to nature. Herein alone is found "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Why may not every normal man marry and bring up a family, in accordance with nature? There should be no limitation of offspring with the married. There is but one reason why all do not marry and bring up large families. What is that reason? An imperfect condition of the social order. What is the cause of this? A wrong ideal. By whom or what? By society-the city, the state and the nation. The individual is made to serve these instead of these the individual. The so-called "greatness" of England, of Americaof all the states of Christendom-rests not, as it should, on the common welfare. No city, state or nation is, in truth, great in which there is even one distressed human being that might be relieved and made comfortable and happy by society, and is not. The only purpose of human existence is to do good (1st) to one's spouse and children, and (2d) to one's neighbors. Who are neighbors? All. But what about our individual selves? What is natural here? It is natural to die for others' good. Selfishness is unnatural-abnormal. It is disease. Nothing but love is natural. How may we know this? Love produces only harmony, joy, gladness, bliss. Selfishness, the contrary. It is not natural for a wife to forsake her husband or a husband his wife. It is an insane action, and it begets insanity in the one forsaken. He kills his wife and children and himself. Marriage is a tie that cannot be broken. Two nominally married and agreeing mutually and willingly to part, have not been really married. What binds? It is instinct-habit inherited from foreparents of a thousand generations that stood steadfastly by one another. This instinct is stronger than death. Without mutual consent there should be no divorce, nor then where children prattle. "For better or for worse" must not be made meaningless. Here society (city, state and nation) must stand for the conservation of the unit. Who is that never a child be orphaned but by act of God. that does not ultimate in making it good born. unit? The child. Let Nothing should be done for all children to be III. Of religion, what does ye old schoolmaster of ye olden time-a Puritan of the Puritans-say? He says over and over again, ever and forever reiterating and ever and ever again saying, "Let the prayer of the Master be speedily answered and all his disciples be one as he and the Father are one, and all that is good of all earth's religions be centered in the oneness-all narrowness kept out-the youth universally brought up and educated rightly, clothed in the straightjacket of purity, temperance, love of God and man, and with ambition to "make the world the better, the wiser, and the happier for their living in it." He believes that God has directed the course of all great movements of history, Catholic and Protestant, autocratic and democratic. If God is love, all love is of His essence; if truth, all truth is of His essence, hence all love and all truth are God-inspired. St. Paul has told us plainly that it is wrong to believe that "gain is Godliness." But he says that "Godliness with contentment is great gain; for we brought nothing into this world," he reasons, "and it is certain we can carry nothing out. Having food and raiment," he says, "let us therewith be content. They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare and into many foolish and hateful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition, for the love of money is the root of all evil." He concludes by saying, "Charge them that are rich that they do good; that they be rich in good works." And the command to men, "Be rich in good works," epitomizes the all of Christianity. But the authors of the “later criticism" say that "those ideas are not St. Paul's at all," and that "he only quoted what Greek philosophers taught hundreds of years before he was born." "Be it so," ye old schoolmaster says, complacently. Since to the ancient Greeks we owe all we know of sculpture, architecture, poetry, oratory, rhetoric, logic, history, etc.,-yea, we worship at their shrine of literature and art-why, then, conceal or deny the fact (if it be a fact) that we owe to the old-time Greeks all we know of the philosophy of right living and right doing? Perfection was the rule of their greatness. Their philosophers said: "There are loftier aims than riches." And St. Paul said: "Flee these things and follow after righteousness, Godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness." What, in the domain of selfishness, is tolerable at all? Perfection of body, mind and character is tolerable, and to covet leisure to devote to achieving greatness that posterity may write of one, "It is good that this man was born." "Of Zion it shall be said, this and that man was born in her. ** The Lord shall count when He writeth up the people that this man was born there." (Ps. lxxxvii; 5 and 6.) * Let him, who is in mind a molusk, read this volume no further, for his composure will be disturbed before he reach the end of "Ye Lessons" and he will bring forward the same old charge that was brought against Socrates and insist that the sentence that condemned the Athenian sage to drink the bowl of hemlock be enforced against ye old schoolmaster. Blind, blind as a bat is he that does not see and know the meaning of the twentieth century renaissance. It means that western civilization has recovered at last from the paralysis brought on the human mind by the ignorant Teutons, Normans and Huns that overran the Roman empire and submerged, like a tidal wave, ancient Grecian and Roman learning and civilization. And we are only just now advanced again to the lofty plane of enlightenment whereon