The redemption of society means, in the fifth place, the purification of politics.  The dethronement of Mammon will go a long way toward this also; most of the corruptions of our political life spring from the love of money.  Graft is the first-born of covetousness.  But the love of power also plays a part in the debauchery of citizenship; and the central sin of using men as means to our ends is exhibited here on a stupendous scale.  This is the vocation of the boss and the briber and the political machinist; and a deadlier way of destroying manhood it would be hard to find.  It is not only the interest of other individuals, but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician sacrifices upon the altar of cupidity or ambition; and when a man has learned to turn the one great privilege of service and sacrifice which citizenship offers into an opportunity of private gain, he has sunk about as low as man can go.  What more urgent task has the church upon her hands than that of making men see the treachery and infamy of this kind of conduct?  And unless men can be made to see it and feel it, what hope is there for free government?  Can anybody imagine that democracy can long endure if the ruling motive of the citizen in his relation to the commonwealth is a purpose to get as much out of it as he can and give it as little as he can?  All political reforms which leave the citizen in this state of mind are futile.  There is no salvation for a democracy which does not change the direction of the motive in the heart of the individual citizen.  And this is the business of the church.  Without this, social redemption is impossible, and there is no other agency which even proposes to accomplish this.

And, finally, the redemption of society means the simplification of life.  Here, perhaps, we strike more nearly than anywhere else at the heart of the whole problem.  The bottom trouble of the world in which we live is the enormous over-multiplication of our wants.  In the multitude of ministrations to our senses, the life of the spirit is overlaid and smothered.  Jesus said that a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses; it is this elementary truth which the world has ceased to believe.  For the most part our life is in our things; our happiness depends on them; our desires do not often rise above them.

The complexity, the artificiality, the profusion of our belongings absorbs the larger part of our interest.  The energies of invention are mainly directed to the creation of new wants.  As the resources of the earth are developed, life takes on an accumulating burden of cares and conventions and superfluities.  We read, with a wonder which is a thinly disguised admiration, the stories of the extravagances of the people of the whirlpool, but most of us are jogging along after them, wishing that we could get into the swim ourselves.  Our houses are cluttered with adornments; our social functions are spending matches; our feasts invite to satiation; our funerals are exhibitions of extravagance.  This thing has been growing by leaps and bounds, and the time has come when we are fairly swamped by the abundance of the things which we possess.  Nay, it can hardly be said that we possess this abundance; it possesses us:—­