her individuals,
but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician
sacrifices upon the altar of cupidity or ambition; and when a man has
learned to turn the one great privilege of service and sacrifice which
citizenship offers into an opportunity of private gain, he has sunk
about as low as man can go. What more urgent task has the church upon
her hands than that of making men see the treachery and infamy of this
kind of conduct? And unless men can be made to see it and feel it, what
hope is there for free government? Can anybody imagine that democracy
can long endure if the ruling motive of the citizen in his relation to
the commonwealth is a purpose to get as much out of it as he can and
give it as little as he can? All political reforms which leave the
citizen in this state of mind are futile. There is no salvation for a
democracy which does not change the direction of the motive in the
heart of the individual citizen. And this is the business of the church.
Without this, social redemption is impossible, and there is no other
agency which even proposes to accomplish this.

And, finally, the redemption of society means the simplification of
life. Here, perhaps, we strike more nearly than anywhere else at the
heart of the whole problem. The bottom trouble of the world in which we
live is the enormous over-multiplication of our wants. In the multitude
of ministrations to our senses, the life of the spirit is overlaid and
smothered. Jesus said that a man's life consists not in the abundance of
the things which he possesses; it is this elementary truth which the
world has ceased to believe. For the most part our life is in our
things; our happiness depends on them; our desires do not often rise
above them.

The complexity, the artificiality, the profusion of our belongings
absorbs the larger part of our interest. The energies of invention are
mainly directed to the creation of new wants. As the resources of the
earth are developed, life takes on an accumulating burden of cares and
conventions and superfluities. We read, with a wonder which is a thinly
disguised admiration, the stories of the extravagances of the people of
the whirlpool, but most of us are jogging along after them, wishing that
we could get into the swim ourselves. Our houses are cluttered with
adornments; our social functions are spending matches; our feasts invite
to satiation; our funerals are exhibitions of extravagance. This thing