The causes are not far to seek. The growth of the scientific spirit and the consequent increased tyranny of even a modified dogma, a mediæval survival in the vocabulary and symbolism of the church, and the seeming mandatory character of all creeds, do menace the intellectual liberty of high-minded and right-spirited young men. This menace harks back to the time of cruel persecutions, and seems to justify distinctions where no differences abide, divisions where unity should obtain; it shocks the ideals and wounds the spiritual sympathies where concord and the spirit of co-operation ought to prevail.

This break between the practical conditions of the churches and the higher ideals of the community has led to numberless social improvisations that undertake to administer piecemeal interests which can be separated only by a fatal process of vivisection. These improvisations of the spirit for the conservation of ethics, the renovation of society, and the salvation of souls, have crowded out the churches on their own chosen fields to an extent little realized by the average friend of the church. Social settlements, women's clubs, men's clubs, fraternities, secret societies, study classes, Christian temperance unions, Chautauqua circles, summer assemblies, Young Men's Christian Associations, Young Women's Christian Associations, civic federations, voters' leagues, industrial unions, university extensions, and, above all, the reach for universal education through the common schools, seem to render the church obsolete and justifiably to enlist the interest, time, energies, lives, of the noblest young men and women that our noblest universities can contribute, and to absorb the time and prime resources of the up-todate home-makers of this generation.

Frankly admitting almost every charge that sanity, science, philosophy, or morality may cast up against the church and the ministry of to-day, there still remains a profound "other side." The church, all churches, are rooted in the most permanent verities of the soul. Take the church out of history and you immolate history; take the church out of society to-day and it collapses. The church has stood and still stands, not

only for the ameliorating forces that make life tolerable, but for the inspiring forces that make life progressive. If history proves anything, it proves that if the familiar facts epitomized in the article in question represent a permanent tendency rather than a surface reaction, the main current rather than an eddy in the stream, then our country is degenerating and our civilization is doomed. All the great ages have been ages of faith-not necessarily faith in this dogma or that-but faith in the essential sanctity of life, the ascendency of spirit, and the immediateness of justice; a faith in the ethical swing of things, in the divinity of man, the sublimity of life; a faith in God that transcends all names, that sometimes asserts itself in defiance of names, and reaches such profound convictions as to become indifferent, if not superior, to all words.

These assumptions are as impressively justified by the facts, figures, and inspirations of to-day as by the testimony of history. Alongside of the "World's Work" for December on my table lies the Church Economist" for January. This journal gives its New Year's pages largely to what it entitles "The Roll-call of the Church Militant." From the most reliable sources it has compiled the statistics of what it truly calls " a mighty army." That army is now on duty. I do not offer these figures as an excuse for obvious defects or as an attempt to palliate the grim situation. But they do reaffirm certain fundamental postulates of life which must be reckoned with before any discussion in detail is worth while. I submit that, in the light of coldest business, severest commercialism, the flattest materialism, these figures mean something magnificent; they overreach in spiritual significance and ethical value any other aggregation of figures that can be gathered from the pages of the United States Census Book. Study your philanthropic, industrial, educational exhibits, your agricultural, manufacturing outputs, and the philosopher, the poet, the statesman, aye, the politician and the speculator, are compelled to admit that their significance is small compared with the dignity and far-reaching potency of the church figures,

This "other side" of which I am speaking rests its claim, not on exclusive Christian presumption, imposing as are these figures. History is enamored of all faiths; justifies every form of religion. Two hundred and more million souls to-day rest in the contemplative life that is related to the Vedas that were chanted on the banks of the Ganges three thousand years ago. Three or four hundred million souls to-day rejoice in the thought of Buddha, he who helped make Asia mild and rendered four continents pitiful. Israel, an insignificant handful, a local clan-captive, dispersed Israel has been a Gulf Stream flowing through the nations, modifying harshness, tempering cruelty, outliving and outshining the glory of Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, and Greece itself. Islamism, with its message of submission, has mitigated and is mitigating the native savagery of fierce races.

