yes he turned
to the jailer and said: "It is a terrible sorrow to have one's boy thus
disgraced, but"--and his face brightened a little--"after all he was
monstrous plucky." So Jesus, out of the heart of this petty group of
persons snatches a lesson for Christians. It is this: "Why should not
the children of light be as sagacious as these rascals were? Why
should pious people be so stupid?" Jesus looks on to the needs that
must occur in his religion for sagacity, prudence, discretion, and the
perils that will come to it from sentimentalism, mysticism, silliness,
and he asks: "Why is it that the children of this world are so much
shrewder than the children of light?"

How closely his question comes to the needs of our own time! Why is it
that in our moral agitations and reforms the bad people seem so much
cleverer than the good ones; that political self-seeking gets the
better of unselfish statesmanship; that the liquor dealers defeat the
temperance people; that competition in business is so often cleverer
than cooeperation in business? What does Christianity need to-day so
much as wisdom? It has soft-heartedness, but it lacks {142}
hard-headedness. It has sweetness, but it lacks light. It has
sentiment, but it needs sense. How often a man of affairs is tempted
to feel a certain contempt for the Church of Christ, when he turns from
the intensely real issues of his week-day world to the abstractness and
unreality of religious questions! How fictitious, how unbusiness-like,
how preposterous in the sight of God is this internecine sectarianism
and impotent sentimentalism where there might be the triumphant march
of one army under one flag! Let us learn the lesson which even the
grasping, unscrupulous world has to teach,--the lesson of an absorbed
and disciplined mind giving its entire sagacity to the chief business
of life.

{143}

LVIII

MAKING FRIENDS OF MAMMON

_Luke_ xvi. 1-10.

Mammon means money, and the purpose of this parable is to teach
Christians their relations to that world of which Mammon is the
centre,--the world of business interests and cares. Jesus says that
this world is neither very good nor very bad. It is simply
unrighteous. It has no specific moral quality about it. He says
further that you cannot serve this world of Mammon and serve God also.
You must choose. What then can you do in your relation to Mammon? You
can do one of three things. You may, first, make an enemy