perennially as are the evergreens of the wood with their verdure.

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Oh, yes, there is moral beauty and strength in His teachings," one exclaims, "but have we not the moral system of our civilization even when we leave religion out? After all, why is Christ indelibly associated with our moral life? We have our moral code, we have our schools; education is our safeguard." Very good. Very good. Just two things in reply. As to education, we yield to none in the recognition of its worth and necessity. We have not enough of it. Yet education itself cannot produce moral stamina. The age of Pericles, which dazzles with the array of genius and scholarship, was the most corrupt time that the little peninsula of Attica ever

saw.

Even if education could produce morals we should have but little of it if it had not been for Jesus, as we shall see later.

But that you might know that Christ is the greatest factor in the moral fabric of our civilization, hear the testimony of one not professionally interested in religion. He is only looking at the matter historically and ethically. Lecky in his "History of European Morals " says, "It was the distinguishing characteristic of Christianity that its moral influence was not indirect, casual, remote or spasmodic. Unlike all pagan religions, it made moral teaching a main function of its clergy, moral discipline the leading object of its services, moral disposition the necessary condition of the due performance

of its rites. By the pulpit, by its ceremonies, by all the agencies of power that it possessed, it laboured systematically and perseveringly for the regeneration of mankind. Under its influence doctrines concerning the nature of God, the immortality of the soul and the duties of man, which the noblest intellects of antiquity could barely grasp, have become the truisms of the village school, the proverbs of the cottage and the alley."

If the Grecian poets and dramatists could weave their immortal stories round the later development of Paris and Oedipus, royal babes, who were exposed to death on the mountains, they were illustrating the terrible custom of infanticide which was so prevalent in ancient times. This moral dereliction, Christianity stamped out. If Roman society by the tens of thousands could sit unmoved while gladiatorial shows exhibited man slaying his brother man wholly for sport, it was Christianity and that alone which accounts for the ultimate banishment of this enormity. Says the great historian, “Christianity alone was powerful enough to tear this evil plant from the Roman soil. The Christian custom of legacies for the relief of the injured and suffering replaced the Pagan custom of bequeathing sums of money for games in honour of the dead."

The exalted position of woman, the making of her a companion rather than a mere plaything, the upholding of virtue and the abhorrence of unchastity, Lecky credits to Christianity.

If it had not been for Jesus, where would be the mainspring of intellectual progress? Christ brought His simple message to the simplest of men, but He was concerned also with the deep and the profound. He exhorted to "Know the truth, the truth shall make you free." He implanted within Christian hearts that view of God and of mankind that exalted the ideal of right thinking. The leaders of the church from the days of the patristic fathers were the greatest students of their time. Even in the age of asceticism, which made such a travesty of Christianity by its persecution of the body, the mind was not despised, every sacred spot became the foundation of a monastery where the scriptures were copied with minute care and even during the so-called Dark Ages when it seemed that men's minds slept these institutions of the church kept the lamp of learning lighted. The universities of most ancient lineage in Europe were the children of the Christian church. Salamanca in Spain, Padua in Italy, Oxford and Cambridge in England are but representative types of the time-worn devotion of Christianity to learning. Long before the state ever thought of such a thing as educating her citizens the church was giving the best light of the time. John Calvin at Geneva was the very father of the public school system. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, are but typical of the foundation of institutions of learning at the hands of the Christian church. If there are six hundred institutions of higher learning in our land today it is on authority that all but six of them

were founded by the Christian church. A century and a quarter ago when the university of Tennessee was founded its first president was none other than the pastor of the Presbyterian church in the city where it was founded. If today philanthropists delight to endow these institutions, it would not be so if it had not been for Jesus.

A strange thing happened in Chicago the other day. A man who had been a multi-millionaire actually died poor, and he hadn't lost his money by a slump in the stock market. He had been worth eight millions of dollars but when he died at the age of ninety-two the other day, Dr. D. K. Pearsons had left hardly enough to pay his funeral expenses. What had happened? Why, he had given through the last twenty-five years every cent of it to his children, to his forty children, to the forty Christian colleges from Berea and Milsaps in the South to Pomona and Whitman in the West. He did it because Christ-love had shone within his heart and he wanted boys and girls to have the Christ light of Christian education.

President Wilson in laying the corner stone of the Methodist University of Washington paid a notable tribute when he said that he knew of no religion that had so upheld education as had Christianity.

If it had not been for Jesus where would be the compassionate sympathy that expresses itself in hospitals,* asylums, and loving-kindness. It is vain to argue that such things are purely humanitarian and * Lecky, "History of European Morals,” II-79.

spring unbidden out of the human heart. Such things were never known before the Galilean had His heart moved with compassion as He saw the multitude as sheep without a shepherd. "When the victory of Christianity was achieved in the Roman Empire the enthusiasm for charity displayed itself in the erection of numerous institutions that were altogether unknown to the Pagan world. A Roman lady named Fabiola in the fourth century founded at Rome the first public hospital, and the charity planted by that woman's hand overspread the world. Another hospital was soon founded by St. Pammachus, another of great celebrity by St. Basil at Cæsarea. This was also probably the first asylum for lepers. In the time of St. Chrysostom the church of Antioch supported three thousand widows besides strangers and sick."

If it had not been for Jesus we would not have witnessed that sight at the Y. M. C. A. recently where were presented one hundred and twenty young Chinese men and women who come as a picked lot to be educated at the best American colleges, on the income of the fourteen million indemnity money which our government refused to take for itself after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

If it had not been for Jesus, how scant would be the frescoes of the masters, how silent the oratorios of the great cathedral singers, and how shallow the themes of culture. If it had not been for Jesus, music and art and literature, the finest flowers of civilization, would be but starved pauper children.