burns within. God means to win His world of men back home to Himself.

But some earnest friend is thinking of an objection to all this talk about
a world being won. You are taken all anew with the great picture of God's
passion of love in the opening page of this old Book. But all the time we
have been talking together you have been having a cross-cutting train of
thought underneath. It has been saying, "Isn't this going a bit too far?
will the whole world be won?"

Let us talk over that a bit. We have been used all our lives to hearing
about soul-winning. We have been urged, more or less, to do it. A
favorite motto in some Christian workers' convention has been, "Win one."
But this idea of winning the world has not been preached. At first it
doesn't seem exactly orthodox.

The old-time preaching, of which not so much is heard now, except in
restricted quarters, is that the whole world is lost; and that we are to
save people out of it. We used to be told that the world is bad, and only
bad; bad beyond redemption, and doomed. In his earlier years Mr. Moody
used to say often with his great earnestness that this was a doomed world,
and that the great business of life was to save men out of it.

But of late years there has been a distinct swing away from this sort of
preaching and talking. Everything we humans do seems to go by the clock
movement, the pendulum swing: first one side, then the other. Now we hear
a very different sort of preaching. This is really a good world. There is
some wickedness in it, to be sure. Indeed, there is quite a great deal of
it. But in the main it is not a bad world, we're told.

The old-time preaching was chiefly concerned with getting ready for