One of our missionaries in India tells of a native who was an earnest Christian and a believer in tithing. He had a friend who was converted and he was anxious to have him tithe also. After some effort to persuade him and seemingly without avail, he gave his friend a sound thrashing and enforced the tithe by brawn and not by persuasion of conscience. This was zeal without knowledge. You can no more make a man give than you can make him pray. You can make a man say words, but it is not prayer. You may make him hand out money unwillingly, but that is not giving as I view it. I like to define giving as follows: Giving is a cheerful, willing, liberal, intelligent, quiet, regular and prayerful exercise of a God-given grace. This grace of giving, like all God’s gifts, comes with the asking and stays with the using. It is no more possible for a man to have the grace of giving without asking for it and making proper use of it, than it is to have the Spirit for service without asking for and making use of that gift. I would not attempt to force this system on any unprayerful person or people. But, Oh that the Church might awake to its glorious provision and its wonderful privilege in this conformity to the law of giving! When a man asks for the grace of giving and receives the impulse to open his purse to abound in this grace, then comes to him God’s rule, The Tenth is holy unto Me as a first-fruit of this grace, and immediately he begins to see where it is that a man crosses over the boundary line of selfishness and steps into the plane of devotion to God, and he takes the step and rejoices in it. As he walks on in the glad consciousness of duty done, he begins to rejoice in larger manifestations of this grace and meets other and larger opportunities for the gospel’s sake and for the Master’s sake, and thus the fulness of the blessing of this grace flows into his soul and he knows the meaning of abounding in this grace also. What has been said of individual experience, may be just as truly said of the experience that comes to any congregation that will follow this same plan of God, as some of our congregations can testify. The blessing is not only financial, but it is spiritual in a large and increasing sense. Would that John Knox might stir up the ministry now as he is said to have done in his day in Scotland when he said, “There is no impiety against which it is more requisite you set yourselves in this time. Repent, therefore, and amend your own neglect in this behalf and call upon others for amendment.” Max Mueller is said also to have written to a young minister, “When one thinks what this world of ours would be, if at least this minimum of Christianity were a reality, one feels that you are right in preaching this simple duty in season and out of season, until people see that without fulfilling it, every other profession of religion is a mere sham.”