Here, then, we confront the stupendous fact with which the Christian church has been called to deal during the last half century. If any prophetic function is hers, if she is called to bear testimony against the sin of the world this, surely, is the one sin against which she should have lifted up her voice in season and out of season. If "conviction of sin" has any meaning for this generation its cry for mercy would be extorted by the contemplation of this sin of covetousness. If the testimony of the church should have been clear and unequivocal and unsparing against any class of sinners it should have been those who were suffering their souls to be consumed by an inordinate desire for gain, and who, under the spur of this desire, were not only destroying themselves, but were filling the land with strife and desolation.

Has this been the attitude of the Christian church in the presence of this overshadowing evil? Has this sin been singled out and smitten as the deadliest of iniquities? I am sure than none of us can claim that it has been. This is not where the emphasis of the church's censure has been falling. It has borne witness against greed, but often in a timid and qualified way: it has not been made plain to the people of the last generations that the love of money is the one central, dominant, soul-destroying social evil. Certainly not. If you want proof, consider the fact that a pretty large share of the men whose colossal greed has been exposed in the recent investigations are in the churches. They have not found the atmosphere of the churches uncongenial. And the great majority of them, if you should suggest to them to-day that they ought to be under conviction of sin, and to be crying out "What must we do to be saved?" would look at you in blank amazement and wonder what might be the matter with you. That the muck-rakers have been after them they are aware, but it would surprise them to be told that the church has anything against them. This is what the church has done for them. It has not convinced them of sin. It has not tried very hard

to do it. It has reserved its thunders for other classes of

offenders.

I take these sentences from a late magazine article. There is a wholesome bitter in them:

"The loss of moral leadership of the clergy is often deplored, but what else is to be expected when so many clergymen appeal to the feminine rather than the masculine conscience. To-day

the virile, who see in graft and monopoly and foul politics worse enemies than beer, Sunday baseball and the army canteen, scoff when the pastor of the indicted boss of San Francisco pleads, 'He was never known to smoke or take a drink. He never was seen in front of a saloon bar.' . . . Our moral pacesetters strike at bad personal habits, but act as if there was something sacred about money-making; and, seeing that the master iniquities of our time are connected with moneymaking [italics not mine], they do not get into the big fight at all. The child-drivers, monopoly-builders, and crooked financiers have no fear of men whose thought is run in the moulds of their grandfathers. Go to the tainted-money colleges and you will learn that Drink not Graft is the nation's bane. Visit the religious societies for young men and you will find personal correctness exalted above the social welfare."*

That is the judgment of a man of the world upon the attitude of the church, and I fear that, in the main, it is a true judgment. There are ministers, I hope, of whom it is not true; respecting the church at large it is nearer true than I wish it were. And is it not plain that a church of which anything like this is true can have no power to arouse the conscience of this generation? For a testimony so lacking in proportion, so stammering and feeble in the places where it ought to be firm and strong, the majority of sinners can have no respect. The preacher may hammer away as hard as he pleases on the sins which he finds it safe to assail, but when he lets the giant wrong of the generation go scatheless he gets * Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 504–505.

no answer from the unbelievers he would convert but a scoff

or a sneer.

In short, my friends, the time has come when judgment must begin at the house of God. The church has not dealt courageously and faithfully with the great business entrusted to her. It was her business to testify, in these intense years through which we have been passing, to the deadly influence of covetousness upon the life of men and nations, and for the most part she has been a dumb witness. There was no other truth that these generations so much needed, and she has not given it convincing utterance. Thus she has greatly discredited herself; thus she has lost the power to appeal, with commanding voice, to the conscience of men.

Can the church regain this power? Most assuredly she can. All she has to do is to accept the truth herself, and shape her own life in accordance with it, and then speak it out, without wrath or doubting.

I do not by any means wish to overlook the fact that the church is already, in many quarters, convinced of its failure, and awake to its responsibility. Here are words that were ringing, only two weeks ago, in the ears of the people of one of our oldest New England churches:

"There are evils to-day so much worse than beer and Sunday picnics that these latter seem to fade out of sight. Booze is bad enough, and men ought to keep the Sabbath. But while we waste our bird-shot on this little game, the big violators of the law of God and man go on their own sweet wicked way. It takes no courage now to shake the saloon-keeper over Hades --and he deserves it. But to rebuke a greed which would devour widows' houses without any sauce, and carries whole insurance companies in its vest pockets, and appropriates a railroad and pawns the people's interests in a little game of political chicanery,—this would make some of our ossified Christians, who have thought that mauling the rum business was the whole duty of man, lift up their heads in holy terror."* * Rev. F. L. Goodspeed.

Words like these can be heard here and there, and we may trust that they are but the prelude of a chorus of testimony which will ring and reverberate from all our pulpits until the conscience of the people shall be thoroughly awakened, and the terrible nature of this soul-destroying sin of covetousness shall be brought home to them.

It is not the only sin-we must not say that; but we must learn to discern its enormity and to put it, in its proper perspective, before the thoughts of men. If we could do that, to-day; if we could make men see how absolutely true are the words of Jesus, when he points out the deadly perils that lie in the love of money; if we could convince them of the truth of Paul's saying that covetousness is idolatry, and the most degrading of all idolatries, we might hope to arouse many consciences that have been narcotized in the poisonous atmosphere of the mart, and to hear from many a troubled soul the cry, What shall we do to be saved?"

Need enough they have of salvation-these multitudes who are pouring out the energies of their lives on the altars of Mammon; whose manhood is being gradually subdued, like the dyer's hand, to the element of greed it works in; who are gaining the world and losing themselves! Is there any deeper need than this, in the characters of the majority of the people you know any deeper need than the need of salvation from the inordinate love of gain? And would we not be sure that the Kingdom of God was coming with power, if we could see that the people round about us who love money too well were convinced that this passion was a curse to them and to all their neighbors, and were crying to God that they, and the communities in which they live, might be saved from it? What shape could salvation take, in this day and generation, more benign than this? How much is any salvation worth which does not include this?

What answer, now, would you give if you should hear that cry from the multitude? Would it not be the same answer

To

that the apostolic prisoners gave to the Ephesian jailer: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." And I think that we could let them take these words in their very simplest sense. the people of this generation whose lives are being spoiled in their delirious worship of Mammon what better thing could you say than bid them believe in Jesus Christ—not in any mystical, transcendental, theological way, but in a perfectly natural child-like way-just to believe what he says, and live by it. And it is what he says about the world and the life we are living in it that they need, first of all, to believe. We are fain to put the emphasis on what he is supposed to have said or done with reference to patching up breaches in the divine government, or to reconstructing the heavenly jurisprudence, and these things are sometimes difficult to understand; but really it is most needful to heed what he says about the life that we are to live, from day to day, here in this world. Nearly all the trouble and misery of this world are caused by our failure to heed what he tells us about the meaning of this life, and the ways in which happiness may be found.

And if the people who are beginning to be conscious that covetousness is death, and who want to be saved from it, would sit down and let him teach them what life means, and would believe what he tells them, they would be saved.

Must it not be so? If we really believe what he says about the terrible danger of letting ourselves go in the mad quest of gain; if we believe him when he tells us that a man's life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses; if we believe him when he counsels us not to be anxious about what we shall eat or drink or wherewithal we shall be clothed; if we can trust his assurance that our heavenly Father knows what we need, and that when we have done our honest best we may safely leave ourselves in his hands; if we can take the yoke of Jesus upon us and learn of him,-not so much about the mysteries of theology as about the real meaning of life in this world; if we can let him show us how to trust our Father