PAM, 
 Ml SC. 
 
 
 ^traigbt Ernes 
 
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 Cijurd; jftnaiue 
 
 Rev. FRANK OTIS BALLARD, D£>. 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS, IND. 
 
 A 
 
 * 
 
 Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church. Rindge Literature Department 
 150 Fifth Avenue, New York 
 
 Copyrighted, 1904 
 
Straight Lines in Church Finance 
 
 By Rev. FRANK OTIS BALLARD, D.D. 
 
 The Church has put her hand to a plow from 
 which she cannot look back; that plow is the 
 conquest of this world for Christ. She has 
 planted her missions on every shore; she has 
 placed her colleges and printing presses in the 
 strategic centers of the pagan world; she has 
 proclaimed to the heathen that they are un¬ 
 done and hopeless without the Gospel of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. And now she has no elec¬ 
 tion. She must evangelize them. It is con¬ 
 tained in her commission. It is hound up with 
 her very life. To turn from it were to ab¬ 
 dicate, to apostatize, to become infamous. I 
 repeat it. Recession from this work would 
 mean for the Church nothing less than the pre¬ 
 vailing of the gates of hell. 
 
 It is no child’s play she has undertaken. She 
 will need all her faith, all her learning, all her 
 prayer, all her pecuniary resources, and how 
 she will be straitened until it is accom¬ 
 plished! 
 
 I speak of the need of revenues not as though 
 this were not a spiritual conflict. Primarily 
 it is that. Yet so has God ordered the affairs 
 
 2 
 
of men that tremendous sums of i^oney will-be 
 necessary. No matter how greats zeal the 
 Church may show toward missions, if that zeal 
 does not crystallize in abundant revenues-., it 
 will be hardly better than a pantomime. Let 
 not this utterance be deemed a sordid or a 
 faithless thought. We do but follow the 
 Spirit’s leading. Christ indeed came without 
 purse or scrip. He paid his taxes out of a 
 fish’s mouth, and he lay down in a borrowed 
 grave (he did not want it for long and so he 
 borrowed it). But at the side of that manger 
 where he saw the light the first thing pre¬ 
 sented was gold, and it stands written in 
 prophecy, “He shall live, and to him shall be 
 brought the gold of Sheba.” Surely the time 
 for the fulfillment of that scripture must be 
 drawing nigh. 
 
 Changing Conditions 
 
 There is an orderly unfolding in the de¬ 
 signs of God, and it may well be that gold 
 which figured so little in the operations of the 
 apostolic Church that Peter could say, “Thy 
 money perish with thee,” may in the closing 
 stages of this same kingdom be beaten into the 
 very wheels and axles of that hurrying chariot 
 on which now our King rides forth conquering 
 and to conquer. Certain it is that the Church 
 of the early Christian centuries, whether with 
 revenue or without it, could not have secured 
 the evangelization of all races for the obvious 
 reason that the conditions were not ready. 
 
 3 
 
The globe had not been mapped. Facilities for 
 transit and communication were not at hand. 
 A long preliminary work had to be done before 
 Christ’s last commission could be fully exe¬ 
 cuted. In this work exploration had a share, 
 the mastery of languages and the art of 
 printing had a share, commerce had a share, 
 and—shall I say it?—war had a share. Yes, 
 even the God of battles would need to become 
 a John the Baptist to the Prince of Peace. 
 
 This work has about all been done. The 
 drama so slow in its opening scenes now hur¬ 
 ries to its close. So far has Providence now 
 forwarded the possibilities of the kingdom that 
 now at length it may be said for the first time 
 that the successful evangelization of the whole 
 world in a single generation is solely a ques¬ 
 tion of the willingness of Christians to devote 
 money to it. It looks as though the consecra¬ 
 tion of our substance to God would be the next 
 great movement in Christendom. 
 
