cross, did He not? Is there any extreme like that
of Gethsemane? and Calvary? It is because He went to such extremes, and
the West knows about it, that the West is so radically different from the
East, and that you and I are redeemed from the slavery of sin, with a
sweet peace in our hearts, and so much happiness in our lives.

The distressing thing is that there is so much of going to extremes. Go
through the Christian homes of the western world to-day, and you find home
appointments, wardrobes, safety-deposit boxes, bank books, title deeds,
all spelling out one word, spelled in capital letters, EXTREMES. But that
key-note, named several times already, gives the only safe
way--_obedience_. We need to be on our guard, not so much lest we go to
extremes at either extreme, but that we _obey_ our Lord Jesus. That, and
that only, leads to the wise, well-balanced judgment and action. Obedience
to Him means true sanity.

Where do you draw the deciding line between necessity and luxury? How do
you define those two words? What is necessity? And what is luxury? Simple
definitions help much in getting clear ideas. The dictionary says, a
necessity is something you must have. And a luxury, in its root meaning,
is an extravagance, something "wandering beyond the proper boundary." The
trouble is to know how to draw the line when it comes to one's own
affairs. There is such a big difference between what you want and what you
need. And often we don't want to go into such distinctions. They might
bother our consciences a bit. It seems difficult to keep one's poise in
such things. Some godly people go to extremes in not providing
sufficiently for real needs. Most of us go to the other extreme. Where
does the true dividing line come in?

Well, I think you can say truly that _whatever keeps up and adds to your
strength_ can properly be called _a necessity_. All beyond that line is
luxury. It is the part of wisdom to provide carefully and well for
necessities. Luxury is _bad_, for it really saps our strength. It makes a
man less vigorous in every way. And yet more can be said. The question of
need comes in. Luxury is wrong because of the crying need of men for what
the money spent in luxury would bring to them. I think chiefly now of the
need of their lives for what can come only through a knowledge of Christ.
The bitter cry of the common people against Louis XVI, at the time of the
French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on th