deal with evil
spirits. Back they come, crowding into his life through the windows if
not through the doors, and the last state of that man is worse than the
first. If the parable had been told in modern times it might have been
called the parable of the vacuum. A man's life is a space which
refuses to be empty. If it is not tenanted by good the evil knocks and
enters it. There is no such thing as an unoccupied life. Nature
abhors a vacuum.

Here is one of the most common mistakes of human experience. A man
often thinks that the less occupied his life is the safer it is. He
casts out his passions, he denies his {139} desires, he abandons his
ambitions, and so seeks safety. But his life is attacked by new
perils. The lusts and conceits of life cannot be barred out of life;
they must be crowded out. The old passion must be supplanted by a new
and better one. The very same qualities which go to make a great
sinner are needed to make a true saint. A man's soul is not safe when
the vigor and force are taken out of it. It is safe only when the same
passion which once threatened ruin is converted to generous service;
and the same physical life that seemed an enemy of the soul has become
the instrument of the soul. The saved life is not the empty life, but
the full life. Jesus comes not to destroy men's natures, but to fill
their capacities full of better aims. The only way to overcome evil is
to have the life preoccupied by good.

{140}

LVII

CHRISTIANITY AND BUSINESS

_Luke_ xvi. 1-12.

This is a difficult parable. There is a quality of daring about it
which at first sight perplexes many people. It is the story of a
steward who cheats his master, and of debtors who are in collusion with
the fraud, and of a master praising his servant even while he punishes
him, as though he said: "Well, at least you are a shrewd and clever
fellow." It uses, that is to say, the bad people to teach a lesson to
the good, and one might fancy that it praises the bad people at the
expense of the good. But this is not its intention. It simply goes
its way into the midst of a group of people who are cheating and
defrauding each other and says: "Even such people as these have
something to teach to the children of light."

I once heard of a father whose son was sentenced to the Concord
Reformatory for burglary. The father stood by the bars of the cell and
heard the boy's story, and then {141} with tears in his e