hazard, and champions are needed to die, the call for volunteers is thrice obeyed. To meet the challenge to excel in money-making is what gives the tremendous zest to commerce. Contrarywise, "To be weak is to be miserable, being or doing." The greatest rewards and the greatest joys are where the greatest tasks are. Let religion sink to a commonplace good, and call for slight endeavor, and men will treat it with disdain. Let it mean heroism, and the world will regard it. It is the blood of the martyrs that is the seed of the Church. Every high loyalty has inspired excellent ideals and mighty endeavors.

The ministry will be recruited with the best men, it is very clear, not as is sometimes counseled, by making salaries larger and conditions of life softer. It will be recruited, both in numbers and in valor, when a few men in it brave poverty and reproach and death. This will lift the calling into a chal

lenge to manhood, and make cheap and joyless and accusing every work that in its essential unfaith turns from the reproach of Christ to the treasures of Egypt.

Without dividing between the various functions of the minister, belittling none, the leader knows to a certainty how the world is to be saved, and so meets the need with great majesty of soul. His passion is for Christ and for His Kingdom. He pushes forward the frontier of his own life. He dares tremendously and serves utterly, as the great before him, so that all his living is but a new telling of the old story of the Son of God, who, by living among men, and by dying for them, brought new life and new hope to the race.

R

CHAPTER VI

THE LEADER'S PROGRAM

ELIGION rests in the certitude that

there is an almighty Will to be

known and declared and rested in and worked with. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," states both the fact and its compulsion. In the might of this power, not his own, the moral leader goes forward. All things sustain it. It sustains all things. This Will marks the bounds of the leader's program. It gives him the authority, and grounds the enthusiasm, without which the moral leader cannot be. It is the reality, and it gives the majesty, which may indeed be lost from faith, but which constitutes the power which makes religion to differ from all the futile plans of man's caprice.

The result the moral leader is to accomplish is accordingly very definite. While his enthusiasm is great, his program is wholly rational. It is really good news he declares. It is an enriching of the individual life that is his method; it is the upbuilding of a good society that is his end. The purpose of men is to be changed from the getting of things, to the being serviceable. This program, it is easy to see, runs counter to a deep bias of the selfish nature, and is a radical change from the ingrained custom encountered as present-day worldliness. Without doubt it is a new order this man contemplates, as different from the present self-regarding order as the present is from the old feudalism. The common life with its tasks and its privileges is in the heart of the Gospel. The Kingdom of God is a commonwealth. The Golden Rule is the law of the new society the leader sacrifices himself to upbuild. To get a man out of

himself, to enthrone the good of society that, distinguished from its counterfeits, is the program. That one choose to lose his life for the sake of society, that saving society he may save also his own soul, and saving his own soul he may save also society, is the consistent though paradoxical program. To make men live as stewards of God and as servants of their fellowmen; that all good should be a common good, and that love should rule in men's hearts- this is the great task that challenges the leader's

powers.

Turning for a moment to speak again of the means for the accomplishment of this, the genuineness of the moral leader, his evident glory of soul, is his chief reliance. He must depend upon this asset, and know to an enthusiasm that he wins his Church and his world in winning his own soul. He must know that his leadership is strong by virtue of God and of his own surpassing