relentless force of general laws and influences, and to diminish
in the individual the conviction of his power to contend against them.
I would avoid dogmatism about this matter and simply say that this
seems plain to me: for one drawback we meet along the pathway of
inheritances, we have a very legion of resource and help through the
gains of time, and of the race. The penalties we have to pay for
transgression against law are not a just indictment of the law, they
are the penalty of its transgression; a by-product, which is always a
decaying product as the character of the race heightens.

The purpose of God in us is character, and once we have it, established
in divine grace and ensphered in the human will of a sufficient number
of us, we shall soon make our new and better world. Without this
character we may hope for nothing, with it we need despair of nothing.

Granted then for a moment that we had but a little more of this
God-fibre running through our individual and our collective life, such
an experience as physical want would become but a memory of a hideous
past. This good old mother-earth can yield us, not only enough to go
round, but enough to go round in generous abundance. Why is it that a
few have so much more than they can use, and so many have less than
they need? Do we think that God wills it? Can we conceive of it as
having any part in the economy of the Kingdom which Jesus came to
establish on the earth? It is not God, but our selfishness that wills
it; a selfishness that has its length of days and its malign power in
the widespread folly and culpable ignorance that play into its hands.

Think again for a moment about the effects on society as a whole of the
intemperate use of strong drink. They are incarnated in horrors, look
where we will. The injuries which simply swarm out of our licensed
temptations to drunkenness are not exceptional and irregular; they are,
as one of the most eminent of our publicists has said, "uniform as the
movements of the planets, and as deadly as the sirocco of the desert or
the malaria of the marshes." There is not a profession round which
drink has not thrown the spell of its sorcery; scarcely a household
that has not been despoiled by its leprous pollution. And who is
responsible for it? Does any one doubt that if the Christian Churches
looked at this accursed traffic through the eyes of God, and attacked
it with faith in His omnipotence, that we could no