ions. Numerically, then, we may appear small by the side of Europe with her more than two hundred and ninety millions; but even this difference is but temporary. We are gaining on her at a rate which, were it not ascertained by authentic statistics, would seem incredible. We double our numbers in about a generation. By the end of the century they will have grown to about eighty millions. In about eighty years they will be equal to all the present population of Europe. According to the tables of longevity, there are some thousands of our children who will see that time. And what an epoch will that be, if the Republic but maintain its unity! That it will do so we have every reason to believe. Every motive of interest and ambition will dispose it to hold fast to its nationality, which is thus becoming every decade surpassingly grand. We have had enough of disunion and war to teach us the value of union and peace for a century at least.*

It is well for us thus to measure our future; not in the spirit of national vanity, but that we may appreciate the work before us and its immense responsibility. Our political and social mission may be sublime beyond that of any other contemporary people. A nation with one system of laws, free, intelligent, rife with industrial enterprise, and equivalent in territory and population to Europe, will be a fact without a parallel in the history of mankind. What a consummation, it has been said, would it be were all Europe itself to be thus one united, free, enlightened nationality, with one language and under one. flag, from Spitzbergen to Malta, from Lisbon to Moscow! When that day comes for us, the mere moral power of our example can hardly fail to be omnipotent among the nations. But to reach this grand consummation we must, as never a people has before, work out our national advancement. We must educate the people; we must evangelize them; we must cover the continent with schools and churches, for the school-house and the church are the only sure fortifications of such a nation. We have done much in these respects, but, looking at our prospective wants, we have hardly more than begun the sublime task. Population is surging in upon us from Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other.

*For fuller statistical details on this subject see "The Centenary of American Methodism." New York. 1866.

The mighty waves roll over our prairies and mountains. Education and religion must keep up with them, or they will break down the strongholds of our public safety, and submerge the national morals and order. We must, more than ever, consecrate our ever-increasing wealth to the public good. Never has there been an equal field for public spirit and Christian zeal; never a more urgent summons to liberality, and heroic devotion to philanthropic work. To the American Christian, more than to any other on earth, has the divine precept that "no man liveth unto himself," become an irresistible truth. Let us confront boldly our unparalleled work. Its greatness should make us all great. The mission of this new world is not merely to make a great nationality, great materialistic improvements, great fortunes, but a great humanity. Great work is the best means of making great souls. Christian life may yet take a development here such as it has had nowhere else since the apostolic age, and such as may effect the triumph of Christianity throughout the world. This we may yet find to be the providential significance of our peculiar history and destiny.

We need this consecration of secular life the more urgently in this country to save our Christian men from our greatest national passion, the love of money-that passion which holy Scripture denounces as "the root of all evil," which is periling the very morals of trade among us, and which so often becomes what medical science must pronounce a species of mental disease, of actual mania. Brion, the philosopher, said to a miser, "You do not possess your wealth, but your wealth possesses you." There are some very curious revelations of human nature brought out by wealth, real "phenomena," well worth the study of thoughtful minds. As a representative of values, and as, therefore, the means of the acquisition of all things, except wisdom and virtue-and of even these to some extent-money is obviously a desirable possession, and what is called "competence" should be the aim of all men. But it is astonishing how an aim thus intrinsically wise, and among the wisest in human life, should be doomed almost always to overshoot its mark, as if there were some irony of fate mocking the calculations of shrewdness. Few men ever attain a just competence without apparently losing their capacity to appreciate

it. Some sinister power seems to play fantastic tricks with their calculations, and they think they see more need than ever of additional resources; their competence must be made secure by excessive surplusages; these again multiply the contingencies of fortune, and must themselves be fortified by additional securities, and thus the passion for gain goes on until the strangest transmutation takes place in the very reason of the man. His selfishness virtually defeats itself by losing the real advantages of wealth for wealth itself. The sinister power which has been playing its tricks with him becomes a stern and terrible Nemesis, puts out his eyes, and leads him blindly on, overburdened with treasure, while denying him the very enjoyments for which alone it is desirable. His shrewdness in making money remains; it will most probably increase, but it becomes an anomaly among the mental capacities; it is shrewdness against wisdom; it is logic without reasoning. Money, which is only a means, becomes an end, an overtopping, all-consuming end. It burdens life with cares and anxieties instead of relieving them; and the really poor victim of the irrational passion at last dies amid unused accumulations, which have only clogged his existence, especially in those most important later years of his life, when he has needed most repose and clearness of mind for both the infirmities of this life and the preparations of the life to come. What a terrible power of perversion has the love of wealth, when it thus becomes an habitual passion! What a really retributive power! Milton, speaking of the "fallen angels" before they fell, describes Mammon as somewhat mean, even in heaven, with brow prone downward in contemplating the "golden street." A clerical writer of long pastoral experience records that he has seen men reclaimed from every other vice, from the lowest debasement of every other passion, but never one fully saved from avarice. Many misers have been gathered into the communion of the Church, but how seldom has one ever been known to recover from the power of this demon more than temporarily? It would seem to be a sort of reprobation. Doubtless to an earnest penitent the grace of God is omnipotent; but, alas! how hard it seems for a devotee of Mammon to become an earnest penitent-to rend off and hurl away his golden fetters!