 The Argument of Open Doors 
 
 A little time ago the doors of many nations 
 were fast locked against the ambassador of the 
 cross. Then did God’s people pray and plead 
 to God to open the doors, and those doors one 
 after another creaked on their rusty hinges 
 and rolled back, and to-day the kingdoms and 
 continents of the world are like the heavenly 
 city-—on the north three gates, on the south 
 three gates, on the east three gates, and on the 
 west three gates, lifting up their heads for the 
 
 4 
 
King of Glory to come in. Tnen there was a 
 cry to the Lord of the harvest, “Send forth 
 laborers into the harvest.” In answer to that 
 prayer you have to-day the World’s Student 
 Christian Federation, the purpose of which is 
 to make the colleges and the universities re¬ 
 cruiting and training stations for the kingdom, 
 with a view to a systematic evangelization of 
 the whole world. This federation embraces 
 twenty-four different countries, with an entire 
 student population of 600,000 and a Christian 
 student brotherhood of 60,000 organized into 
 about 500 societies. Thousands of Student 
 Volunteers have signed the declaration, “It is 
 my purpose, if God permits, to become a foreign 
 missionary.” These young men and women are 
 even now standing on tiptoe looking over into 
 the white harvest field of the world, saying to 
 the Church, “Here am I; send me.” And the 
 Church has not the money to send them. 
 
 A Revival of Giving 
 
 A prince of Madagascar came lately to the 
 Bishop of London and asked beseechingly for 
 two hundred missionaries for his people. The 
 Bishop of London looked into the treasury and 
 said, “We can send you two.” Poverty, lack of 
 funds, retrenchment, this is the trouble. 
 Meantime wealth has towered up like a moun¬ 
 tain and threatens to turn into a volcano and 
 bury the Church with its ashes. If Midas and 
 Croesus were with us now they would be bring¬ 
 ing up the rear of the procession and could 
 
 5 
 
hardly keep out of the poorhouse. Why has 
 such wealth been developed if not to be wheeled 
 into line for the mighty work that Providence 
 has in hand? The doors have been opened. 
 The men have been made willing. All we wait 
 for is the money to send them forth. Any 
 chess player might see with half an eye what 
 should be the next move on the chessboard. 
 Whitefield and Wesley, Finney and Moody were 
 well and in their places as the very angels of 
 God. The Church will always need, and God 
 grant she may always have, such evangelists, 
 such revivalists. But there is more than one 
 string on the harp of God, and I verily believe 
 that the next world-shaking revival is going to 
 come from the pew, led and sustained by a 
 devoted ministry, in connection with the bring¬ 
 ing in of our substance to God in those tithes 
 and offerings prescribed in his word. It must 
 be so. The time-locks on the safes of God were 
 set for the twentieth century. They have 
 opened; the gold has rolled out and will either 
 fascinate and seduce the Church and drug her 
 into idolatry, or, if she awakens, quickly turns, 
 grasps and uses it, she will publish the name 
 of the Redeemer as far and as plentifully as 
 the blessed sun scatters his healing beams be¬ 
 fore the fleeting night. 
 
 The Problem of Persuasion 
 
 But how are you going to persuade men to 
 devote the necessary money to this work? It 
 is very easy to talk of the need of money. It 
 
 6 
 
would be easy, too, to lay a financial plan, to 
 draw up a schedule apportioning these funds 
 to be raised so much by one Church, so much 
 by another. The scheme would not be worth 
 the cards it was printed on. The author of it 
 and a few of his select friends would be the 
 only persons who would take any interest in it. 
 Men do not act in this world in view of the un¬ 
 derstanding that every other man is going to 
 act in the same way. We may show them that 
 great good would be accomplished by a course 
 of conduct provided all would only follow it. 
 But they do not believe that all will follow it. 
 The proviso throttles the proposition. The 
 Church has for years been flooded with 
 schemes and proposals to give a penny a day 
 or a nickel a week to missions, and every blithe 
 reformer has been cheerful to show what a 
 small fraction of money from everybody would 
 advance the cause he would see advanced. It 
 has all been an endless chain of inanity. 
 Neither general secretary, nor Conference, 
 nor bishop, nor general council or assembly 
 can make an apportionment that individuals 
 will pay the slightest attention to. God did in¬ 
 deed set some in the Church, first apostles, 
 second prophets, third evangelists, after that 
 pastors, teachers, helps and governments, and 
 the like, but if he sent any to be financiers we 
 have not yet discovered them. So far they 
 seem to have been self-appointed. They ran, 
 but he did not send them, and all their words 
 have been spoken into a vacuum. 
 
