majority has no right to do what it pleases except when it pleases to do what is right. We believe in a moral law that underlies and should override all statute laws. We believe in a justice that limits and controls the will of the majority. And the foundation of this national belief is laid in the Christian faith of the majority of the American people.

WE TRUST THE MORAL CONVICTIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

The history of democracy in America has had a most profound influence upon the world. To the students of political life no fact is more evident than is the steady growth, throughout the civilized world, of confidence in the ability of the people to govern themselves. Who believes that the trend toward popular government is to be checked or reversed? The problem for the world to-day is, how shall this tendency be directed and controlled? Always the education and the animus of the heir apparent to the throne, have been matters of profound interest to the people whom he was to govern. To such a gathering of thoughtful Christian men as this Conference has assembled, the conception which the great mass of people in the civilized world have formed of their own powers and their own obligations must be a profoundly important question. Is the attitude of thoughtful men, of statesmen and leaders, toward the people whom they lead, to be an attitude of confidence and loyal regard, or an attitude of suspicion and concealed hostility?

The true leader of the people is one who trusts the people, speaks truthfully and candidly for their enlightenment, but waits for their convictions. Such a leader was Abraham Lincoln. Who does not feel the difference between such a leader and the demagogue who shrewdly plans, by playing upon the interests and the passions of the people, to defeat the purposes they have in mind, and to secure his own ends by the use of the people as mere tools? Shall the people be trusted and prove themselves trustworthy? Or shall the people be doubted and dreaded and by their leaders deceived and duped? The awful reckoning that in the end must follow, when false leaders of the people are called upon to reckon with those whom they have misled, is to be read in the darkest pages of history.

If we seek to know why it is that in the United States there

is so little of that dread of the rule of the majority which plainly characterizes even the most popular governments of Europe, we cannot avoid the belief that it is the Christian convictions and the Christian life of the American people which has kept alive this confidence in the wise rule of the majority, and has led the world forward in the latest and largest development of the ideas of equality of rights, of self-government by the people.

THE WORTH OF THE INDIVIDUAL MAN-THE BROTHERHOOD OF ALL MEN.

Upon the Christian Church of to-day rests a profound responsibility for the reception and the true interpretation of this mighty idea of the brotherhood of all men. Mutual confidence in each other's moral convictions must be maintained. This must be developed through institutions that insist upon duties and obligations toward others as strongly as upon rights and privileges for one's self.

Historically, the great contribution of America to the religious life of the world, the supreme import of American Christianity looked at in its world-wide relations, is to be found in the development here of the worth of the individual man as he stands in jural relations with his brothers, under laws of his own making, restrained and compelled by no power from without himself,--but only by that eternal power of truth and justice and love which is from God and speaks to man from within, through his conscience, his heart, his own spiritual and religious life.

A NEW SOCIAL ORDER WAS NEEDED.

This conception of the possibilities of the human race could not be made real in the life of men and nations, until a place was found for its development where there need be no struggle with those rigid habits of mind that are the result of generations of precedent, with those deep, irrational, but irresistible prejudices that come from the recognition, through successive generations, of distinctions of social and political caste. In our land, the sense of brotherhood is in the atmosphere. It has always been the oxygen, the life-giving ozone, in the air of these United States. Frequent and constant as is the interchange of thought

between the United States and England, it is still difficult for Americans to understand to what a difference between national ideals the words of our English historian, Bryce, bear witness, when he tells us of the deep impression produced upon him, as he studied our life, by what he calls "the natural impulse of every citizen in America to respect every other citizen, and to feel that citizenship constitutes in itself the ground for a certain degree of respect."

NO DEFERENCE TO ACCIDENTS OF ASSUMED SOCIAL RANK.

The American can hardly understand that deference to men who happen to be born in another social rank, which enters so largely into the instincts, the impulses and the social standards of the Englishman. In America the presumption is in favor of an equal opportunity for all. The attempts that are made in one or two cities of our land to build up an exclusive circle whose membership shall be determined by accidental relations with certain English people, or by descent from a few families of wealth or of assumed social prominence, provoke only gentle and good-natured laughter, except when assumptions become so ridiculous as to challenge scorn. The entire absence of any fixed barriers between ranks or classes in society has made it far easier in America than elsewhere for that sense of brotherhood which underlies Christianity to work itself out into social and religious life. Here are none of those rigid habits of mind which result from the perpetuation of caste. The entire organization of society is more open to the moulding influences of religious and social reform.

SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE.

We do not assume that we in America are nearer to God than others, or have seen more clearly the mind of Christ than have our brothers of the Christian faith in other lands. But there is in the institutions and life of America a fundamental conception of manhood which seems especially adapted to receive the revelation of the kingdom of God on earth among men. Now that we have reached, in the evolution of the thought of God for our race, that period in the history of man when it has become clear to all that the interests of the whole

race are one, that the man in greatest poverty and of humblest station is indissolubly linked in all his interests with the strongest and richest of his fellow-men; now that we have come to understand that no member of the race can suffer without involving suffering for the whole race; and that the first and highest duty of the strong is to use their strength for the benefit of the whole, for the uplifting and strengthening of the ignorant and weak, the mission of America in the religious life of the world becomes clearer from year to year.

THE PECULIAR LESSONS TO AMERICANS FROM CHRIST'S SONSHIP.

Among the profoundly suggestive remarks of Frederick Denison Maurice was one to the effect that from the constitution of their mind the German nation must derive their truest and deepest ideas of God through their thought as to the person and the functions of the Holy Spirit; and that, by contrast with the Germans, the English nation had received and would receive its strongest and most abiding religious impressions through the thought of God the Father, through religious and political institutions which are suggested by paternity. Is it not equally true that the people of the United States, the Christians of America, in a peculiar way have received and will receive their strongest and clearest ideas of God and of the kingdom of heaven through the conception of Christ the Son? That there can be no true brotherhood among men save as men recognize God as their Father; that the eternal Sonship of the Son of God, and His identification with the race of men, makes all men in the deepest and fullest sense brothers of one another, and if they will recognize and heed their divine calling, then sons of the living God; that the kingdom of Christ on earth-a kingdom of universal brotherhood, founded in the universal recognition of the Fatherhood of God-has been established and is advancing; that if the prayers of the Christian world are to be answered in the coming of the kingdom of God on earth, we shall see the evidence in the life of Christians, as the Spirit of Christ shows itself in practical goodness, in works of mercy, of healing, and of blessing in our present social life; that since the incarnation of the Son as Son of man, the progress of the kingdom of God has meant and now pre-eminently must mean the working out,

in institutions, of justice, of mercy, and of love in the social life of men; that the thoughts and the virtues of the living God are thoughts and virtues which can be lived out in the lives of Christian men and women; that true Christianity means and must mean social reform; that this world in these years should be made increasingly good and blessed by the presence in it of the church of those who are redeemed by the blood of Christ, and are seeking to live among men the life of Christ; in short, that the world is the field for a battle of conquest, that the church is the force, that the Spirit of the living God furnishes the power, that victories are won in the driving out of ignorance, the overcoming of sin, the building up of purity and holiness in the lives of men one by one, and so in the lives of the masses of mankind; and that all who have named the name of Christ are called as individuals, by personal responsibility to Christ their divine Redeemer and their Master, to make these conquests of love and holiness in his name, such seem to be the lessons which the religious life of America, pre-eminently, has taught and is teaching to the world.

THE CHRISTIAN UNITY OF THE RACE-WORLD-WIDE MOVEMENTS.

This sense of the brotherhood of the race is thrilling the world now as never before. The social and religious life of this new world offers a medium for the action of this force and a field for the display of its results, such as the Christian world nowhere else affords. The vast international movements that are leading the world forward into the fullest sense of the brotherhood of the race take hold especially upon us, and have been developed most rapidly and most powerfully in America.

The Young Men's Christian Association originated in London, but it is in the religious life of our land that it has had its most marvellous growth, and has taken on a true international form, and through the International Committee, organized here, has reached all the nations of the world, and places its secretaries as leaders of the young Christian manhood of Japan and India and Ceylon. The educational classes maintained in our cities by our Christian Associations are in line with the University Extension work of England. And the movement for the extension of the privileges of the university to the great masses of the