Money-making men have, then, a grave liability to watch against. Their besetting passion is, perhaps, the most insidious of vices; it coils like a gliding snake around them, till they are wrapped inextricably in its folds. But, on the other hand, wealth is one of the grandest advantages if rightly applied. The talent to make it is God-given, and they who have that talent should use it to the utmost as a most precious endowment for the good of the world. It promotes business; it gives industrial employment to the poor; it prompts invention; it advances civilization. Wealth is capital; and there can be no great industrial enterprise, no advanced civilization, without capital. Money can have the highest consecration; it can establish great and perpetual institutions of education, of charitable and scientific relief to human suffering, of relig ious propagandism. It is astonishing that successful business men do not more generally perceive these its noblest uses. The grateful recognition of communities, and of posterity, is a worthy, a virtuous object of ambition; but what commemorative monuments can equal those which rich men can erect to themselves in hospitals, colleges, church edifices, public libraries? In these, it has been justly observed, they may live on, ages after death, a more effective life than they ever had in the flesh, and with ever augmenting rewards in eternity. Many a man of wealth would give his fortune for the fame of a Da Vinci, a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo; but money cannot buy genius; it may, however, buy something better-higher usefulness, and equally enduring and more grateful remembrance in the heart of the world. How can a Christian capitalist forego such possibilities?

We are the more urgent in pressing the doctrine of the priesthood of the people on the attention of successful Christian "men of business," because in this country they have special advantages. In no other nation has wealth afforded such ample means for usefulness. The official census shows that, in 1850, the amount of our property, real and personal, was $7,000,000,000; by 1860 it advanced to more than $16,000,000,000; by 1870 to $30,000,000,000. There is no

other recorded example of such a growth of wealth. It is a possibility only of the new world. In ten years our aggregate property much more than doubled; in twenty years it much

more than quadrupled. All this advance, let us remember, has been made in the present generation; in about two thirds the time of a generation. Evidently, wealth and luxury will overwhelm us unless corrected by a better standard of Christian life and liberality. All these means, among Christian men, belong legitimately to the Church, for these men are its "royal priesthood."

We believe that a just, a really sober view of this subject, such as is implied in the "priesthood of the people,” would make an epoch in Christian civilization, and we are not without hope that wealth is yet destined to such a consecration. Examples occur in England and in this country increasingly. They may yet become a rule, rather than an exception, among Christian capitalists. Not until then will sound reason and sound religion have their normal sway in the business life of Christendom.

But let it not be thought that because we thus speak of " men of business," "men of fortune," the Christian obligation we have been discussing chiefly devolves upon them. As the priestly function is common, it applies to the humblest spheres of life. There is not one of us who is not here on earth in the order of Divine Providence, and with a providential work before us. We can minister in our "holy priesthood" at our family altars, in our workshops, in our neighborly relations. Our hardearned pittances may be the most acceptable offerings presented in the temple. Christ has consecrated forever, in the memory of his Church, the poor widow's mite, and her example, says a great divine, has done more for the charities of Christendom than the conversion of Constantine. Say not, ye poor and humble ones, that you can do nothing. There is not a day, scarcely an hour, in which ye cannot scatter about you the good seed. It was precisely in those lowly spheres of life in which you move that early Christianity began its work and laid its imperishable foundations. By converse, neighbor with neighbor, by household meetings in "upper chambers," by charities in the name of their Lord, by pure living and meek and brave suffering, as well as by apostolic preaching, they swept away at last the imperial heathenism of the Roman world.

And Christian women may well remember the devout women