There is a truth we have not anything like exhausted yet in the great words of Christ, "He who saves [or hoards] his life shall lose it." Parsimony, if we knew it, impoverishes as well as extravagance. If the prodigal had turned miser, he would have remained just as far from the father's house. We do not accuse the disciples for a moment of selfishness or greed. If they misconstrued Mary's motive, let us beware lest we misconstrue theirs. Say they were honest and genuine, but that they lacked insight and that emancipation from the commercial spirit which saves men from estimating all precious and lovely things at their market value. We need the lesson. No century has needed it more. While love in self-forgetfulness and holy passion is spending itself in the tenderest offices that an overflowing heart has suggested, the disciples are engaged in problems of valuation, working out calculations in arithmetic--so much ointment at so much per pound. But that would have been condemned by many who would yet ask themselves seriously whether their main contention was not right. Their blunt and rude interruption showed lack of feeling; it was vulgar and inexcusable. Granted. But if they had quietly sympathised with the good intention, and yet afterwards had clearly represented that here love had loved "not wisely but too well," and had done better if it had selected some more practical method in which to exhibit its reality, would they not have commanded a very general assent? Would not nine out of every ten have said that she could have laid out the money to better advantage, and that it was a holier thing to clothe and feed the persons of the poor than even to anoint the person of the Christ? Now let me say that I do not think we can understand our Saviour's commendation of this deed of love, and this apparent disregard of principles of utility and practical philanthropy, unless we take at once a large and a deep view of life--its purpose and the methods of its education. The pressure of the material necessities is constant and urgent, I know; but God does not mean us to believe that the supreme questions of life are "What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?" When Christ propounded His query to the multitudes on the mount, "Is not the life more than meat, and the body than the raiment?" He demanded in reality their assent to the proposition that the spiritual life is the supremely important. The fact of the matter is, God has never treated man as if he were made to eat and drink because to-morrow he must die. The world is not designed simply to promote our physical well-being, and conducted on purely utilitarian principles, as if it were some sort of gigantic store in which all men were shareholders, and the sole business of which was to produce certain annual profits. That mode of regarding the universe is popular, but false.