THE LIFE INVISIBLE It is interesting to note two contrary tendencies in the current appraisal of spiritual values in America. On the one hand there is what has been called, not altogether happily, the tendency of ethical materialism. In its best form it is simply a demand for reality, the renewal of the old words, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Show me thy faith by thy works.” In its less worthy forms it is the effort to eliminate spiritual expression and formal religion from areas of life where these have been most familiar. Illustrations in extreme forms abound. We are told now that in charity love has nothing to do with the matter, that the introduction of religious sentiment is only mischievous and misleading, that the issue is one purely of proper economic principle and organization. It is a question of employment for the unemployed, or of calculating accurately the amount of need, counting the hungry mouths and fixing the quantity of bread, and then determining scientifically how much of the bread the hungry should earn, and how much society through appropriate and unsentimental machinery should supply. In medical philanthropy the new idea is that ideas have nothing to do with it. The good Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded man a tract or say anything to him about the religious views or motives of his benefactor. He was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. Let the chaplains depart from the hospitals. And so also in social service. The legitimate work is to improve the culinary methods of the neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for living bodies and to assist in the burial of dead ones; but Christ must not be mentioned, and religious issues must not be raised. These are extreme illustrations, but they are perfectly familiar, and the tendency they represent is indisputable. In this view our Lord, of course, was far astray when He talked to His disciples by Jacob’s well about having meat to eat which they knew not. “Meat!” say our modern ethical materialists. “Meat is meat――beef or bread. It is not a metaphor. Meat that is a metaphor is a mockery.” Well, it would be if it were offered for food to a hungry man, but it is not a mockery to the man who would go hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole modern question is not between those who would give real meat to the hungry and those who would give only metaphorical meat. It is between those who want to deal with people’s skins only and those who mean to deal both with their skins and with their souls, between those who conceive of man as mainly belly and back and those to whom our real life is the life invisible.