danger of the loss of their lives; but it was to save a world and all that were in it. That was the conception he had of his mission. "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." How that word in its meaning begins to orb itself out until it comprehends every man and woman and child, black and white, heathen, Christian, Mohammedan and Jew, all of them some time to be taken up into the infinite love of God. and into the conception of his mission which Jesus Christ had. I want you to realize the meaning of that word world. Weigh it in your hand for a moment— the whole of humanity; feel the weight of it upon your heart just for a second, that you may know how the burden pressed upon the spirit of Jesus Christ as he realized that he had been sent to save a world.

In this connection let us attempt to realize what conception of his mission the Son of Man had. While he was sent to this individual and that, to bring Mary of Magdala back from her life of sin, to recall Peter from his denial of his Master, and to bring Matthew and Zaccheus back into usefulness, yet his mission was not alone to individuals. It was to so infuse them with his large idea that every one of them being restored to health, should become a center of force and influence by means of which a world might be saved. God hath sent his Son into the world, he says, not to condemn the world, but to save the world.

Now men are condemned enough. Every man knows it. I remember when one had been asked by Mr. Brockway, the head of the Elmira Reformatory, to speak one Sunday morning to the prisoners, he warned him thus: "You can speak on any subject here but the word hell. They know all about that now, a good deal better than you do. You are to speak on salvation and love and heaven. They know more about hell now than any

one else." Now, Jesus says, I have not come to condemn the world. Every man is condemned already, and knows it. The remorse, the despair, the sense of pain, the feeling that you are out of relation, all these things we know perfectly well; we do not need anybody to tell us that we are out of relation, we feel the pain of it. And Christ did not come to tell them such things as that, which men already knew, but to tell them how to get out of that condition; how to save the world from that; how to possess themselves of the forces and centers of influence in the world, that others might not fall into like trouble. Christ came to impress upon men the hope of salvation, and open up to them the ways of life; to infuse them with enthusiasm of humanity so that they themselves would go out as missionaries of the new faith. That was his mission, the salvation of the world. It was nothing less than that which Jesus Christ had as his conception of his mission.

Now, to save a world was to take possession of these great centers of influence. If you are going to start a reform, the place to start it is in the city, where there are newspapers that can talk about it; where there are intelligent men to grasp it; where there are social forces that can organize it and carry it out. The cities are centers of might and life and organization. To possess oneself of a city, then, is to influence a large outlying country. Jesus knew what we know now, that people fall in masses. You can vitiate the atmosphere of this room so that every one of you will be lethargic and languid. It is not enough for some one to come in from the outside and say: "You are sick and dying," and take out one at a time.

Long before this congre

gation could be gotten out of doors in that way, some would be dead. The way to do is to open the windows

and let in the air.

People fall in masses, then, because

there is sickness at the heart of men; because there is a poison around them; because a false idea has misled them; because the objects of their life are low.

Take for instance intemperance. There are those who think that people are intemperate because of taste for drink. I do not think so. But having that conception they take this man out and that man out. Now we see that the causes of intemperance are other than the individual will. They are many. They are in povertyand I believe the greatest cause of intemperance is poverty, absolute misery of life; and in this indulgence they have a sense of forgetting it; it is in the weakness of the body; they need strength, and resort to drink for this false strength. More than that, a starved and degenerated physical organism craves something. We know that what might be called the object of the new temperance movement is not to take one and another up, but to control the causes, get possession of the centers of influence.

We feel now that the cause of crime is not alone in an individual will, is not in a depraved heart; but crime may come from a large number of sources. It may come from a false sentiment in the community; it may come from poverty; it may come from bad associations and evil communications. So we must possess the large central forces in the world, and sweep honesty, truth, heroism and love through it before we shall have succeeded in reaching all this crime.

Jesus, in his conception of his mission, had just such large ideas as that. He had infinite time and leisure to attend to the individual; he would go down to Jericho to restore a little twelve-year-old girl to life. He would stop at any time to listen to the wailing cry of a child or a lost woman; and yet for all that, he knew it was impossible to take them one by one and drag them out of the hell they were in; and that certain large forces

must be liberated, and certain large ideas must possess the world before it could be saved. The secret of the liberation of an individual soul from the bondage of sin is not cutting off its habit. Its habit is only the expression of its sin. But it is taking possession of its heart with a new force; of its mind with a new idea.

Let me fill the mind of a young man with an idea, and his heart with a passion, and I know very soon the whole life will be regulated, will build itself up. Jesus gave great ideas to the world, expansive, forceful ideas. Some of them are so old now that we can not realize that they were ever new; but when he gave the idea of the Fatherhood of God, at once that made of the whole world a family; at once every one thought, Why, I know what fatherhood means; that means wise, tender government; that means thoughtful provision; that means protection; that means forgiveness; that means exhaustless love. Get that thought into the mind of every man and at once heaven has become a great family centered about the great benignant Heart that never knew anything but to love.

Another idea he gave was that of brotherhood. Now brotherhood, if we can take the cant away from the word and take it out of the mouth of the demagogue, and just stand it there as a great scientific term, means just this, that the same way in which we treat each other in the family, all the members of the world are to treat each other. That is all there is of it. It is a simple thing. You see the world does not believe it possible. Why, they say, of course I know what I am to do to my brother and sister; but then it is ridiculous to say that I must treat outside people in the same way. No, my friends, it is a Christian conception. Let us try it to be solicitous for each other's welfare; to comfort each other in sorrow; provide for each other in want.

The members of such a family should be so bound together, so happy in their lives, so ardent in their affections, so able to withstand outside pressure, and so strong to accomplish certain desired results that others I will see that in the union of the brotherhood there is the greatest social strength.

Now those are two ideas that he gave to the world. What expansive power there is in them. Jesus Christ, then, thought that the world was to be saved as well as the individuals in it.

There is great attraction in masses for each other. The earth attracts the moon directly in proportion to the mass. If it is one hundred times as large as the moon, other things being equal, it will attract it one hundred times as much. So the sun attracts the earth. Now great ideas have that attractive power in that they draw us toward themselves; and such an idea is the word which Jesus Christ put before his disciples. Nothing less than a world must ever satisfy you; nothing less than every individual in it must satisfy you. This idea has always had in it an attractive power over human souls, and enlarges the soul to the measure of the idea. The man who says, "I am content if I can save my soul in this life," would have a soul little worth saving at the end of it! But the man who says, "I can never be happy if I live a thousand times a thousand lives if a single soul were in pain or misery in this vast universe of God," and means it as he says it, that man's soul rounds itself out until it is as large as the universe of God. Nothing less than every individual in this world would satisfy the immense love of Jesus Christ. That was his conception of it.

But ideas always take a certain form; they are clothed with flesh, and this idea was to build itself up into a world within the world, a society within society, the Kingdom of God. Very many persons think the Kingdom of