of Christ. When the inequalities among men are frankly acknowledged, the duty of those who are favored by the differences among men becomes apparent. The proudly-strutting, self-made man, who thinks any one of his workingmen might like him make a million if he only would, is encouraged by the false doctrine of equality to assume a hard and unsympathetic attitude with respect to the aspirations of the toiling masses. But he is in reality a pagan and not a Christian.

The anarchists are right in claiming that God is the true source of authority. Without authority we can have no social order and no progress in material civilization. Authority exists as a matter of fact, and it finds its seat in government or in private property. But it becomes first fully conscious of its responsibility in recognition of its true source in God and in acceptance of the Christian view of authority as a social trust.

It appears to be always in order in an address of this kind to urge on the ground of policy the cultured and wealthy to assist their less fortunate fellows in attaining at least a minimum amount of improvement in their conditions. There are, indeed, reasons of policy sufficient to induce general action. That the situation is one involving danger and very great danger to the favored classes in the future, provided considerable changes in government and industry do not take place, cannot in my own opinion be denied. It seems to me indeed that a denial implies a failure to apprehend the nature and force of the social movements which have taken place during the past generation. But it is idle to hope to secure action on the ground of mere policy. Cold policy will never suffice, because cold policy will fail to recognize the relative truth in the programmes and platforms of those who are denounced by wealth and culture as extremists. Moreover cold policy will lack insight which would lead to action in time.

Calamity can only be averted by men who have genuine love for the masses and who are willing to become leaders of the sort who bear double burdens; kings of the kind praised by Ruskin, who do the hardest work, thinking little about remuneration, perhaps taking what is left after the others have been satisfied. Life for the masses must make men more or less radical, but the true church will guard against the excesses to which love might lead, because the true church has not only love

but learning. She should indeed be armed with the accumulated knowledge of the ages. Culture alone is proverbially selfish and unprogressive. It is unsympathetic and sides with the powerful. But it is the mission of the church to guard against this by combining with learning ardor.

We have always in mind an ideal. Naturally the church, so called, in its actual existence among men is frequently far away enough from the ideal. All too generally, the church lacks both love and the special social knowledge required by the present situation. Yet what there is of discreet zeal is still largely in the church and is stimulated by the church.

It has been observed that the stronger classes in the community capture useful social institutions. It has indeed been claimed by the president of an American college that Oxford and Cambridge universities were founded for poor boys, but were so successfully captured by the rich that at last it took an Act of Parliament to secure admission for a poor boy. Whether this is exact historical truth or not, it illustrates a frequent movement. Workingmen of sense will all acknowledge that the church is a tremendous social power. But because they see her used frequently by those opposed to them, they are inclined to desert her and surrender her entirely to the service of those whom they call their enemies. How much wiser it would be for the wage-earners to endeavor to divert into right channels this vast social power!

I would oppose to the war-cry of Karl Marx another, namely: Workingmen of all lands, find freedom in the service of Christ! Workingmen of all lands, capture the church!

A SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF CHARITY.

BY REV. H. L. WAYLAND, D.D., oF PHILADELPHIA.

THE significant words in the statement of the subject I shall use in a large sense, employing the word scientific as including all knowledge, and the word charity as meaning the right sentiment and the right action toward all our fellow-men, especially toward dependents (not at present including the children of the rich), defectives in mind or body (so recognized by the law), and delinquents (including for our present consideration only those whose crimes are so small as to bring them within the reach of the law; those who steal railroad systems and states will no doubt be considered by some other speaker). My thesis may be thus stated:

There is need of knowledge and wisdom and of the organization of the facts in order that we may wisely administer charity.

According to the old view, all that was necessary for charity was a warm heart and an open hand. The one duty was to give, without stint and without question; heart, affection, was everything. If one undertook to counsel a mother as to the health or management of her children, the one unanswerable reply was: "Ought not I to know? Am I not the child's mother?"

At the outbreak of the war for liberty and union it was currently supposed that the one requisite for the soldier was enthusiasm, patriotism; for a time the Union army was an assembly of town-meetings without any moderator. It was not until this notion was outgrown that we entered on the course which ended at Appomattox.

