Again, we all of us think too much of money and money-making. Is it not time that we utter a word of warning in the matter? It is inconvenient to have no money, most of us know by practical experience; but the possession of much of it is not after all a guarantee of respectability of character, or individual capacity. We call ourselves a Christian people, we profess to be actuated by Christian principles. The Master was a poor man—a carpenter’s son—His disciples were poor men. If any class are particularly referred to in the New Testament as far from the kingdom, they are the rich. All modern society is based on the opposite idea. We give the rich man the chief place in the synagogue. The society journals delight to do him honour. He has even made church-going the fashion. This is no age of poor geniuses. Our artists, our poets or teachers are all of the well-to-do. A Burns, or a Bloomfield, would be thought nothing of in our time. The modern woman is impossible in a poor community. When a lady writer is described in our magazines and newspapers, the writer dwells at painful length on the costliness of her surroundings; her dresses, her parties, the expensiveness of her furniture, and the signs of wealth she everywhere displays. The millions—how they toil and how miserably they live! The rich—what an idle life they lead! And then think of the way in which that wealth, which is often a curse to them, is obtained! Far away indeed is the new heaven and the new earth in which dwelleth righteousness; infamous as are the means by which the wealth we envy and admire is obtained, how ready we are to do homage to its possessor, poor as he may be in spirit, and unclean and unlovely in his life! Wentworth saw, as we all do, this unsatisfactory side of all human affairs. The time had come, he thought, for an effort for something better, for a state in which the wealth earned by the labourer should be more equitably distributed. There was a divine order in life, he believed, which had been lost sight of, and forgotten, and the result was unmitigated poverty and wretchedness. For this society was responsible, and especially its rulers, who had increased the sufferings of the poor, who had trampled on the weak, who had played into the hands of the rich and the strong; he did not believe, as some of our modern lights do, that the masses were always right and the classes always wrong. It seemed to him that there were good and bad amongst them all, that circumstances were such, that there was little hope of change for the better. Circumstances were too strong for the individual to conquer. Take intemperance, for instance, the main cause of England’s wretchedness; how is it possible to grapple with that in society, where intoxicating drink is deemed, in most circles, a daily necessity of life?