therefore the creators of the spirit of peace.  Nothing permanent can be achieved except in cooeperation with God; any work of man alone (or of the devil) has in it the seed of decay and must perish, This knowledge relieves us of the gloomy responsibility of destroying or trying to destroy every evil thing we see or think we see.  If it is really evil it is already dying unless nourished by evil within ourselves.  Here is a Buddhist legend which has a lesson for each of us—­“The watcher in the shrine of Buddha rushed in to the Holy Fathers one morning with tidings of a horrible demon who had usurped the throne of our Lord Buddha.  The Fathers ran to the throne room, each one more infuriated than the other, and declaimed against the insolence of the demon, who grew huger and more hideous at every angry word that hurtled through the air.  At last arrived the oldest and most saintly of the monks and threw himself on his knees before the demon and said, “We thank thee, O Master, for teaching us how much anger and wrath and jealousy was still hidden in our hearts.”  At every word he said, the demon grew smaller and smaller and at last vanished.  He was am Anger-Eating Demon, and anger-rousing words and even thoughts of ill-feeling nourished him.

The belief that in comparison with the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow may also be expressed in the statement that God is Lord of Eternity while the devil is prince only of this world.  As this evil spirit has power, and as a part of this power is the ability to appear as an angel of light, so to deceive us, we are bound by self-examination, constantly indulged in, to scrutinize those things, so common in our own lives we do not notice them, which may be but the illusions of this spirit of darkness showing as a fictitious spirit of light:  Hurry and carelessness both in thought and in action; snap-judgment at short range; compromise with the spirit of the time in the interest of “good business,” “practical considerations” or “sound policy”; worship of the doctrine of “get results,” acceptance of the horrible principle:  that it is every man’s business to “sell” something to another, from a patent medicine or “gilt edged” bonds to a new philosophy or an old religion; the estimating of values by size, number, cost.  It is common parlance among Christian people to speak of what a man “is worth” meaning how much money he has.  We speak of a man’s “making a living” meaning only how much money he makes, when by making only money he would be killing his living.  Do we not speak of the call of a missionary from an unshepherded flock to a large city parish as a call to “a wider sphere of usefulness”?  When you or I conceive of any piece of work as “important” is it not because it involves either great numbers or great sums of money?  Then we hear much today of the need for leaders.  The need could not be exaggerated, but does not this lack exist, in part, because we have forgot that the Christian’s first