we can meet Him in our fellows. Richard Swain tells of going home one afternoon and finding his children, Philip, eight years old, and Esther, two years younger, playing together. The latter was standing under the electric light, with both arms raised as high as she could stretch them over her head. Seeing her dramatic position, and the unusual look on her face, he remained silent, knowing that something was coming. With intense feeling she said:

"Oh, Philip! of course we could kiss God!" To which Philip replied:

"Oh, you couldn't kiss God. He is a spirit. Why, God is in you—and in me."

Still standing in her dramatic position, with the light shining full on her face, she began lowering her arms slowly, and as her expression of comprehension deepened she said:

"Oh, well, then, Philip, if God is in you and in me, if we were to kiss each other we would kiss God."

"Yes, that is right, you would," was his response. Then she said:

"Let us kiss God." He arose promptly, and the children, throwing their arms tightly around each other, kissed God. They had grasped a fundamental idea and interpreted it in their own sweet way.

When we can see the divine all about us in our fellows and live in a constant sense of it, many of the difficulties which people raise against the full participation in the Christian way will quickly fade. One will more readily see the necessity of relinquishing the way of warfare and following methods which will call forth the response of that divine element. The industrial problem will be taken from the realm of conflicting economic elements and be approached as a family affair, in which no group will be willing to tolerate a system which works hardships on other members of the family.

It is little wonder that the plain people of Galilee and Judea received the various angles of that message with a ready gladness. That this was God's world about which He cared and in which men were His children and could live as such, was immediately a liberating idea. It freed them from the tyranny of the current ecclesiastical establishment; it eliminated the significance of the Roman yoke. What mattered it what the emperor or governor did? They stood or fell by God's judgment. It killed the envy of the rich or privileged, for did not they have just as much worth before their common Father? And they found not just a nation but a world of brothers.

My second point is, I suppose, in a sense, but a development of the first one; but it has such significance that it deserves separate emphasis. It is that this is man's world, as well as God's, or we might say, because it is God's. Because it is God's world, it is the scene of great possibilities for the individual man and for the whole social group. The best is possible at any moment and for every person, and God sees us in the light of what we may be. The bargain idea of religion as expressed by Jacob—if you will look after me and keep me then you can be my God and I will give my worship—is forever swept aside in the conception that God has made this a world where man can come to his best, and that when man responds to that vision and tries to live in the light of it, he is rendering the only service God cares about.

The additional thought which brings the first one to completion is that this world of those great possibilities is put in man's keeping: it is for him to create the realities which potentially exist. It is man's world, for, as St. Paul says, we are God's fellow-workers.

It is unnecessary to detail the expressions Jesus used to bring home to His hearers the understanding that it was for them to make real what was only potential. The thought is expressed in the large in the conception of the kingdom which was to be progressively realized. He announced it as at hand, outlined its characteristics as a new brotherly set of relationships and then told them how to bring it about.

He was not one to open before them a fool's paradise. He recognized the evil, weakness and brutality in the world summed up in the fact that men generally were living on quite a different basis from that which He set forth. His was not the advice to shut their eyes to the actual situation and pretend that it was what they would like to have it. Many have thought that that was His message; but to give such a word is no more like Him than the supposition that He meant to encourage them to attempt what was impossible.

No, He admitted the evil that was present, that tended to obscure the possibilities which were also there, and told them how they could overcome and transform that evil and make real the good which had been overlain. Forgiveness and love were the transforming powers which were to accomplish it. He put a creative instrument in their hands, the full possibilities of which we have not yet discovered.

Malcolm Sparkes has said: "Love treats every man as if he were the friend he ought to be." That is not a gospel of pretense, for there is a compelling power in love that brings reactions often quite unsuspected. Most people, in their reasoning, ignore the fact that this human nature that we speak of has its two sides; that which responds to base motives and impulses and that which responds to the higher, and that it is for us to choose which we shall appeal to. It has been said that there is no average human nature any more than there is average organ music. What comes from the pipes of the organ depends upon the hand which touches the keys, whether it is a series of divine harmonies or just a jumble of discords.

The opposite conception has been put in these clear-cut words by Herbert Adams Gibbons in a recent magazine, in speaking of the wisdom of Americans adopting a policy of disarmament:

"Their country cannot afford to change from a wolf into a sheep unless a simultaneous change takes place in the others of the pack. Probably the change will never come, for the simple reason that none will consent to risk being eaten by being a little ahead of the other wolves."

Such a point of view entirely ignores the reality of human reactions. The Golden Rule is much more than an arbitrary obligation: it is an expression of the fundamental truth that men react to the stimulus that is applied. It may be true that a hungry pack of wolves will not discriminate between a loving Christian and an angry heathen who is at their mercy; but the case is entirely different when a group of evil-minded men encounter a person radiating a spirit of love and good will as contrasted with one who shows hatred, antagonism or fear. Their reactions will be quite different to those two persons, even though no absolute guarantee of immunity goes with the former.

A few years ago a certain clothing manufacturer, when invited to make an address on "What Is Wrong With Christianity?" sat down to consider the matter. Before he got through he decided that he had no right to criticize until he had tried it out and that it was up to him to make the attempt. Examining his business in that light he found that he was paying some women as low as four dollars a week. He immediately tripled their wages and the others in proportion, announcing that he was going to run his business on the basis of the Golden Rule. He expected, as he said, to go bankrupt in two or three months; but felt that it was better to go out of business that way than to continue and prosper on an un-Christian basis. But when the three months was up, he found that instead of being