256 MONEY AND THE KIJ^GDOM. 



What right has any one, who has light on this subject, 

 to believe he has given himself to Grod, if he has not 

 given his possessions? If he has kept back the less, 

 what reason is there to think he has given the greater? 

 As Jeremy Taylor says:^ "He never loved God who 

 will quit anything of his religion to save his money." 



Is not much that the Master said concerning posses- 

 sions a dead letter in the church to-day? " Lay not up 

 for yourselves treasures upon earth." Is not that 

 exactly what many in the church are doing, and many 

 more striving with eager energy to do? "The deceitful- 

 ness of riches." How many are afraid of being deceived 

 by them? How many refuse to run the risk? "How 

 hardly shall they that have riches enter into the King- 

 dom of Heaven." How many are unwilling to become 

 rich or richer? Multitudes now complain that they have 

 so little who, on the great day of accounts, will mourn 

 that they had so much. The Word declares covetous- 

 ness to be idolatry; but how many church-members 

 were ever disciplined for this idolatry? There is, how- 

 ever, a sign of the millennium down in Maine, where, a 

 few years ago, a church disciplined five members because 

 they would give nothing. The spiritual life and power 

 of the Church can vitalize and save the world only when 

 there is a spirit of consecration sufficiently deep and in- 

 clusive to accept the true principle of Christian giving. 



3. Again, our safety from the perils which have been 

 discussed demands the acceptance of this principle. 



It is not urged as a panacea ; specific remedies, which 

 there is no space to discuss, must be applied; reform 

 must be pressed ; we need patriotic and wise legislation, 

 and to this end fewer politicians and more statesmen; 

 but statesmanship cannot save the country. Christ's re- 

 fusal to be made a king, and his rejection of Satan's 

 offer of the world's scepter, ought to teach those who 

 seek to save the world that moral means are necessary 

 to moral ends. Christ saw that the world could not be 



1 Holy Living, p 184. 



