had not
brought them the material Kingdom for which they longed?

That servant who had feared to act, who had hid his talent in the ground,
who had said unto his lord, "I knew thee that thou art an hard man,
reaping where thou hadst not sown," was the man without faith, the
atheist who sees only cruelty and indifference in the order of things,
who has no spiritual sight. But to the other servants it was said, "Thou
halt been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many
things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord."

The meaning of life, then, was service, and by life our Lord did not mean
mere human existence, which is only a part of life. The Kingdom of
heaven is a state, and may begin here. And that which we saw around us
was only one expression of that eternal life--a medium to work through,
towards God. All was service, both here and hereafter, and he that had
not discovered that the joy of service was the only happiness worth
living for could have no conception of the Kingdom. To those who knew,
there was no happiness like being able to say, "I have found my place in
God's plan, I am of use." Such was salvation . . . .

And in the parable of the Prodigal Son may be read the history of what
are known as the Protestant nations. What happens logically when the
individual is suddenly freed from the restraint of external authority
occurred when Martin Luther released the vital spark of Christianity,
which he got from Paul, and from Christ himself--the revelation of
individual responsibility, that God the Spirit would dwell, by grace, in
the individual soul. Ah, we had paid a terrible yet necessary price for
freedom. We had wandered far from the Father, we had been reduced to
the very husks of individualism, become as swine. We beheld around us,
to-day, selfishness, ruthless competition, as great contrasts between
misery and luxury as in the days of the Roman Empire. But should we, for
that reason, return to the leading-strings of authority? Could we if we
would? A little thought ought to convince us that the liberation of the
individual could not be revoked, that it had forever destroyed the power
of authority to carry conviction. To go back to the Middle Ages would be
to deteriorate and degenerate. No, we must go on. . . .

Luther's movement, in religion, had been the logical forerunner of
democracy, of universal suffrage in government, the death-knell of that
misinterpretation of Christianity as the