of Mammon;
or secondly, make a master of Mammon, or thirdly, make a friend of
Mammon. Many people in Christian history have made an enemy of Mammon.
They have regarded the world of business as a godless world which
should be shunned. They have run away from it to the ascetic,
unworldly life. That is the spirit of the whole monastic retreat from
the battle of {144} practical life,--a reaction full of the beauty of
self-denial, but still a retreat. The battle of life has to go on, and
the best troops have run away. On the other hand, a great many persons
have made a master of Mammon. They are simply the slaves of money.
That is the vulgar materialism of the modern world. But Jesus says
that neither of these attitudes towards Mammon is the Christian
relation. The Christian is to make a friend of Mammon; to welcome it,
and to use it, to discover the good in it and learn its lessons; to
mould it into the higher uses of life. Here is a potter working in his
clay. It is a coarse material which he uses and his hands grow soiled
as he works; but it is not for him to reject it because it is not
clean, but for him to work out through it the shapes of beauty which
are possible within the limits of the clay. Just such a material is
the modern world. It is not very clean and not very beautiful; but the
problem of life is to mould out of its uncleanness the shapes of beauty
which it contains. To run away from life--that is easy enough; to
yield to its evil--that is still easier; but to be in the world and to
mould it--that is the {145} real problem of the Christian life. And
here is the real test of Christian character. The saints of the past
have been for the most part men who fled from the world, but the saint
of to-day is the man who can use the world. He is the man of business
who amid looseness of standards keeps himself clean. He is the youth
in college who without the least retreat from its influences moulds
them to good. He is not the runaway from the world of Mammon, nor yet
its slave; he makes a friend of Mammon for the service of God.

{146}

LIX

COMING TO ONE'S SELF

_Luke_ xv. 17.

When he came to himself he said: "I will arise and go to my father."
This is one of those gospel sentences which contains within itself a
whole system of theology, a doctrine of man and of God and of the
relation of the one to the other. He came to himself. It was not then
himself that had gone away into a far