“Dear friends,” the girl was saying, as Beaumont and Storth joined the crowd, “believe me, we plead with you for your good. I cannot think it right so many of you should lead the lives you do. Some of you, I fear, live very far apart from Christ, living only, as it were, that you may continue to live. All your efforts, all your anxieties, are summed up in that—to continue to live. If you can live honestly you are the more content, because you do not like the risks of dishonesty. If you are unhappily compelled to live meanly, meagrely, you put up with it as best you may, hoping, for a turn of your luck. If you are not so compelled how do you show your gratitude to the Almighty giver and disposer? By faring sumptuously every day, caring only for raiment and fine linen, for dainty dishes, good cheer, soft living. Perhaps you are of the foolish ones that cannot be quite happy without the envy of your neighbours. Then you spend your money upon vanities that give you no real pleasure, except the poor delight of making someone jealous of your good fortune. You work very hard to get more money than you have any need for to buy luxuries that are hurtful to you body and soul. You are really very foolish so to waste this precious life in vain strivings. How much of the misery and poverty of this world are caused because one man conceives he cannot be happy till he has amassed a large fortune. It does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers. So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? Methinks I see one of your sleek manufacturers, an alderman, maybe, perhaps a magistrate. He is well clad, housed sumptuously; he has money always at command, enough and to spare. I can fancy how sweet to him must be that smooth saying, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ Pshaw! The man mistakes a letter. He means the survival of the fattest. Do you think Jesus Christ died for the survival of the fittest, for the sacred law of supply and demand? It seems to me that the fittest do not survive. They are _too_ fit, and the world crucifies them. That is the world’s way of dealing with the fittest. No! Jesus taught a very different doctrine, and His teaching will square with that of neither your Huxleys nor your Spencers, and still less will it square with your consecrated supply and demand. You have tried to carry on the world with theories of men’s devising. Are you satisfied with the result? Does Dives enjoy his dinner the more because he has perforce heard the moans of Lazarus at his gate? Is anybody who has a head to think and eyes to see and a heart to feel