The crime, the cardinal sin was with those who refused to serve, who shut their eyes to the ideal their Lord had held up, who strove to compromise with Jesus Christ himself, to twist and torture his message to suit their own notions as to how life should be led; to please God and Mammon at the same time, to bind Christ’s Church for their comfort and selfish convenience.  Of them it was written, that they shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for they neither go in themselves, neither suffer them that are entering to go in.  Were these any better than the people who had crucified the Lord for his idealism, and because he had not brought them the material Kingdom for which they longed?

That servant who had feared to act, who had hid his talent in the ground, who had said unto his lord, “I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hadst not sown,” was the man without faith, the atheist who sees only cruelty and indifference in the order of things, who has no spiritual sight.  But to the other servants it was said, “Thou halt been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.  Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

The meaning of life, then, was service, and by life our Lord did not mean mere human existence, which is only a part of life.  The Kingdom of heaven is a state, and may begin here.  And that which we saw around us was only one expression of that eternal life—­a medium to work through, towards God.  All was service, both here and hereafter, and he that had not discovered that the joy of service was the only happiness worth living for could have no conception of the Kingdom.  To those who knew, there was no happiness like being able to say, “I have found my place in God’s plan, I am of use.”  Such was salvation . . . .

And in the parable of the Prodigal Son may be read the history of what are known as the Protestant nations.  What happens logically when the individual is suddenly freed from the restraint of external authority occurred when Martin Luther released the vital spark of Christianity, which he got from Paul, and from Christ himself—­the revelation of individual responsibility, that God the Spirit would dwell, by grace, in the individual soul.  Ah, we had paid a terrible yet necessary price for freedom.  We had wandered far from the Father, we had been reduced to the very husks of individualism, become as swine.  We beheld around us, to-day, selfishness, ruthless competition, as great contrasts between misery and luxury as in the days of the Roman Empire.  But should we, for that reason, return to the leading-strings of authority?  Could we if we would?  A little thought ought to convince us that the liberation of the individual could not be revoked, that it had forever destroyed the power of authority to carry conviction.  To go back to the Middle Ages would be to deteriorate and degenerate.  No, we must go on. . . .