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 of Mammon; or secondly, make a master of Mammon, or thirdly, make a friend of Mammon. Many people in Christian history have made an enemy of Mammon. They have regarded the world of business as a godless world which should be shunned. They have run away from it to the ascetic, unworldly life. That is the spirit of the whole monastic retreat from the battle of {144} practical life,--a reaction full of the beauty of self-denial, but still a retreat. The battle of life has to go on, and the best troops have run away. On the other hand, a great many persons have made a master of Mammon. They are simply the slaves of money. That is the vulgar materialism of the modern world. But Jesus says that neither of these attitudes towards Mammon is the Christian relation. The Christian is to make a friend of Mammon; to welcome it, and to use it, to discover the good in it and learn its lessons; to mould it into the higher uses of life. Here is a potter working in his clay. It is a coarse material which he uses and his hands grow soiled as he works; but it is not for him to reject it because it is not clean, but for him to work out through it the shapes of beauty which are possible within the limits of the clay.