Two illustrations suggest themselves.  The use of intoxicants has wrought disaster since man came upon the earth.  Drink is not only ruinous when used continuously and in large quantities, but it is injurious even when used moderately.  The life insurance tables show that a young man who, at the age of twenty-one, begins the regular use of intoxicating liquors, reduces his expectancy by more than ten per cent., or more than four years in forty.  That is the average.  In proportion as the body is left to its own control the appetite becomes destructive of the body itself as well as of the body’s value to others.  Just in proportion as the body is under spiritual control is it in position to enjoy itself and to extend the period of enjoyment.

Reference need hardly be made to the diseases that follow in the wake of immorality.  The wages of sin is death—­death to the body, death to the mind and death to the soul.  Races have rotted and passed into oblivion because the body was put in command of the life.  Both drunkenness and unchastity curse the generations that follow as well as the generations that are guilty—­the sins of the fathers and mothers being visited upon the children and children’s children.

And so, too, with the mind; it would run wild but for the sovereign soul of man.  There are temptations that come through the intellect—­temptations that are as destructive as those that come through the body.  Only when the mind is guided and directed by a spiritual conception of life is it capable of its highest and noblest work.

The soul is greater than the mind as it is greater than the body.  Would you have proof?  Recall the days of the martyrs.  What is it in man that can take the body and hold it in the fire until the flames consume the quivering flesh?  The soul of man that can coerce the body to its death is greater than the body itself.  And the soul is likewise greater than the mind.  It can take the imperial mind of man, purge it of vanity and egotism and infuse into it the spirit of humility and a passion for service.  The soul that can thus harness the mind and make it bear the burdens of the World is greater than the mind itself.

Remember, also, that the spiritual gifts which Jesus bestows are vastly richer than all that man possessed before.  Who can measure the value of salvation—­the peace that comes with sins forgiven and the joy of constant communion with the Heavenly Father whom Christ reveals?  And, then, consider the moral code that is revolutionizing the world.  I only have time to mention a few of the fundamental teachings of Christ.

Christ gave the world a new definition of love.  Husbands had loved their wives and wives their husbands; parents had loved their children, and children their parents; and friend had loved friend, but Christ proclaimed a love as boundless as the sea.

Christ founded a religion and built a Church on love—­on love, the greatest force in the world.  Love furnishes an armour which no weapon can pierce.  When physical warfare is forgotten, love will still call its hosts to battle; the effort then will be, not to kill one another but to excel in doing good.