Cicero stood and Socrates stood, and out of the soil of which grew the church of the primitive time-the Pentecostal Commonwealth that soon is to be restored and made universal, the United States of the World, and "all things common." YE 1st LESSON. Our Own Columbia. Our Own Columbia that is to be and Our Own Columbia that now is, are not identical, and yet they are the same. The boy and the grown man are not identical; but they are the same. What the marble is in the quarry and what it is in the temple finished and beautiful are not alike the same. Of course, the temple, we say, is "marble," its statuary and even its walls and columns-"a marble temple." The late war in the East was not of our time. Not standing armies and other military organizations, armed cruisers and battleships, cannon and small arms-only the plowshare are of our day. The gallows is not of our time. The death penalty is out of date. Anarchy and anarchism are of a former age long past. What is pertinent to the present time? "Overcome evil with good"-that alone is pertinent-that alone will do to stand alongside of our civilization, which is, indeed, "of the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" the ideal of an age that produced the highest ideals of all past time in ethics and aesthetics, in philosophy, painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, oratory, history, rhetoric, etc. We look today upon a condition of society that appalls. Why so? Because it is not as it should be. How do we know that the condi OUR OWN COLUMBIA. 19 tion we behold is not as it should be, though trusts, millionaires, slums, whist clubs, gambling hells, liquor hells, tobacconists' dens, opium joints, divorce courts, professional abortionists, strikes, murder, robbery, housebreaking, suicides, etc., abound? We know that these are wrongs because we have reached the higher plane of enlightenment-adult age above and beyond the childhood of humanity. We are the peers of the great of antiquity. We understand the true significance of our discoveries in science, our inventions, our grasp of the lightning, our tunneling under the sea, the might of our minds. It means that we are gods. It means that poverty has, by mindachievements, been abolished. How say so when the poor we still have with us? It means that drunkenness and nicotine blood-poisoning and unchastity have ceased to be. How dare give out this positively apparent falsehood in the face of facts to the contrary, observable by the blindest of the blind? The reason for these paradoxical statements is that the door of the past is yet left ajar, though a child may close it. Why is that door not closed? Because the word has not yet been spoken by the people. Has God ordained that the time is now that the word be spoken? Yes, the time is now. What is the word? Only, "Close the door!" Kind reader, it is to your interest, though a millionaire, that the door of the dead past be closed forever and bolted. It is to the interest of every one that our institutions be brought into harmony with our civilization. What it has cost to carry on the Eastern war would amply feed, clothe and shelter the whole people of Russia and Japan; make all comfortable for a half century, not to mention the physical suffering the war has costthe wiping out of the best, the flower of the land-irreparable loss! Let as great pains be taken to meet the common needs in peace as to support an army in war, to help the distressed of our slums, made so by no fault of their own, as to place on their feet the helpless made so by earthquake, fire, cyclone or flood. But, reader, the day is here. Soon will all the institutions and governments of mankind be placed in harmony with twentieth century civilization. This will bring in the Cosmopolitan Christian Commonwealth-Our Own Columbia That Is to Be-the United States of the World! Home Rule of states! Of nations one huge Trust! And soon all tribal narrowness recedes- Come in! O world-wide, democratic state! Come in! Home Rule of every integral part! How long, O Lord! How long have we to wait! "The day draws nigh when Christ shall come again!" YE 2nd LESSON. Individual Reform. Preliminary to social reform must come in individual reform. It was reported that the Union leader, at the head of the teamsters' strike in Chicago in 1905, held his headquarters over a saloon and in a disorderly house. In a word, that he was intemperate and immoral in his habits. Whether true of him or false, the fact is that only good men may lead in any line of reform. "You cannot gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles. A bitter fountain cannot send forth sweet waters, nor a sweet fountain bitter waters." How trite these sayings of the Master, and yet they lie at the foundation of progress. While a city of eighty thousand supports one hundred and twenty saloons, that pay a license tax yearly of twelve hundred dollars each to city and county, taken mainly from the wages of working men, the prospect of the immediate coming in of the millennial day looks dark. Individual and personal manliness is the great want of the age. We must give up our bad habits. We must be as earnest in pursuit of the right as were Cromwell and his Ironsides, or we shall be everlastingly slaves. Slaves to Satan, we will be evermore bondsmen economically. We are units. The aggregation of the units makes the whole. It is by saving the units that Jesus will draw all men unto himself. Men are not saved by tribes and nations, but only individually. This comes home to each person. It is all right to be proud of one's country; better to be, with reason, proud of one's self, proud of one's wife and of one's children. Every man can have a family of good