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such large terms, he begins to do a man's work. Figures are current which indicate that 97 per cent of all business men in America fail at some time in their business career. Most of them recover and make at least measurable successes, but the majority who fail do it because they are misfits. They have not found their place and often the failure shows them their place. No man is in his place until he can realize himself as supplying part of the real need of the world. Robert Louis Stevenson said there are only two just reasons for the choice of any way in life; "the first is inbred taste in choosing, the second some high utility in the industry selected." It is that high utility that gives a man the largest sense of the value of life. Along with it is the feeling of fellowship with other men in doing his life work. One's brethren and companions have a good deal to do with enthusiasm in service (122:8). They constitute an added motive for activity (22:22). "The American laborer who does his work feeling that he is a partner will do a third more work in a day than laborers will in other countries where the fight-psychology possesses the people, and where employers and employes are all busy in fighting each other's interests in the shops, and going home at night to hold meetings to think how to fight better in the morning" (Gerald Stanley Lee, "We," p. 562).

But we have had in America in recent years a merchant whose life was lived on this basis-Mr. Robert C. Ogden, leader in the Southern Education Board. "In the best sense of the word he was an organization man, always working with the structural elements in the life of the community. He was a man who had learned to work in harness, but he believed in the kind of harness that would give each man scope to pull his best." His biography is written in a book, but it is more fully written in the service he rendered with his life, finding a need and gathering around him a body of people who could be inspired to help in supplying it and then giving himself generously to it.

Nor must we let this seem apart from our religion. It is God who sets the solitary in families and who demands that each life take its share of the world's load. The sense of the psalmists that the great men of their history were only working out a plan has sustained many a man in smaller place since that time. Feeling God's concern in the social group

which we are set to serve is no affectation, but a very real inspiration. James Russell Lowell said that Wendell Phillips

"Saw God standing upon the weaker side;
Therefore he went

And humbly joined him to the weaker part,
Fanatic named, and fool, yet well content
So he could be the nearer to God's heart,
And feel its solemn pulses sending blood

Through all the widespread veins of endless good." The attributes of the true member of the society of God's choice in the 72nd psalm are almost all social, and when we serve the needs of the group we are serving Him to whom our goodness cannot extend. Jesus' forecast of the future and the attitude which eternal justice will take toward human life is all connected with service or neglect of service of the needy here (Matt. 25:31-46). The moral of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is deeply true:

"He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all."

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT AND STUDY

Starting with the case of Thomas Sumner given in the Comment for the Week, try to work out some general principles which will help to determine when a man may serve the social group best by leaving a bad situation rather than by remaining in it to resist the evil in it.

Think over your campus or community and see some of the special lines of unselfish service now being followed, or followed in the past and productive now. This may help to make living for the group a more normal

thing.

CHAPTER VII

The Challenge of the Social Order

In this study we pass from thought of the social group nearest to us, the group of our own kind, to a wider field, that social order which includes our own and all other groups and which is steadily being broadened in the minds of thoughtful men until it carries with it the burden of responsibility for all men. It was forecast centuries ago by a Latin poet who said, "I am a man, and I count nothing that pertains to humanity alien to myself." But his thought of humanity was not so wide as that of Jesus, who set the stakes for his disciples at the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8).

DAILY READINGS

Seventh Week, First Day

We have heard with our ears, O God,

Our fathers have told us,

What work thou didst in their days,

In the days of old.

Thou didst drive out the nations with thy hand;

But them thou didst plant:

Thou didst afflict the peoples;

But them thou didst spread abroad.

For they gat not the land in possession by their own sword,

Neither did their own arm save them;

But thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy

countenance,

Because thou wast favorable unto them.

Thou art my King, O God:
Command deliverance for Jacob.

-Psalm 44: I-4.

What attitude ought we to take toward the past, specially that part of the social order which has come most directly to our own lives? We do not like talk of "the good old days," nor suggestions that the golden age is past. Do you

like the citizens of your town to tell very often how much better the earlier days were in the place? But neither do we like the contemptuous dismissal of the past which is common now, as college students do not like alumni to depreciate the early conditions under which they were trained. Mr. Gladstone once spoke of the conditions of the present as differing from a better early time. An opponent challenged him to say what earlier time he meant, and when Mr. Gladstone mentioned two centuries ago, said, "Oh, yes; the time when they burned witches!" The answer was rather shrewd than satisfactory, for at the point of Mr. Gladstone's contention those times might have been better. There are bad items in any past period, but there are good items too. Part of our history challenges us to our finest lives. God has been plainly in it and there are obligations on us who have inherited it. In the latter part of the psalm is frank acknowledgment of failure. As for yourself, are you the kind of American you ought to be in loyalty to the history of America? Are you living by the best of it? And as a Christian are you as fine as you ought to be in view of the history of the Christian faith? The social order which we have inherited challenges us.

Seventh Week, Second Day

If we have forgotten the name of our God,
Or spread forth our hands to a strange God;
Will not God search this out?

For he knoweth the secrets of the heart.
Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?

Arise, cast us not off for ever.

Wherefore hidest thou thy face,

And forgettest our affliction and our oppression?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust:

Our body cleaveth unto the earth.

Rise up for our help,

And redeem us for thy lovingkindness' sake.

--Psalm 44:20-26.

The admission of the presence of evils in the social order, running through the rank and file of us, is always easy, so easy that we can jest about them. Some of us even talk about

evils as inevitable; they continue if men are in social relations at all. There has never been a wrong done among men which was not described by some people as belonging in the nature of things, to continue "as long as men are men.” The logic of that we hardly realize, for it means that evils are essential to a moral order, and that some men have to be immoral so that other men may be moral, which is monstrous in a rational to say nothing of a moral order, whatever philosophy supports it. The existence of a social order cannot require the existence of the things that make it impossible. And the worst feature of the acceptance of social disorders as necessary is that it cuts the nerve of our opposition to them. A prime requisite of a helpful place in the social order is that these evils shall hurt us, that we shall recognize the inevitable punishment which they bring on any social order. Mordecai believed in God strongly enough to expect that deliverance would come for Israel in some other way if Esther did not do her share toward deliverance, but he saw plainly enough that she could not escape by standing aside (Esther 4:14). God may be able to take care of the social order without us, but what ought to come to us if we stand aside and let it go without our care?

Seventh Week, Third Day

Come, and see the works of God;

He is terrible in his doing toward the children of men. He turned the sea into dry land;

They went through the river on foot:

There did we rejoice in him.

He ruleth by his might for ever;

His eyes observe the nations:

Let not the rebellious exalt themselves.

Oh bless our God, ye peoples,

And make the voice of his praise to be heard;

Who holdeth our soul in life,

And suffereth not our feet to be moved.

For thou, O God, hast proved us:

Thou hast tried us, as silver is tried.-Psalm 66: 5-10.

Pessimists are men who either do not see the saving forces at work in society or do not believe in their effectiveness. They see the 5,000 hungry people so clearly that they either overlook the presence of five loaves and two fishes or else

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