 7 
 
The Proposal as to Tithing 
 
 Very well—now we are getting near the 
 point. I hear some one say, “The tithes of 
 God’s people would be a resource adequate to 
 this work. Let the people bring all the tithes 
 into the storehouse and the financial part of 
 this problem is already solved.” I think so too. 
 There is no doubt of it. If members of the 
 Church would tithe their incomes conscien¬ 
 tiously and bring the whole tithe undiminished 
 and unwasted into the storehouse the world 
 could be speedily evangelized. But we come 
 nack to the old trouble; what is to induce them 
 to do it? The proposal is a good one, but can 
 you show me how such a proposal even from 
 you will become epidemic and sweep the 
 Church? How do you propose to present it— 
 as an expedient, as a plan? And is it believed 
 that as such it will gather to it the united 
 action of the Church? Spare your hopes; it 
 never will. It never will so long as it is viewed 
 as a good plan, or even the best possible plan. 
 Believe me, men will never bring the whole 
 tithe into the Lord’s treasury until they can be 
 fully persuaded, each man for himself, that it 
 is an individual duty he owes God. They will 
 not do it on a general scheme of universal 
 cooperation, and if they shall ever do it it will 
 be as an act of spiritual religion and indi¬ 
 vidual devotion in which God’s honor is alone 
 considered. 
 
 The question then returns in this form: “Are 
 
 8 
 
there grounds for believing beyond question 
 that the first tenth of all our gains is not our 
 own at all, but belongs to God already and for 
 that reason is to be brought into his treasury, 
 irrespective of what others do, or do not do?” 
 I believe that to be the true state of the case. I 
 believe that that part of the financing of the 
 kingdom which consists in supplying the neces¬ 
 sary revenues has not been trusted to the 
 hazards of our invention or left to the jets of 
 our impulse, but has been sovereignly ap¬ 
 pointed in the constitution and divine laws of 
 the kingdom itself, and our failures have been 
 in ignoring it. 
 
 Let me put the whole doctrine on this point 
 into one sentence. Resting upon the plain 
 proposition that one tenth of all our increase is 
 God’s and not our own, nor in any wise to be 
 used or appropriated by us without dishonesty, 
 but to be disposed of as God directs; and find¬ 
 ing that he directs that it be brought into his 
 treasury since it stands in plain words, “Bring 
 the whole tithe into the storehouse,” the reason 
 annexed being, “that there may be meat in 
 mine house”—we, his people, are upon the 
 literal fulfillment of this command and pur¬ 
 pose to bring the tithe into the Church as un¬ 
 questionably God’s house, though it has long 
 lain waste, and to do this as an act of spiritual 
 religion, in full reliance upon the promise at¬ 
 tached to the command that God may be 
 honored and Christ’s kingdom may surely 
 come. 
 
 9 
 
Tithing is not Giving 
 
 Under this view it is necessary to have 
 clearly in mind that tithing is not giving. The 
 Bible designates two sources of revenue— 
 tithes and freewill offerings. Tithes are ob¬ 
 ligatory and are paid. Offerings are voluntary 
 and are donated. In tithing we are on the 
 plane of justice. We bring the tithe to God 
 because it is his, not because we hear that he 
 needs it in his business. It is not that ass’s 
 colt of which, as we are loosing it, we may say 
 to the proper owners, “The Lord hath need of 
 him,” but it is the Lord’s own about which he 
 does not have to give an account to any man. 
 It is his. Our withholding it is a breach of 
 justice, not a defect of generosity. In failing 
 to bring the tithe we are guilty, not of stingi¬ 
 ness, but of robbery. It is dishonest. Yet 
 Christians generally do not so view it. They 
 rather feel, even when they devote ten per 
 cent, that they are making a voluntary con¬ 
 tribution. They are like the boastful and 
 swelling Pharisee who said, and said in a 
 strutting spirit, “I give tithes.” But our 
 Saviour did not use words so carelessly. He 
 said, “Ye pay tithes.” When it comes to free¬ 
 will offerings which are over and above the 
 tithes, those are quite a different matter and 
 should be considered by themselves. 
 
