Our Country; Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis...

📒 This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... Average Annual Increase of Wealth of Chnrch-Membere in the United States from 1880 to 1890, $434,790,000. Contributions to Home and Foreign Missions in 1890, $10,695,259. chapter xv. money and the kingdom. Property is one of the cardinal facts of our civilization. It is the great object of endeavor, the great spring of power, the great occasion of discontent, and one of the great sources of danger. For Christians to apprehend their true relations to money, and the relations of money to the kingdom of Christ and its progress in the world, is to find the key to many of the great problems now pressing for solution. Money is power in the concrete. It commands learning, skill, experience, wisdom, talent, influence, numbers. It represents the school, the college, the church, the printing-press, and all evangelizing machinery. It confers on the wise man a sort of omnipresence. By means of it, the same man may, at the same moment, be founding an academy among the Mormons, teaching the New Mexicans, building a home missionary church in Dakota, translating the Scriptures in Africa, preaching the gospel in China, and uttering the precepts of ten thousand Bibles in India. It is the modern miracle worker; it has a wonderful multiplying and transforming power. Sarah Hosmer, of Lowell, though a poor woman, supported a student in the Nestorian Seminary, who became a preacher of Christ. Five times she gave fifty dollars, earning the money in a factory, and sent out five native pastors to Christian work. When more than sixty years old, she longed to furnish Nestoria with one more preacher of Christ; and, living in an attic, she took in sewing until she had accomplished her cherished purpose. In the hands of this consecrated woman, money transformed the...