Nations perish for want of great leaders. Social reforms are dependent to a large extent upon the spirit of the leadership which has adopted them. The Church is always looking around for some bolder man, some more heroic and dauntless spirit, who will utter the new truth, if any truth can be new--say, rather, the next truth; for truth has always a next self, a larger and immediately impending self, and the hero, who is also martyr, must reveal that next phase of truth and die on Golgotha for his pains. Can we not, in some small sense, be leaders in our little circles--in our business relations, in our family life, in our institutional existence? Many people can follow a tune who can not begin one. That is the philosophy we would unfold and enforce. Regard all leaders with prayerful hopefulness in so far as they want to do good and to be good. Sympathize with them; say to Asa, even the king: “What thou hast done thou hast well done; in God’s name we bless thee for the purification of the land and for the encouragement of all noble things.” Asa showed the limits of human forbearance and human philosophy. He broke down in the very act of doing that which was right because he went too far. He made a covenant, and the people made it along with him. Solemn renewals of the original covenant which God made with their fathers in the wilderness occur from time to time in the history of the Jews, following upon intervals of apostacy. This renewal in the reign of Asa is the first on record. The next falls three hundred years later, in the reign of Josiah. There is a third in the time of Nehemiah. On such occasions the people bound themselves by a solemn oath to observe all the directions of the Law, and called down God’s curse upon them if they forsook it. “And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and all their soul; that whosoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.” That is the danger. You can not make men religious by killing them, by threatening them, by inflicting upon them any degree of penalty. Do not force a child to church. Lead it; lure it; make the church so bright and homelike and beautiful that the child will eagerly long for the time to come when the door will be opened. Asa was impartial. There was a touch of real grandeur about the man. He would not even allow his mother to keep an idol. The queen had an idol of her own “in a grove.” “And also concerning Maachah, the mother of Asa, the king, he removed her from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa cut down her idol, and stamped it and burnt it at the brook Kidron.”