 An Obligation for Christians 
 
 But what we must ask now is the question 
 whether the paying God the tithe is really for 
 
 10 
 
Christians an obligation. In other words, is it 
 in force now just as it was before the Advent, 
 and apparently long before the Hebrew com¬ 
 monwealth, or did Christ’s coming do away 
 with the necessity for it and the obligation to 
 pay it? This is a vital question, and I may be 
 permitted to enumerate some reasons for be¬ 
 lieving that the duty is incumbent upon us now 
 quite as much as ever. 
 
 First: If it be not so, if God does not re¬ 
 quire the tithe to be paid and as an obligation 
 into his treasury, then it follows that his king¬ 
 dom on earth has no financial foundation at all. 
 Certainly gifts, alms, donations, basket collec¬ 
 tions, and such things cannot be called a finan¬ 
 cial foundation. Now look at the facts. We 
 all acknowledge that God has conceived and 
 brought forth on this globe a kingdom called 
 the kingdom of heaven but existing on the 
 earth with a work to do greater than ever a 
 nation had, with functions more varied, more 
 multiplied, and more delicate than any civil 
 government ever had, with conquests to make 
 more extensive than any king ever dreamed of 
 undertaking, a kingdom, more stable than any 
 other. This kingdom, depending primarily 
 upon subtle spiritual forces, is nevertheless 
 obliged to do its work against mundane fric¬ 
 tions and amid elements that are material. Let 
 us ask whether it is conceivable that God has 
 brought into existence such an organism and 
 has never thought about financing it, but has 
 thrown it out a waif into the world to be sus- 
 
 11 
 
tained or to be neglected as men see fit, and 
 sustained if sustained at all by sporadic dona¬ 
 tions, solicitations, beggings, coaxings, whin- 
 ings alms, and other such suctional processes? 
 Does not this seem like a sickly assumption? 
 It certainly does. Yet this sickly assumption 
 has lain at the root of too many of our opera¬ 
 tions as churchmen. How we have begged as 
 though we were Philippine friars! We have 
 not blushed to coax men for a pittance of that 
 which the Bible tells them is already God’s. 
 We have had on hand a system of mingled mer¬ 
 chandise and beggary supplemented with real- 
 estate ventures such as selling divisions of 
 consecrated space in the house of prayer, with 
 heavy leanings in times of emergency upon 
 the oyster, the Trilby social, the ’possum roast, 
 the pink tea, and a thousand devices innocent 
 enough in themselves considered, it may be, but 
 utterly to be despised when presented as the 
 motive power of that magnificent and im¬ 
 pregnable piece of splendor which we call the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 Pkesent-day Gifts 
 
 And is this what we call the liberty of the 
 new dispensation? And how has it done its 
 work? How speeds the Gospel? Where are our 
 converts? How is our conquest prospering? 
 Let us see. The Baptist Church taken as a 
 whole secured from its people in 1903 for the 
 purpose of foreign missions the sum of 78 
 cents a member; the Presbyterian Church for 
 
 12 
 
tlie same great cause, $1.30 a member; the 
 Canadian Methodists, 88 cents a member; the 
 Methodist Church in the United States for all 
 missions, home and foreign, 72 cents a member. 
 Or, to sum it up, the average Christian devoted 
 92 cents in one year to the cause confessedly 
 closer to the heart of Christ than any other. 
 Ninety-two cents in a year’s time to fill the 
 earth with the glory of God as the waters cover 
 the sea! And in missionary conventions some 
 have thought it the pinnacle of zeal to ask the 
 Church to come up to two dollars a year per 
 member. To such a comedy of faith have we 
 fallen! From these facts are we not warranted 
 in saying that if tithing is not an obligation 
 Christians owe, the kingdom to which they be¬ 
 long is without any financial foundation at all? 
 
