FOREWORD This little book contains the substance of seven sermons delivered during Lent, and on Easter Sunday, 1913. It seemed to the Sermon Publication Committee of Unity Club that it would be more satisfactory to epitomize the series, through which runs a single idea, than to choose, as usual, one sermon in February and another in March. This book will therefore take the place of Nos. 6 and 7 in the series of sermons 1912-13. The purpose of the preacher was to stimulate his hearers to look deeply enough into the common life to find the good of it. Life is not a May game, neither is it as hard as many people suppose. Half understood, life seems unbearable; fully understood, the most unfortunate and adverse conditions reveal in their heart the resources by which we grow strong. These are not preachments of stoicism. They do not urge hardihood. They attempt to show that, without blinking and without heroism, there are foils in the common life which are employed daily by people everywhere. While much of the talk on the street and among friends is about the untoward and the annoying in life, these brief sermons point out the essential values-which are generally appropriated but not always appreciated. Necessarily prepared for printing in great haste, from notes so brief as to be almost cryptic, the short chapters are offered with a sense of poor workmanship. It has also been impossible in every case to cite authors whose words have been quoted. There has been no attempt to reproduce the sermons as they were delivered. The central theme is carried through, it is hoped, with some effect. I. Responsibility: An Indispensable Burden HE savage acknowledges no responsibilities. That is why he is a savage. The civilized man not only acknowledges responsibilities, but assumes many that are unnecessary and troublesome. Hence he is what he is. Between these two it would be possible, with the proper measuring instruments, to grade men fairly accurately. Employing responsibility as the standard, we could account for the fears and the failures, on the one hand, and the assurances and the successes, on the other hand, that we frequently say we cannot understand. It is not true that responsibility is the one great thing that makes a man. But it is one of the great things. Until one assumes this burden, and bears it constantly, one merely goes back or marks time. The reach of the final goal, while it has never been effected by responsibility alone, has never been effected without the burden, which grows not less, on the whole, as one advances with the years. Yet if fittingly understood and taken up,-observe this paradox,-responsibility instead of forcing him to retreat, vanquished from the world, causes him to stand forth, and to stand alone. A responsible person is one who has learned things. for himself, and come to his own convictions. He uses the reference book on what others are doing sparingly, because he knows that the chief resources are not on the outside, but within himself. His experience tells him, moreover, that even the commonest things of life are uncommonly fertile, in shouldering upon him the burden which is indispensable to a man's part in a man's world. Making a living is the commonest, but by no means the least significant of these burdens. In these agitated times, when there is emphasis upon |