mouths.  No such conception of equality and abundance entered into the mind of the Creator or of Him who represented the Creator.  To preach the gospel to the poor was to awaken the mind of the poor.  It was to teach the poor—­“Take up your cross, deny yourselves, and follow me.  Restrain all those sinful appetites and passions, and hold them back by the power of knowledge and by the power of conscience; grow, because you are the sons of God, into the likeness of your Father.”  So he preached to the poor.  That was preaching prosperity to them.  That was teaching them how to develop their outward condition by developing their inward forces.  To develop that in men which should make them wiser, purer, and stronger, is the aim of the gospel.  Men have supposed that the whole end of the gospel was reconciliation between God and men who had fallen—­though they were born sinners in their fathers and grandfathers and ancestors; to reconcile them with God—­as if an abstract disagreement had been the cause of all this world’s trouble!  But the plain facts of history are simply that men, if they have not come from animals, have yet dwelt in animalism, and that that which should raise them out of it was some such moral influence as should give them the power of ascension into intelligence, into virtue, and into true godliness.  That is what the gospel was sent for; good news, a new power that is kindled under men, that will lift them from their low ignorances and degradations and passions, and lift them into a higher realm; a power that will take away all the poverty that needs to be taken away.  Men may be doctrinally depraved; they are much more depraved practically.  Men may need to be brought into the knowledge of God speculatively; but what they do need is to be brought into the knowledge of themselves practically.  I do not say that the gospel has nothing in it of this kind of spiritual knowledge; it is full of it, but its aim and the reason why it should be preached is to wake up in men the capacity for good things, industries, frugalities, purities, moralities, kindnesses one toward another:  and when men are brought into that state they are reconciled.  When men are reconciled with the law of creation and the law of their being, they are reconciled with God.  Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of knowledge, he is reconciled with the God of knowledge, so far.  Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of purity he is so far reconciled with a God of purity.  When men have lifted themselves to that point that they recognize that they are the children of God, the kingdom of God has begun within them.

Although the spirit and practice of the gospel will develop charities, will develop physical comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion.  It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet.  “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you.”  The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of the help that he demands.