tender and touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence.  The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could not read the language in which they wrote.  Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the prosperity of the state.  The production and distribution of wealth, the disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade, these were matters as remote from his interests, as they were beyond his comprehension.  Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious sect; never one worse to found and direct a commonwealth.”

Jesus’ teaching concerning the Kingdom of God is contained in a handful of parables and picturesque sayings.  It attempts no detailed account of a Utopia; it lays down no laws; it offers the world a spirit, which in every age must find a body of its own.  But this indefiniteness does not fit it the less, but the better, as the inspiration to social reconstruction.  It affords scope for variety and endless progress.  It can take up the social ideals of other ages and of other civilizations, and incorporate whatever in them is congruous with the Christian social order.  The ideals of Greece and Medieval Europe and of our present commercialism, and the ideals of China, India and Japan, are not to be thrown aside as rubbish, but reshaped and “fulfilled” by Christlike love.  It does not stultify human development by establishing a rigid system; but entrusts to thoughtful and conscientious children of God the duty of constantly readjusting social relations, so that they are adequate expressions of their Father’s Spirit.  In every age Christians are compelled not only to voice their protest against the existing order, but to point out precisely what the Spirit of Christ demands, and try practically to embody it.  The fact that our directions are not explicit is proof that God deals with us not as little children but as sons and daughters, not as servants but as friends.  We have to think out for ourselves the economic system, the policies of government, the disciplinary methods, the educational ideals, that will incarnate the Spirit of our Father.  The all-sufficient answer to the charge of the inadequacy of Jesus as a guide to social welfare is the fact, that only in so far as we are able to express His mind in our social relations, do they satisfy us.  The advances made in our generation are conspicuous instances of progress not away from, but up to Him.  The crash of our present commercial order in industrial strife, now scarcely heard in the greater confusion of a world at war, gives us the chance to come forward with the principles of Jesus, and