determines the value of the deed. Why keep on
insisting upon being good if our hearers have never been carefully
instructed in the nature and the sanctions of goodness? Has not the
trouble with most of our political and moral reform been that we have
had a passion for it but very little science of it? How can we know
the ways of godliness if we take God Himself for granted? No: our
chief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than the
application of the truth. Not many people are interested in trying
to find the substance of the truth. It is hated as impractical by
the multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned by
the get-saved-quick reformers. Nevertheless we must find out the
distinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and why they
are what they are, and what is the good of it all. There is no more
valuable service which the preacher can render his community than to
deliberately seclude himself from continual contact with immediate
issues and dwell on the eternal verities. When Darwin published _The
Descent of Man_ at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the _London
Times_ took him severely to task for his absorption in purely
scientific interests and hypothetical issues. "When the foundations
of property and the established order were threatened with the fires
of the Paris Commune; when the Tuileries were burning--how could a
British subject be occupying himself with speculations in natural
science in no wise calculated to bring aid or comfort to those who
had a stake in the country!" Well, few of us imagine today that
Darwin would have been wise to have exchanged the seclusion and the
impractical hours of the study for the office or the camp, the market
or the street.

Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central and abstract
matters still obsesses us. At the Quadrennial Conference of the
Methodist Episcopal Church held recently at Des Moines, thirty-four
bishops submitted an address in which they said among other things:
"Of course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompromising
denunciation of all violations of laws, against all murderous child
labor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe mines, all deadly tenements,
all excessive hours for those who toil, all profligate luxuries, all
standards of wage and life below the living standard, all unfairness
and harshness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of the
employer or union, all overlordships, whethe