THE KING’S BUSINESS 89 sacrifices and bestow gifts upon others, but seldom are these sacrifices made or bestowed for Christ’s sake, or in His name. The mythical Santa Claus is magnified instead of the real Christ. Of course, very few, even among children, any longer believe the lie that there is a Santa Claus, but even churches introduce this mythical and usually disgusting-appearing person in their Christmas celebrations. Is it not time that intelligent Christians had done with this sort of nonsense and worse than nonsense? In all that we do in our churches in connection with Christmas day can we not give the pre eminence to the Lord Jesus. In our giving gifts to one another, can we not do it from a Christian motive and in such a way as will magnify Christ even among those of our friends who do not know Him as yet as their Saviour. Can we not make use of the Day to lead our unsaved friends to a real knowledge of Him whose birth we are ostensibly celebrating? February Fifth ■ 5 N THE fifth day of February, 1837, seventy-eight years ago this Wmonth, one of the greatest men in all the history of America was Eborn in the little country town of Northfield, Mass., D. L. Moody. gNo one dreamed that a great man was being born. His father was a poor working man with a large family and practically no property, indeed in debt, but God who is ever “choosing the foolish thing the world to -confound the wise” and the “weak things of the worl confound the things which are mighty” had chosen this unheeded bab humble parents in an unknown country village as the one who should move the world for Christ and the truth as almost no other man, if any other man, of his generation. The early ,days of his life gave no promise of what was to be. His father died while he was a very young child. Even the opportunity of completing a common school education was thus taken from him, and the little work he did at school was not encouraging in its immediate results. But when at the age of seventeen he was converted through the faithful personal work of his Sunday school teacher in Boston, a great change came. He not only accepted Christ as his Saviour, but surrendered all that he had and was to Him as his Lord. He became untiring in his activities for his new-found Master and stopped at no sacrifice to win souls for Him. He was consumed with a passion for the salvation of the lost. He was “at it and always at it” in the work of bringing men to an immediate decision for Christ. In the store where he worked, on the streets where he walked, on the trains in which he travelled, he was ever alert for an opportunity to tell some one about his Lord. And God kept opening to him larger and larger doors of opportunity. Then he learned of and sought to obtain for himself a definite baptism with the Holy Spirit for service. He paid the price and obtained what he sought; and the result is a matter of history, but the whole result no historian could tell. To this day, though fifteen years have passed since he left, this world, new discoveries are constantly being made of lives that were transformed through the direct or indirect influence of D. L. Moody, The whole modern evan gelistic movement originated with him. The Student Volunteer movement and the whole Y. M. C. A. movement in colleges and universities received their first impulse and direction from him. Thousands of men and women well equipped for Christian service, have gone out from the schools in North-’
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