and
that the boughs should bend over and drop the ripe fruit into their
mouths. No such conception of equality and abundance entered into the
mind of the Creator or of Him who represented the Creator. To preach the
gospel to the poor was to awaken the mind of the poor. It was to teach
the poor--"Take up your cross, deny yourselves, and follow me. Restrain
all those sinful appetites and passions, and hold them back by the power
of knowledge and by the power of conscience; grow, because you are the
sons of God, into the likeness of your Father." So he preached to the
poor. That was preaching prosperity to them. That was teaching them how
to develop their outward condition by developing their inward forces. To
develop that in men which should make them wiser, purer, and stronger,
is the aim of the gospel. Men have supposed that the whole end of the
gospel was reconciliation between God and men who had fallen--though
they were born sinners in their fathers and grandfathers and ancestors;
to reconcile them with God--as if an abstract disagreement had been the
cause of all this world's trouble! But the plain facts of history are
simply that men, if they have not come from animals, have yet dwelt in
animalism, and that that which should raise them out of it was some such
moral influence as should give them the power of ascension into
intelligence, into virtue, and into true godliness. That is what the
gospel was sent for; good news, a new power that is kindled under men,
that will lift them from their low ignorances and degradations and
passions, and lift them into a higher realm; a power that will take away
all the poverty that needs to be taken away. Men may be doctrinally
depraved; they are much more depraved practically. Men may need to be
brought into the knowledge of God speculatively; but what they do need
is to be brought into the knowledge of themselves practically. I do not
say that the gospel has nothing in it of this kind of spiritual
knowledge; it is full of it, but its aim and the reason why it should be
preached is to wake up in men the capacity for good things, industries,
frugalities, purities, moralities, kindnesses one toward another: and
when men are brought into that state they are reconciled. When men are
reconciled with the law of creation and the law of their being, they are
reconciled with God. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of
knowledge, he is reconciled with the God of knowledge, so far. Whe