that the principles of religion shall be accepted as the working principles of life; on condition, that is, that love shall be made the ground of human association.  Religion can make a better world, it can make the kingdoms of God and of His Christ; but it can only do so on the condition that it is whole-heartedly accepted and thoroughly applied.  The proof that it can do this is in the fact that it can and does make better individuals.  Wherever men and women have lived by the principles of the Gospel they have brought forth the fruits of the Gospel.  It has done this, not under some specially favourable circumstances, but it has done it under all circumstances of life and in all nations of men.  What has been done in unnumbered individual cases, can be done in whole communities when the communities want it done.  It is quite pointless in times of great social distress to ask passionately, “why does not God make a better world?” The only question which is at all to the point is, “why has God not made me better?” The problem of God’s dealing with the world is, in essence, the problem of God’s dealing with me.  If He has not reformed me, if I do not, in my self-examination, find that I am responding to the ideals of God, as far as I know them, there is small point in declamations about the state of society.  Society that is godless, is just a mass of godless individuals; and I can understand why God does not reform the world perfectly well from the study of my own case.  What in me prevents the full control of God is the same that prevents that control over the whole of society:  and I know that that is not lack of knowledge, but lack of love.  Men ignore the primary obligation of life:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... and thy neighbour as thyself.”  As long as they ignore that, there can be no reformed world, no world reflecting the divine purpose, no society,—­whatever may be its widely multiplied legislation,—­securing to men conditions of life which are sane and satisfactory.

Therefore the Child who is born of Mary in Bethlehem while the angels are singing their carols over the fields where the shepherds watch, the Child Who brings peace to men of good will, still, after nearly two thousand years, finds His gift ignored and His longing to lift men to God unsatisfied.  “He came unto His own and His own received Him not”—­and the conditions are not vitally changed to-day.  When we think of a world of fifteen hundred million human beings, the number of those who profess and call themselves Christians is comparatively small; the number of actually practicing Christians, of men and women who do live by the Gospel, without reserve and without compromise, is vastly smaller.  The resistance of the principles of the Gospel is to-day intense; the demand for compromise is insistent.  We are asked to throw over a system which has obviously failed, and to accept as the equivalent and to permit to pass under the same name a system which is fundamentally different; a system whose end is man and not God, whose means are natural and not supernatural, which seek to produce an adjustment with this world that means comfort, rather than an adjustment with the spiritual world which means sanctity.