The new charity realizes that nowhere in the world are knowledge and wisdom more needed than in the effort to benefit our fellow-men, and especially to lift up those who have fallen. In the wise words of my friend and former pupil, Dr. Henderson, in his invaluable volume on "Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents," "He who imagines that any amiable impulse will answer for science is sure to blunder."

The need of a full knowledge is suggested by the dimensions of the problem. According as they make the territory covered by their classifications more or less extensive, statisticians put the number of dependents, defectives, and delinquents in America higher or lower. Some put them at half a million; while Mr. Charles D. Kellogg estimates that 3,000,000 have been supported, in whole or in part, by the United States in any one year; Mr. McCulloch (in whose untimely death every good cause in America, and especially organized charity, met a great loss) estimates the actual cost (I think he means of pauperism) at $50,000,000 in maintenance and $50,000.000 in loss of productive powercertainly a moderate estimate. Mr. Round reckons the cost of the criminal class alone in America at from $300,000,000 to $400,000,000 annually. This loss, even were it doubled, might be borne, if it simply represented so much property consumed by fire or sunk in the ocean. It is because it represents so much moral bankruptcy, so much degradation, a degradation which is ever perpetuating and multiplying itself, that we stand appalled.

And the problems are complicated. In the simple state of society, where every one earns his living by his daily labor, the problems of life are solved by a very little kindness and thought. In the early history of a nation, as in New England and Israel, there was no pauper class nor criminal class. There is only enough of suffering to keep the benevolent activities from rusting. I have lived in a village (which I have no doubt represented thousands of similar instances) where there was one family that needed charity, and they only in consequence of the drunkenness of the husband and father. But with the advance of wealth and luxury, with the growth of great cities, with the widening of the chasm between rich and poor, the problem becomes more and more paralyzing.

To feed people who want to be fed is easy; how to save people who do not want to be saved, how to lift people out of the gutter, the jail, and the tenement horror who prefer to stay there, this is a question.

Here as elsewhere it is very difficult to interpret statistics. They may indicate a cause or only a symptom. The same statistics may be favorable or unfavorable. If there are one hundred divorces in a year in Vermont and no divorces in Italy, it does not follow that morality is higher in Italy. Divorce is a symp

tom of unsatisfactory domestic relations, often of lewdness; but also divorce is a tribute, however imperfect, to public sentiment; lamentable as it is that people should be divorced, this is perhaps better than that they should readjust their domestic relations without legal formalities. If there are a thousand executions this year more than last, this may imply that there are more murders, or it may simply imply that murders are more rigidly recognized and punished. That there is an increase in the number of insane may simply imply another definition of insanity and a more carefal searching out of the cases of insanity.

The charity that is informed by wisdom looks first of all to causes. First among these causes, certainly in order of time, it finds ancestry; and closely allied with it, the surroundings, particularly during childhood.

Another cause is drink, upon which there is little need that I enlarge. The $1,000,000,000 directly spent each year for drink represents perhaps an equal amount in wages unearned, in defective work, in the expenses of courts and prisons and poor-houses and mad-houses, and these figures represent who can say how many broken hearts, devastated homes, wives worse than widowed, wives and children tortured and murdered, and a lineage poisoned and corrupted to the second and third generation.

A fourth cause lies in indolence, the hatred of honest work, the passion for getting a living at the expense of somebody else; a craving for the most fatal of all poisons, more deadly than the venom of the cobra, food that has not been earned. I have sometimes thought that the tree in the garden of Eden "whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe" must have been the bread-fruit tree, and the fruit which it bore must have been bread which had not been earned by the sweat of labor. This hatred for honest labor finds expression in the love of gambling, in the fondness for the tramp-life, in theft and robbery, not seldom accentuated by murder.

And this desire for iniquitous acquisition and for a living at the expense of others is aggravated by the example and by the success of great criminals the largeness of whose depredations seems to exalt them into dignity and to lift them above the moral as above the civil and criminal law. The petty robber naturally looks with admiring but not necessarily despairing envy upon the wealthy and successful criminal who has his own country-seat,