely less important in 

 its results than the great Reformation of the sixteenth 

 centur}^. What is needed is not simply an increased 

 giving, an enlarged estimate of the "Lord's share," but 

 a radically different conception of our relations to our 

 possessions. Most Christian men need to discover that 

 they are not proprietors, apportioning their own, but 

 simply trustees or managers of God's property. All 

 Christians would admit that there is a sense in which 

 their all belongs to God, but deem it a very poetical 

 sense, whollj^ unpractical and practically unreal. The 

 great majority treat their possessions exactly as they 

 would treat property, use their substance exactly as if it 

 were their own. 



Christians generally hold that God has a thoroughly 

 real claim on some portion of their income, possibly a 

 tenth, more likely no definite proportion; but some 

 small part, they acknowledge, belongs to him, and they 

 hold themselves in duty bound to use it for him. This 

 low and unchristian view has sprung apparently from a 

 misconception of the Old Testament doctrine of tithes. 

 God did not, for the surrender of a part, renounce all 

 claim to the remainder. The Jew was taught, in lan- 

 guage most explicit and oft-repeated, that he and all he 



' Bushuell's Sermons on Living Subjects, pp. 264, 2G5. 



