Faith Necessary.

-in 1910, United States-

If all the world did not trust all the world, we could not do business for a single day. The amount of coin and bank-notes in circulation is ridiculously inadequate to the needs of business. By far the larger part of every day's transactions of every kind is conducted by means of promises to pay.

The National Monetary Commission has just reported an investigation of this matter. About seventy per cent of the daily bank deposits consists of checks, and even more than half of the retail business is conducted in the same way, while the banks report weekly pay-rolls aggregating $134,800,000, seventy per cent of which is settled by checks.

This is a gigantic illustration of the principle of faith. We have faith in the integrity of the average man. We have faith in the business institutions of the country. We have faith that the future will be as good as the past. And in this faith we continue to accept bits of paper in return for most of our labor and the goods we sell.

In exalting the principle of faith in our relations toward God and the concerns of the next world, religion is merely applying to the Owner of all things the same rules that we apply without question to the petty properties of earth. --Christian Endeavor World.