very much alive. It is vibrant, virile, and as militant and earnest as the faith of the crusaders. The Every-Day Businessman lives by it.

And he is ready to die for it. No faith is worthy of the name unless a man is ready to die for it. Unless a man "hate his father and mother,

yea, and his own life also” for its sake that is to say, unless it is the biggest thing in his life, it is not a faith worthy to be compared with those faiths that made martyrs. Nobody is dying now for Lutheranism, Congregationalism, Calvinism or Winebrennerianism. Nobody is persecuting any denomination now, as they once persecuted Quakers and Huguenots; and when men cease persecuting a faith, it is because it doesn't matter.

But the Greatest Common Divisor matters. We sent two million men to die for it, if necessary, on the plains of France. For it was this that the Huns attacked. Prussianism assaulted the religion of the twentieth century, the common creed that civilization has been laboriously building up through the ages. It hurled its armies and sent forth its spies and plotters against the holy of holies of all good men's belief. It was not a drive at England and France; it was a thrust at that image of God that dwells in the soul of the world. It menaced not only our business, our property and our political institutions that we might condone—but it threatened the religion of the Every-Day Businessman, the sum and gist

. of all honest men's faith.

The religion of the Every-Day Businessman is here. It is laying its compelling hand on all men everywhere, black or white, rich or poor, in the church or out, spreading like the lump of leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, like the seed growing secretly. It is keeping millions of girls straight, and millions of boys strong and honest. It broods over innumerable homes. It stands, a silent partner, in the business house. It breathes upon the newspaper, the magazine, and the book. Farm and factory, railway and mine, bank and shop, feel its compelling presence.

This country is more religious than ever in its history. We have lost interest in the shibboleths of yesterday, with sectarian rivalries and doctrinal contentions, but we have more interest than ever in the root of the matter, in those ideals of honor, chivalry and truth that are "the same yesterday, and today, and forever."

If God is not within one's soul, He had as well not be at all. If God does not move within one's thoughts, as the wind moves among the trees, as the light dawns in the sky, and as the stars creep out one by one at evening, then God is but a fiction to quarrel over.

The fundamental virtue of virtues is courage. All moral lesion, all doubt and despair, is the result of cowardice. The man who feels he is divine will be the one who dares to say so. No man becomes noble, good, and great-souled until he lays down the law to himself that he is so. The most irreligious thing anyone can do is to permit him. self to think he has no religion.

"I am divine, high, fine, Christ-like !" Let a man draw his sword and take his stand there and defy the devil. In the heart of this egoism lies deep humility. In the bosom of this boasting is the heart of nobleness.

The world is kept bad by saying it is bad, by fearing to claim goodness.

In a recent book is this: "Thou shalt no more separate the melody of the lyre from its cords and

its notes than thou shalt disjoin the creature from the Creator, the finite from the infinite that bears it, the attribute from the substance."

Let me think that even in my life quivers some echo of those sounds heard through the lattices in heaven.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE CHURCH IS ITS

POOR LINE OF SAMPLES

Did it ever occur to the learned gentlemen who write articles in reviews upon the Probable Cause of the Decay of the Church in These Times, and to the reverend gentlemen who gather in ministerial conventions and discuss the question, Why Congregations are Falling Off and the Church is Losing its Hold on the Masses, and to bishops, councils, presbyteries, and conferences, that the real difficulty lies in the Samples they produce ?

The doctrines are very good, the talk is very interesting, the representations are all any one could ask, but when the agents of religion produce their line of Samples they are not satisfactory.

Laying aside all discussion of theory, of divine origin, and day of judgment, we find that people flock to a church, as a rule, when the persons in the church have something in their lives that persons out of the church want.

When you get down to the bed-rock of facts and human nature you discover that churches are subject to the law of supply and demand the same as dry-goods stores. If they produce what people