children, a good wife, and a happy home. How? By his being a good man. But what is it to be a good man? The first thing is to be good to himself. How so? clean. Be A man with mouth tobacco-befouled and his breath smelling of lager beer said in my hearing to a little girl who was walking by his side and, in playful mood, put her hand on the sleeve of his shirt, "Oh," he said, "your fingers have made a dirty imprint on my sleeve!" He would not for the world have a stain on his white shirt sleeve or shirt bosom. Such men! Better be, like Socrates, careful to keep a clean soul. "Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter," said Jesus, "that the outside of them may be clean also." We must have clean men before "his kingdom come, and his will be done on earth as it is done in heaven." What is his kingdom? A commonwealth which the Pentecostal church epitomized. Filthy swine never have "all things common." Immoral and corrupt men will never do right by their wives and children, let alone their fellowmen. Family failure, as a rule, is failure of the husband and father, not of the wife and mother. She will do her part, if he do his. The important part of his duty is to keep her in the same mood as when they were united in marriage. How? By attention. Never slight her. Never enter a saloon. Never befoul the air she has to breathe with tobacco smoke. Be a man. We should think constantly of our home and family. The one object of life, according to nature, is to conserve the home. Oh, the idiocy of borrowed appetite! Let no appetite control outside of the moral demands of nature. Eat and drink only to make good and helpful blood to course through our veins. One thing is sure, if we get the idea that to make others happy is our mission on earth, we will forget self. We will sleep on a hard board and eat the coarsest food willingly that we may be a missionary of good to the world. All proper labor is for the common good. So should we feel while working. Was not St. Paul, while engaged in tent-making, working for the good of those who must have shelter? So of every *The capital city of Iowa. FORWARD AND NOT BACKWARD. 21 legitimate craft. We are only missionaries of good while working in any line of sufferable production. Let us feel so-have no other but altruistic motives. That it is to be civilized. He is a savage who would let a house for an immoral purpose-who will do anything that he can see is harmful to others. Curb, O foolish one, your desire for money, your anxiety to be rich. The best, presumably, your boy will see to do, if left a great fortune, will be to be a golf champion. Better an expert shoe-black or barber. Here is something of good. An expert golf or billiard player-great man, indeed! Such is the end of having inherited a fortune. Harmless is golf compared with dispensing strong drink or tobacco, or breaking up rivals in trade. "All right to compete in legitimate business," do you say? No; 'tis not, Only it is right to lend a helping hand. We want a higher ideal of life and of the purpose of living. If every one felt that he lives to give and not to get, to add to and not to take from, it were correct. Let us do our share of service, no more, no less. I would not wish to build or direct the building of all the houses or shoeing all the horses or digging all the coal or producing all the oil or distributing all the goods. But such is now the craze of the individual. I would only do enough to bring to me and mine daily bread. That is all one ought to pray for or labor for. So it is to get back to nature. Leave work for our children to do also and for our neighbors. Let them do their share. So it is to live and let live. Every business should be conducted for the good of all connected with it, as well as for the common good. It is for the state to see that this is done. Let no hog have more than is justly his share. Those who sow and reap and thresh the harvest get little of the yield. One takes it all. So in railroading, so in oil production, coal and diamond digging, etc., the men that do all get scarcely a handful. They lie at the gate of Dives to beg the crumbs that fall from his table. They are not permitted to do even that in this day, but are sent to jail as "vagrants." That is the condition. But how better it? Give Lazarus a nickel to spend for drink-will that help? The Ironsides stood up for the "good old cause" and won. But they were "men of God"-men with a conscience, men of principle. earnest for righteousness. We can succeed only when we stand for right as they stood as devotedly, as earnestly. The units must be perfected. The bricks of the building must not one of them be defective. Of course, we build schoolhouses, grand ones, and colleges. But there is one thing lacking. Every father must be the kind of man he would have his sons be, and every mother the kind of woman she would have her daughters be. YE 3d LESSON. Forward and Not Backward. Socialism and individualism are convenient words to apply to this or that doctrine advocated by a reformer who has no idea of any "ism;" but only sees that some better arrangements of the social body must be brought about. What kind of "ism" may the American system of government be defined to conform to? Is the administration of the federal constitution from Washington to Roosevelt to be defined "socialistic" or "individualistic?" It is immaterial which. What ye old schoolmaster of ye olden time advocates is a continuance of the same governmental system as has been upheld by the American people during the past; but what shall be done, he insists, shall be for the good of the many toilers and not alone of the few speculators. The protective policy (applied to the ninety and nine in |