In his talk to the Boy's Brigade of Glasgow, Henry Drummond said "Boys, banish forever from your minds the idea that religion is subtraction. It does not tell us to give things up, but rather gives us something so much better that they give themselves up. . . Instead of telling people to give up things, we are eager to tell them to 'seek first the kingdom of heaven,' and then they will get new and better things, and the old will drop off, of themselves. This is what is meant by the 'New heart.' It means that God puts into us new wishes and we become quite different boys."
We are all boys in that we would be assured that the course we adopt is not subtraction.
It is a legitimate and perfectly reasonable question to ask, Is this step to be a loss or gain to me, a subtraction or an addition? The point to be settled at the very beginning is what is gain and what is loss. The greatest of all teachers asked: "For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" When we have reached the understanding which answers. Material things profit nothing, spiritual growth is the only gain, we shall then be able rightly to locate our plus and minus signs.