 Old and New Testament Standards 
 
 Well, now, in the second place, suppose a 
 Christian without offending against his God 
 may spend on self-interests more than nine 
 tenths of his earnings, then it follows that it is 
 lawful for a Christian to be more selfish than 
 was lawful for an Israelite. Less than one 
 tenth an Israelite could not consecrate to God 
 without robbery. If, then, a Christian may 
 lawfully consecrate less, his religion leaves him 
 “more earthly without guilt, less noble without 
 reproach.” William Arthur, of England, has 
 stated it in this way: The Israelite was blessed 
 with a religion which checked his earthward 
 tendency at the very least to this extent, that 
 
 13 
 
one tenth went to sacred things; but is the 
 Christian at liberty to devote to his God what¬ 
 ever proportion he will, from the nearest ap¬ 
 proach to nothing upward, so that if one part 
 with a tenth, another with a ninetieth, and 
 another with a thousandth part, they differ not 
 in this, that one is liberal, the other covetous, 
 and the third a wretch, but in this, that one is 
 liberal, the other less liberal, and the third still 
 less so, each of them practicing a voluntary 
 virtue only in various degrees? If this is so, 
 then is Christianity to be charged with lower¬ 
 ing the standard of a virtue. Are we quite pre¬ 
 pared for this conclusion? “I do not mean,” 
 you say, “that we are at liberty to devote 
 money by mere chance without fixing some 
 principle; I only mean that we are not bound 
 to a tenth.” Not bound to a tenth? No, most 
 surely we are not bound to a tenth. No pre¬ 
 cept of the Gospel, no principle of the law, even 
 so much as glances in the direction of binding 
 us to a tenth. But is it possible you mean 
 something you do not say? Is it possible that 
 when you speak of not being bound to a tenth 
 you mean we are at liberty to make up our 
 minds to devote not a tenth but something less? 
 If so, then again we are landed in contradic¬ 
 tion. The tenth was never anything more than 
 God’s minimum. It is the back-stop he would 
 put to our selfishness, saying to it, “Thus far 
 shalt thou come and no farther, and here shall 
 thy proud waves be stayed.” 
 
 “But does not the New Testament say, ‘As a 
 
 14 
 
man purposetli in his heart, so let him give’?” 
 Certainly it agrees perfectly with the Old Tes¬ 
 tament in that. We read in Dent. 16. 17, 
 “Every man shall give as he is able, according 
 to the blessing of the Lord thy God which he 
 hath given thee.” Again, “Thou shaft keep the 
 feast with a tribute of a freewill offering of 
 thine hand, which thou shall give unto the 
 Lord, according as the Lord thy God hath 
 blessed thee.” Again, in Exod. 35. 21, “They 
 came, every one whose heart stirred him up, 
 and every one whom his spirit made willing, 
 and brought the Lord’s offering to the work of 
 the tabernacle of the congregation.” Here and 
 in many other places in the Old Testament the 
 idea of voluntariness is set forth as actuating 
 God’s people. Yet we know that at that very 
 time the tithe was in force as an actual com¬ 
 mand and was being practiced as a matter of 
 course, and these counsels applied to such over¬ 
 plus of generosity as extended beyond the 
 tithe. If, then, the free principle of voluntari¬ 
 ness, of spontaneity, of purposing gifts in your 
 heart, coexisted in the Old Testament with the 
 duty of bringing in the tithes, how can the dis¬ 
 covery of this same idea in the other Testa¬ 
 ment be construed as abrogating tithes? 
 
 Only One System of Finance 
 
 The truth is, the Bible presents not two but 
 one system of finance for the kingdom of God. 
 As the Old Testament agrees with the New 
 concerning generosity in giving gifts, so the 
 
 15 
 
New Testament agrees with the Old in the 
 justice of paying obligations. Our Saviour 
 would not allow even such great duties as judg¬ 
 ment, mercy, and faith to abolish the duty of 
 even the smallest tithes. He said, “These 
 ought ye to have done, and not to leave the 
 other undone.” And as touching tithes the 
 New Testament has another clear testimony in 
 Hebrews, chapter seven, “And here men that 
 die receive tithes; but there he receiveth them, 
 of whom it is witnessed that he liveth,” mean¬ 
 ing by the pronoun the type of Christ in his 
 perpetual priesthood. 
 
