ll that it signifies, is the most powerful force in the spread of
Christianity. The spiritual nature of man needs to be trained and
disciplined. But does this truth lead the Christian to the monastic
method? Was the self-renunciation of Jesus like that of the ascetics,
with their ecstasies and self-punishments? Is God more pleased with the
recluse who turns from a needy world to shut himself up to prayer and
meditation, than He is with him who cultivates holy emotions and
heavenly aspirations, while pursuing some honorable and useful calling?
The answer to these questions discloses the chief fallacy in the
monastic ideal, the effect of which was the creation of an artificial
piety. There is no special virtue in silence, celibacy, and abstinence
from the enjoyment of God's gifts to mankind.

The crying need of Christianity to-day is a willingness on the part of
Christ's followers to live for others instead of self. Men and women are
needed who, like many of the monks and nuns, will identify themselves
with the toiling multitudes, and who will forego the pleasures of the
world and the prospects of material gain or social preferment, for the
sake of ministering to a needy humanity. The essence of Christianity is
a love to God and man that expresses itself in terms of social service
and self-sacrifice. Monasticism helped to preserve that noble essence
of all true religion. But a revival of the apostolic spirit in these
times would not mean a triumph for monasticism. Stripped of its rigid
vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience, monasticism is dead.

The spirit of social service, the insistence upon soul-purity, and the
craving for participation in the divine nature, are the fruits of
Christianity, not of monasticism, which merely sought to carry out the
Christian ideal. But it is not necessary, in order to realize this
ideal, to wage war on human nature. True Christianity is perfectly
compatible with wealth, health and social joys. The realms of industry,
politics and home-life are a part of God's world. A religious ideal
based on a distorted view of social life, that involves a renunciation
of human joy and the extinction of natural desires, and that prohibits
the free exercise of beneficent faculties, as conditions of its
realization, can never establish its right to permanent and universal
dominion. The faithful discharge of unromantic, secular duties, the
keeping of one's heart pure in the midst of temptation, and the