the sons of men.

III

The Sovereignty of Service

Self and Service My Soul or My Service The Satisfaction of Service

The fruits of sacrifice become the roots of love.

A tin halo makes a fine trap for a man to tangle himself in.

It takes the base line of two worlds to get a correct elevation of any life.

Life is always a dull grind to the man who thinks only of the grist.

Knocking the saints will not open the doors of paradise.

Capacity for that heaven comes from creating this one.

Another man's burden is the Christian's best badge.

The only way to lift life is to lay life down.

It doesn't take long to choose between a sinner who swears once in a while and a saint who makes every one swear all the while.

You cannot lift folks while you are looking down on them.

III

SELF AND SERVICE

There is such a thing as supremely selfish self-denial. A man retires into the monk's pietic seclusion; he isolates himself from interest in the world battles; he shuts himself from sympathy with the struggles of business, civil, and even social life. To him these things are carnal. He is engrossed with the complication of interpretations of languages long dead, or with visions of an unknown heaven, and this, he thinks, is living the life of self-denial.

The denial of self is not the death of self; it is the leading of the best self into larger life. It is not the dwarfing of the life; it is its development into usefulness. It is not the emasculation of character; it is the submission and discipline of the life to new and nobler motives.

He best denies himself who best develops himself with the purpose of serving his fellows. What Jesus meant was that if any man would be one of His he must cease to make his own selfish pleasures, ambitions, and passions the end of his living; he must make the most of himself that he might have the more to give to the service of mankind; he must make the one motive and end of his life the benefit and help of every other man.

That kind of a life means a change of centre. Instead of regarding the universe as revolving about itself it sees that self as but part of the great machinery of life, planned and operating for the good of all. A man begins to deny himself as soon as he begins to love another. Even a yellow dog may act to deflect the heart from its old self-centre. The love of kin and family, of friends, and associates all serve to strengthen the habit of self-denial.

The fewer people a man takes into his plan of life the more likely is he to be selfish. But some lives are but the more selfish because they take in all mankind and look on them as designed to contribute to their single enriching. That kind of a life commits suicide; ever grasping and never giving it dies of plethora. It had never learned that strange secret of the best self-development, sacrificing service.

We need to guard ourselves against the delusion that the denial of oneself means the impoverishment of the life. There can be no true giving of the life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the self, a thorough fitting for that service. The more of a man you are, the brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better your service to the world may be. The sloth that sinks the soul in indifference to its own development is the most sinful of all forms of selfishness.

This way of denial is more, the Master tells His disciples, than an emptying of the life. If some of the cares of self are cast out the burdens of others more than take their place. It is a full life, overflowing with the interests, the fears, loves, hopes, and longings of other lives. It bears the cross, not of an ornamental, vanity-serving glory, but the cross of a world's sin and sorrow.

Each man must carry his cross not on his breast but on his heart and brain. It is what he can do, what he can plan, suggest, undertake towards saving this world. The cross of discipleship will be to some statesmanship, to others science, to others the daily service of a home or the work in the shop; it is the kindly word, the cheering look, the lift by the way; it is whatever is done in unselfish desire to make life better, to bring men nearer to one another and to the Father of all.

You have only to look at the great Teacher to know what self-denial and cross bearing really mean, and you have only to follow Him to fully carry out their principles. To Him they meant the life of doing good, of seeking the sorrowing, befriending the forsaken, helping the helpless. They who follow Him lead the world; they who seek to minister instead of being ministered to are the world's masters. The value of every life must be measured at last not by what it has gathered to itself but by what it has given for the enriching and help of the whole life of the world.

MY SOUL OR MY SERVICE

There is no more subtle temptation than that which sets the soul as a hindrance to the service we should render. A surprise awaits him who carefully will compare the emphasis laid upon the individual soul and its salvation by the modern church with the place given this in the teachings of the Bible. Perhaps he will find in modern preaching, with its insistent appeal to men to save their own souls, an explanation of prevalent selfishness. The moral effect of urging a man to save his soul is not much better than that which comes from advising him to save his skin at any cost.

The most serious objection ever made to religion is that it produces a narrow, self-centred type of mind. That type of religion cannot be right, regardless of its doctrinal orthodoxy, which produces a wrong type of men and women. But may not failure here be accounted for by the selfish basis on which men build the plea for what they call personal salvation?

What could be more selfish than this continual appeal to fear, this urging of men to escape from punishment, to make sure of a house in the heavenly city, this offering of crowns and perpetual rest, plenty and peace, this emphasis on the great object of saving your own soul? It is opposite directly to what the great Teacher told men. Did He not say that the man who would save his own life should lose it?

The concentration of mind on the self, whether in the name of religion or in any other name, is but moral suicide. People who have no other object in life than that of saving their own souls are but little better than those whose whole object is to fatten, protect, and keep safe their bodies.

But Christianity must be perverted greatly to make it teach men to set their own interests first. It is the religion of the other man. Its appeal is not to the love of self, but to the love of society. It offers a way of salvation, not as a thing desirable for your exclusive use, but as the pathway for all lives, for all the people. Its tree of life is not for a single pair, but for the healing of the nations.

True religion is not in self-centred culture, but in the culture of all through the service of the single ones and the culture of the one through his service for all. Only in the atmosphere of service does the soul grow, expand, and find itself. To live in a circle is to die; it is the centrifugal life that finds salvation. They court death who seek only their own lives; they find life who,