 It was not necessary to reenact a law which 
 was universal among all tribes and nations, 
 which was practiced before the giving of the 
 law and more widely than the dispersion. It 
 was amplified in the law, and not only so, but 
 emphasized by the prophets, those most 
 spiritual teachers of the Old Testament. The 
 only thing which makes tithing seem provin¬ 
 cial to us is that we have stupidly and wickedly 
 discontinued it in the practice of our Churches. 
 The only thing against it is that it is amplified 
 in the Old Testament. Where would you have 
 it amplified? It is there made so clear that 
 there is no need to reamplify it. We go back 
 to the Old Testament for much of the ethics of 
 law and jurisprudence. We go back to the Old 
 Testament for the sun, moon, and stars. The 
 only star created in the gospels is the Star of 
 Bethlehem, that blessed star, dearest of them 
 all. We go back to the Old Testament for the 
 
 16 
 
Sabbath, and would not have any unless we did. 
 For I would have you note that if the tithe is 
 left without a New Testament foundation the 
 Sabbath is still more so. Now, such parts of 
 the Old Testament have passed away as were 
 clearly typical and as such were fulfilled in 
 Christ, like the bloody sacrifices and the orders 
 and functions of the Levitical priesthood. But 
 there are elements in that revelation which are 
 neither typical nor temporary, but of the 
 nature of permanent institutes of humanity. 
 Such are the laws relating to time and money. 
 These two things are broad, secular elements 
 in the world’s daily life. Can we suppose that 
 a divine law would not legislate upon them? 
 Certainly it would. And how has it done so? 
 Of our time God requires one seventh; of our 
 means one tenth. There is a strict parallel: 
 “The Sabbath is the Lord thy God’s,” and “All 
 the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of 
 the land or of the fruit of the tree, is the 
 Lord’s, it is holy unto the Lord.” These two 
 requirements are exactly alike. The one is a 
 perpetual memorial of our labor. The other is 
 a perpetual measure of our rest. They are both 
 for the sake of man, yet they are the require¬ 
 ments of God. He has not asked us by 
 unanimous resolution to apportion the Sabbath 
 to him. He claims it. He has not asked us to 
 enact a law apportioning the tithe to him. 
 He claims it. “The tithe is the Lord’s.” In 
 any dispensation where God’s sovereignty re¬ 
 mains undisputed these will remain as testi- 
 
 17 
 
monies to it. The Church does not levy taxes, 
 but it is her duty to make the position God 
 takes on the subject of his honor in connection 
 with our gains, and to remind men everywhere 
 of the Lord’s own words, “Ye have robbed me, 
 even this whole nation. But ye say, Wherein 
 have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings” 
 (Mai. 3. 8, 9). 
 
 The Lord’s Treasury is His House 
 
 Furthermore, it is of vital importance that 
 men be shown that the Lord has a treasury and 
 that it is his house. Whatever we do with our 
 freewill offerings, the Lord’s tithe is to be 
 brought into the Lord’s treasury. The Church 
 is poor because the Lord’s servants either 
 spend the tithe on themselves or else if they 
 devote it they distribute it from their own 
 houses in a wide, a miscellaneous, and too fre¬ 
 quently in a wasteful charity. The tithe is not 
 for any and every good purpose, but is sacred 
 to the great purpose of the spiritual kingdom, 
 the chief part of which is the conquest of the 
 nations for Christ. The Church, and not the 
 private individual, is the trustee of this work. 
 She has the commission. She only can do the 
 work, and she will be able to do it whenever 
 God’s people cease the wandering distributing 
 of sacred money and bring it all, undiminished 
 and unwasted, into the Lord’s treasury. “Ye 
 shall not do after all the things we do here 
 this day, every man whatsoever is right in his 
 own eyes”—“but unto the place which the Lord 
 
 18 
 
your God shall choose to put him name there, 
 even unto his habitation shall ye seek, and 
 thither shall ye bring your tithes” (Deut. 12). 
 And again, “Bring ye the whole tithe into the 
 storehouse ”—bring them, do not send them— 
 “that there may be meat in mine house” 
 (Mai. 3). When this is done the ends of the 
 earth will become the kingdoms of our Lord 
 and of his Christ, and the windows of heaven 
 will open and pour out measureless blessing 
 upon the Church. 
 
