It is all due to the hoary temptation to try to get to one’s end by some sort of a short cut:  “All these things will I give you if you will fall down and worship me.”  Our Lord knew that Satan could not really give Him the ends He was seeking; but His followers are constantly confident that he can, and are therefore his constant and ready tools for this or that party or interest.  They sell themselves to monarchy or democracy, to capital or labour, with the same guileless innocence of what is happening to them, with the same simple-minded incapacity to learn anything from the lessons of the past.  There are no short cuts to spiritual ends, and those ends can never be accomplished by secular means.  The interests of the Kingdom of God can never be forwarded by alliance with the powers of this world; the interests of particular persons or parties in the Church may be—­but that is quite another thing.

The lesson is one that is not without application to the individual life.  There again the tendency to mind something other than one’s own business is almost ineradicable.  We have before us the work of building our spiritual house, of finishing the work that the Father has given us to do, of carrying to a successful conclusion the work of our sanctification.  In view of the experience of nearly two thousand years of Christianity and of our own personal experience, that would seem a sufficiently difficult and obligatory work to occupy the undivided energies of a life-time.  But we are accustomed to treat this primary business of life quite as though it were a parergon, a thing to play with in our unoccupied hours, the fad of a collector rather than the supreme interest of an immortal being.  That spiritual results are no oftener achieved than they are can occasion no surprise when one understands the sort of spirit wherewith they are approached.  If the average man adopted toward his business the attitude he adopts toward his religion he would be bankrupt within a week,—­and he knows it.  You know that the attention you are paying to religion and the sort of energy and sacrifice you are putting into it are insufficient to secure any sort of a result worth having.  Spiritually speaking, your life is an example of misdirected and dissipated energy.  There is no spiritual result because there is no continuous and energetic effort in a spiritual direction.  You are not like a master-builder planning and erecting a house.  You are like a child playing with a box of blocks who begins to build a house with them and, when it is half built, is attracted by something else and runs after that—­not even waiting to put the blocks back into the box!