ould follow the words while he took off his overcoat
and silk hat and laid them carefully on one of the tapestried chairs. He
still followed them as he straightened his cravat before the glass,
pulled down his white waistcoat, and smoothed his hair.

"'Christ's mission, therefore,'" Thor read on, "'was not to relieve
poverty, but to do away with it. It was to do away with it not by
abolition, but by evolution. It is clear that to Christ poverty was not
a disease, but a symptom--a symptom of a sick body politic. To suppress
the symptom without undertaking the cure of the whole body would have
been false to the thoroughness of His methods.'"

Claude appeared on the threshold. Lois smiled. Thor looked up.

"Hello, Claude! Come in. Just wait a minute. Reading Vibart's _Christ
and Poverty_. Only a few lines more to the end of the chapter. 'To the
teaching of Christ,'" Thor continued, "'belongs the discovery that the
causes of poverty are economic only in the second place, and moral in
the first. Economic conditions are shifting, changing vitally within the
space of a generation. Nothing is permanent but the moral, as nothing is
effectual. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with
all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself; on
these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. On these two
commandments hangs also the solution of the problems of poverty, seeing
that a race that obeys them finds no such problems confronting it. In
proportion to the spread of moral obedience these problems tend to
disappear. They were never so near to disappearing as now, when the
moral sense has become alive to them.'"

Claude smoked a cigar while they sat and talked. It was talk in which he
personally took little share, but from which he sought to learn whether
or not Thor was satisfied with what he had done. If there was any
_arriere pensee_, he thought he might detect it by looking on. It was a
pleasant scene, Lois with her sewing, Thor with his book. The library
had the characteristic of American libraries in general, of being the
most cheerful room in the house.

"What I complain of in all this," Thor said, tossing the book on the
table, "is the intermediary suffering. It does no good to the starving
of to-day to know that in another thousand years men will have so
grasped the principles of Christ that want will be abolished."

Lois smiled over her sewing. "You might as well say that it d