 Objections to Tithing Discussed 
 
 Now for some obstacles in the way of tithing. 
 First, they say the poor cannot afford it. But 
 there is a blessing in it. Why should the poor 
 man be deprived of that blessing? He has 
 little enough now. Is it thought that God can 
 meet the faith of his rich servant but cannot 
 sustain his poor servant in his faith? How¬ 
 ever, it is not the poor man who says this. It 
 is the prosperous rich man who is so tenderly 
 trying to shield his weaker brother lest God’s 
 law may rest too heavily upon him. And why? 
 Because he sees what it would mean if he him¬ 
 self tithed. What he really wants to say is 
 this: “Do you know what you are preaching? 
 Why, sir, if I brought a tenth of my gains to 
 God I would bring in ten thousand dollars a 
 year!” It does seem hard to tithe if one seems 
 to have but a bare living, yet God has promised 
 to bless us if we do it. You will recall Jacob’s 
 vow: “If thou wilt give me bread to eat and 
 
 19 
 
raiment to put on, I will surely give a tenth to 
 thee.” Now bread and raiment are a “bare 
 living,” and so Jacob’s proposition was to de¬ 
 vote the tenth of a bare living to Jehovah. He 
 did so, and was prospered far beyond his ex¬ 
 pectations. The poor man can ill afford to be 
 idle one day in seven, yet God asks it of him 
 and blesses him in doing it, particularly if he 
 does it as unto him. 
 
 “But,” says another, “I do not take such a 
 narrow view. I believe the tenth is God’s, and 
 more too. I go further. I believe all I have is 
 the Lord’s.” And then he illustrates his prin¬ 
 ciple by spending it all on himself. Of course 
 all is God’s. The elder scriptures are very 
 careful to assert God’s right of eminent do¬ 
 main, and the largest expressions of it extant 
 are in the Old Testament: “The earth is the 
 Lord’s, and the fullness thereof;” “For every 
 beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon 
 a thousand hills;” “If I were hungry I would 
 not tell thee, for the world is mine.” This is 
 Old Testament doctrine. Now, what is the 
 tithe? It is simply a tangible token and tes¬ 
 timony that all is God’s. As an evidence that 
 we think all is God’s, he asks for the current 
 devotion of a definite per cent. He says ten. 
 Why he should require a seventh of our time 
 and only a tenth of our toil I do not know. 
 He is the great Arithmetician of the universe, 
 and the chemist knows and astronomer knows 
 that he is not ashamed to descend into details 
 and name times and seasons and proportions 
 
 20 
 
and equivalents. And he would not impoverish 
 his people either. Strange as it may seem, we 
 are actually better off with six days and nine 
 tenths after religiously devoting one day and 
 one tenth to God in spiritual worship than we 
 would have been with the whole. This is be¬ 
 cause there is a living God. The most ruinous 
 influence in society is the general distrust of 
 the vigilance of a Power who defends the 
 right. If obeying these laws could teach us to 
 trust him, their issuance would be justified on 
 that ground alone, and no doubt that is largely 
 their design. 
 
 One objection more: “I shall not be able to 
 ascertain what my tithe would be. My busi¬ 
 ness is so complex, full of credits, running 
 accounts, losses by bad debts, long running in¬ 
 vestments, and the like that I am not able to 
 tell just what my income for a given period 
 would be.” I see the point, and it is well taken, 
 but may I ask him a question? Suppose the 
 law were reversed; suppose the Bible ordained 
 that the Church should pay the merchant, the 
 man with many irons in the fire, a sum of 
 money equal to one tenth of his net profits 
 upon being informed correctly how much that 
 was. Let me ask how long would he be finding 
 out what his profits were? 
 
