The highest values we can cultivate are the human values. It is all well enough to lay out beautiful parks, build broad streets, erect costly monuments, and rear majestic buildings. However, to do these things alone would be following a very short-sighted plan. Such a program cannot long continue unless we keep producing men who can carry it forward. Furthermore, its results would be of no value to the future without a vigorous and hardy race to enjoy them when the future arrives. If we develop the highest type of human beings we shall not be lacking any good thing when the to-morrows come. After all, the human problems are about the only ones we have. Give us worthy people, and everything else will take care of itself. Where wealth accumulates and men decay the country decays with them. Where humanity is regnant and ascendent everything else is certain to be at its best. The world goes upward or downward, forward or backward with its people. All that enters into our physical environment must first be conceived in the mind and wrought by the hand of man. Humanity is, therefore, the most important object to which our interest and service can be dedicated. It represents both the divine problem and the human task. Only by discharging our full duty to it can we realize the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. The strength, and worth, and happiness of human beings are the things for which we should all be living, both for the sake of others and that of ourselves. Our Blessings of Deliverance (1922) When Thanksgiving Day comes ’round, it always reminds us how numberless are our blessings. This is true even of the visible blessings which could be listed on paper, if there were a volume large enough to hold them. It is also true of a great body of invisible blessings. We might call them our blessings of deliverance. No less important than the things which we have been given are the things from which we have been saved. What the extent of that group of blessings is we can never know. We are here because God did not see fit to call us away this year. Our homes still shelter us because He has not decided to foreclose the mortgage He held upon them before we were born. We still receive our livings because He has not seen fit to discontinue honoring the old petition, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Our loved ones are still about us because He has not seen fit to sunder any of the bands that hold them to earth. What sad misfortunes might have come to us, and did not! What pitiful events might have occurred, and did not! What dark storm clouds might have arisen, when the skies remained clear! Every absence of trouble is a mercy of God.