MONEY AND THE KINGDOM. 255 



such expression in the Bible. The v/ord does not occur 

 there in the plural. It has been belittled ; it has come to 

 mean trial, disagreeable duty, anything which crosses 

 our inclination ; but its meaning in the Scriptures is 

 never so meager as that. There it always means cruci- 

 fixion; like the word gallows, in modern speech, it 

 means death. To take one's cross means, in the Bible, 

 to start for the place of execution. ' ' If any man will 

 come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.'' 

 Follow him where? To Golgotha. He in whose experi- 

 ence there is no Calvary where he himself has been cru- 

 cified with Christ, knows little of Christian discipleship. 

 Christ demands actual self-abnegation; but where the 

 Christian nanio is honored, and its profession confers 

 obvious advantages, self-deception is common and Chris- 

 tian experience is hable to be shallow. As quaint old 

 Rutherford said : ' ' Men get Christ for the half of noth- 

 ing—such maketh loose work. " Too many church-mem- 

 bers know little or nothing of self-surrender ; hence the 

 lack of spiritual life and power. At such times the 

 Church suffers for the Avant of some decisive test, the ap- 

 plication of which wiU show men to themselves, and 

 separate, with a good degree of accuracy, those who 

 have been crucified with Christ from those who know 

 not what it is to " take up the cross." 



In a commercial age, and especially in a luxurious 

 civilization, the form of worldliness to which the Church 

 is most likely to be tempted is the love of money. As 

 the means of almost every possible self -gratification it 

 becomes the representative of self; hence the true prin- 

 ciple of Christian giving, the actual surrender of all 

 substance to God, is exactly the test for the application 

 of which the Church is suffering to-day. If this test 

 were applied now to every church-member as Christ ap- 

 plied it to the young ruler (and the need is the same, 

 for the human heart is the same, and heaven and the con- 

 ditions of entrance are the same) , would not the record 

 in many a case be, ' ' and he went away sorrowful, for he 

 had great possessions " ? 