 The Pboof of Tithing is the Doing of It 
 
 But let me not weary you with proofs. The 
 best proof of this duty is the doing of it. If 
 you really want to prove it, the Bible tells you 
 
 21 
 
how. “Bring the whole tithe (R. V.) into the 
 storehouse, and prove me now herewith”—-that 
 is, by bringing it in—“whether I will not open 
 you the windows of heaven and pour you out 
 a blessing until there shall not be room enough 
 to receive it.” It is well understood that the 
 object on which the tithe was expended, 
 namely, the visible and material temple, has 
 gone. It has been taken away, but it has been 
 replaced by the broad and more magnificent 
 undertaking of the Christian Gospel. To this 
 undertaking, and not to private charity, the 
 tithe is sacred. The trouble is God cannot 
 get his hands on his own. We loudly proclaim 
 it to be his, and then in our vanity and way¬ 
 wardness we scatter it where we will. We ob¬ 
 tain a reputation for private generosity, but the 
 Church still sits a poor beggar by the wayside 
 and hardly a dog to lick her sores. We dwell 
 in our ceiled houses, but God’s house lies waste. 
 We are not ashamed to make grand-stand plays 
 with our Lord’s money and let his missions 
 languish. We are robbing God and we are lean 
 in our own souls. We rob God and therefore 
 must only toy and trifle with the work of sub¬ 
 duing the world under the sway of the Re¬ 
 deemer. God pity us! 
 
 A great District Conference near the center 
 of population gave for all purposes during the 
 year $410,000. We do not know what her tithe 
 would have been. There are 52,000 members 
 in that Conference. Carroll D. Wright, statis¬ 
 tician of labor for the United States, informs 
 
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us woman’s average earnings are $298 a year 
 in this country. That would be a ridiculously 
 low estimate for the earnings of the members 
 of a great and prosperous Church in one of the 
 most thriving and populous portions of the 
 country, yet even at that absurdly low estimate 
 of $298 a year each they would earn in a year 
 $15,000,000, and the tithe of it was $1,500,000. 
 They brought in $410,000, leaving them in debt 
 to God on the operations of that year alone in 
 that one District Conference $1,090,000. Now, 
 recollect that over this same territory is the 
 Presbyterian Church, the Baptist Church, the 
 Episcopalian Church, all derelict in the same 
 or in a corresponding measure. Is it any won¬ 
 der that Christ is not seeing of the travail of 
 his soul? 
 
 Spiritual Reasons and Financial Revenues 
 
 Finally, financial revenues, greatly as they 
 are needed, are not all the reason of the law. 
 It was given also for a reason intensely 
 spiritual. It was given then and it is needed 
 now as an aid to faith. How vague God seems 
 to men! How real money is to them! It is as 
 if our heavenly Father had said, “I will couple 
 the two together. I will take a share in every 
 dime and dollar they earn or in any way hon¬ 
 estly acquire. I will ask them to bring it in 
 person to me every week. It will afford them a 
 good way to come near to me. It will draw to 
 a focus the rays of their scattering faith. The 
 tithe will make a good lens for them to see me 
 
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with. It will prevent absent-mindedness in 
 worship. It is going to tax their courage, but 
 I will stand by them. I will bless them. By 
 this means I will sanctify their labor and set 
 up the cross in the very market place.” And it 
 does work so. Wherever men are obedient to 
 this beneficent command the effect is purifying 
 to their commerce and hallowing to their 
 hearts. As prayer and praise are good means 
 of having intercourse with the Unseen One, so 
 is the effort to honor him with our substance. 
 
 So tithing does two things: it makes a better 
 and a happier Christian, and it so replenishes 
 the treasury of the Church that she can 
 evangelize all the world. If it is good for these 
 two things, do you think it likely divine wis¬ 
 dom would have abolished it for some hap¬ 
 hazard plan or scheme of ours? By no means. 
 It only remains to practice it and to preach it. 
 Let those who tithe bring the whole tithe into 
 the Church, and thence let it flow out to make 
 glad the city of our God; so shall God be 
 honored, and Christ shall have the heathen for 
 his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the 
 world for his possession. 
 
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