To check the tendency to thriftlessness and extravagance, let us unite and work together for practical, systematic national thrift. You will do this if you teach from the pulpit that it is possible " to serve God and Mammon;" you will do this by giving a different construction to those passages that condemn the rich; you will make men better and happier if you tell them that that wealth which is envied by so many, and which is looked on doubtfully by so many more, so far from being the cause of want amongst thousands, is the "cause of the non-starvation of millions," and, as though by a viewless magnetism, is holding together the whole body of civilization. It is like an enormous electric battery, generating the vital current. "Wealth produces civilization, because it diffuses gradually new wants through the community; and each new want produced, each new luxury needed, is a new magnet-a new power added to the productive engine. The presence of wealth in a community is like a developing solution poured over a photograph. It develops human nature; it develops all the sleeping talents, energies, ambitions, ingenuities by which man is distinguished from the animals, and by the degrees of which men are distinguished from each other. It seems to be producing inequalities, but it is really only revealing them.

"Wealth, then, begins civilization by creating and by satisfying a want. It springs from labour, which is not only motivated by the want of food-for all labour is motivated by that, primarily -but it springs from labour which is motivated by the want of food in such a way and under such conditions, that it does more than satisfy the want by which it is motivated. The majority of mankind,