so long as ye can buy cheap and sell at
large profits? What is the highest aim of us railroad men in the great
whirl of commercial competition which seethes and boils and surges
about this earth like another atmosphere, plainly visible to the devils
of other worlds? What is our aim, but to make money our god and power
our throne? How much care or love is there for flesh and blood when
there is danger of losing dollars? But oh, mighty Saviour! it was not
for this that we were made! We know it was not.

"To whom am I speaking? To myself. God forbid that I should stand
here to condemn you, being myself the chief of sinners for these
twenty-five years. What have I done to bless this community? How much
have I cared for the men in my employ? What difference did it make to
me that my example drove men away from the Church of Christ, and caused
anguish to those few souls who were trying to redeem humanity? To my
just shame I make answer that no one thing has driven the engine of my
existence over the track of its destiny except self. And oh, for that
Church of Christ that I professed to believe in! How much have I done
for that? How much, O fellow members--and I see many of you here
to-night--how much have we done in the best cause ever known and the
greatest organisation ever founded? We go to church after reading the
Sunday morning paper, saturated through and through with the same
things we have had poured into us every day of the week, as if we
begrudged the whole of one day out of seven. We criticise prayer and
hymn and sermon, drop into the contribution box half the amount we paid
during the week for a theatre or concert ticket, and think we have done
our duty as Christians. Then when anything goes wrong in the
community, or our children fall into vice, we score the church for
weakness and the preacher for lack of ability. Shame on us, men of
Barton, members of the Church of Christ, that we have so neglected our
own church prayer meeting, that but of a resident membership of more
than four hundred, living in easy distance of the church, only sixty
have attended regularly and over two hundred have been to that service
only occasionally. Yet we call ourselves disciples of Christ! We say
we believe in His blessed teachings; we say we believe in prayer; but
in the face of all these professions we turn our backs with
indifference on the very means of spiritual growth and power which the
Church places with