an. When the first thief appeared in Plymouth colony a man was
withdrawn from the fields to make locks for the houses; when two
thieves came a second toiler was withdrawn from the factory to serve
as night watchman. Soon others were taken from productive industry to
build a jail and to interpret and execute the law. Every sin costs the
state much hard cash. Consider what wastes hatred hath wrought. Once
Italy and Greece and Central Europe made one vast storehouse filled
with precious art treasures. But men turned the cathedrals into
arsenals of war. If the clerks in some porcelain or cut-glass store
should attend to their duties in the morning, and each afternoon have
a pitched battle, during which they should throw the vases and cups
and medallions at each other, and each night pick up a piece of vase,
here an armless Venus and there a headless Apollo, to put away for
future generations to study, we should have that which answers
precisely to what has gone on for centuries through hatreds and class
wars. An outlook upon society is much like a visit to Lisbon after an
earthquake has filled the streets with debris and shaken down homes,
palaces, and temples. History is full of the ruins of cities and
empires. Not time, but disobedience, hath wrought their destruction.
New civilizations will be reared by coming generations; uprightness
will lay the foundations and integrity will complete the structure.
The temple is righteousness in which God dwelleth.

"Have life more abundantly." Man is not fated to a scant allowance nor
a fixed amount, but he is allured forward by an unmeasured
possibility. Personality may be enlarged and enriched. It has been
said that Cromwell was the best thing England ever produced. And the
mission of Jesus Christ is to carry each up from littleness to
full-orbed largeness. It has always been true that when some genius,
e.g., Watt, invents a model the people have reproduced it times
innumerable. So what man asks for is not the increase of birth talent,
but a pattern after which this raw material can be fashioned. Carbon
makes charcoal, and carbon makes diamond, too, but the "sea of light"
is carbon crystallized to a pattern. Builders lay bricks by plan; the
musician follows his score; the value of a York minster is not in the
number of cords of stone, but in the plan that organized them; and the
value of a man is in the reply to this question: Have the raw
materials of nature been wrought up into u