Not only the past but the present testifies to the permanent need of the church. The social status is to-day safeguarded by the very preachers who are dismissed if not contemned by the collegians. Hampered as the pulpit may be, it is, for all that, the freest calling which the human mind has yet attained. I challenge all the other professions to offer as much freedom of investigation, courage of the advance, aye, power of leadership, as is represented to-day by the fettered ministry of religion.

Go find anywhere and any way a hundred lawyers, a hundred doctors, a hundred editors, a hundred teachers, even, and I will put the hundred ministers gathered in a similar way over against them, and their freedom from tradition and convention, their power in molding society, influence in safeguarding morality, will equal, to say the least, any one of the cognate professions that share with theirs the honorable title of "liberal," in the academic sense of "free "—a profession independent of the trammels of greed, wage, and craft.

The individual soul is rapidly discovering the inadequacy of these modern substitutes for the church. The Young Men's and the Young Women's Christian Associations carry in their very initials defeating limitations. The mighty agency that will redeem the community

will not recognize age, sex, or creed lines. The "Y" and the "M" and the W" and the "C" will fall away, but the "Association," the heart of the church idea, stays.

During my twenty-five years' ministry in Chicago I have seen the rise of women's clubs, men's clubs, social clubs innumerable. I have seen hundreds of women unconsciously yielding to the pressure of the times, withdrawing their executive energies from church life and work, identifying themselves instead with what seemed the more available, practical, profitable club forces. They did find valuable schooling, energizing activities; but the time is near at hand when many of them are ready for something more fundamental and universal. As a moral and spiritual force the movement has probably reached its maximum; it is dying from being found out; it has touched things superficially; it has gone after strange gods. The "function," dress elements, and political ambitions have blurred spiritual vision and blunted moral earnestness. As a kindergarten in social education, a training-school for better things, a woman's gymnasium in which she learns to use effectively her own faculties, these clubs have been invaluable. But as an adequate expression of mature life, a place to use trained skill, as a substitute for the church, they are obviously inadequate.

It is even so with the men's clubs. Slowly we are finding that the world cannot be reformed by means of banquets. Clubs, lodges, unions, leagues, have done and are doing yeoman service for progress and reform, but all of them carry at the center an element of inadequacy.

All these modern substitutes for the church exploited by men and women, separately or unitedly, seek congeniality and efficiency by selection. "Nice" people hope to enrich their lives in one another's presence freed from the distractions of the other kind. All these exclusive compacts fail of the fundamental democracy that belongs to religion and after all is better embodied in the church than anywhere else. Certain "nice" people have elected you into their membership. This nicety you will

help guard with your black balls only to find that eventually it grows tiresome and stupid to you. There comes inevitably the time of disillusion to the devotees of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and societies, when they discover that they hold no monopoly on excellence; that many interesting people are outside their boundaries, and that their own hearts overreach the limitations they have so championed. There is a growing life in all these that yearns for an organization big enough to hold men and women, genial enough to include rich and poor, wise enough to reach the old and the young, and loving enough to like those who are unlike themselves; and this is what the church assumes to be, nay, comes nearer being than anything else known to man.

The need of society is the need of the individual soul. The individual heart hungers for communion with the eternal, thirsts for the "living waters that spring up into eternal life." No potency, success, or culture can protect the soul from loneliness, sorrow, separation, and death. The cradle and the grave forever demand consecrating thought. "No man liveth unto himself, and no man dieth unto himself."

The church, with all its faults and limitations, is here to stay, and the question to a sensible man or woman can never be between the church and no church, but between the existing church and a more adequate one. Religion cannot be eliminated out of the life of man except by immolating the man. How more adequately to house, incorporate, institutionalize, embody religion, is always an imperative question.

The churches are sick; the ministry is on the decline; but to rightly diagnose the case is to discover the remedy. In this decline I find inspiring encouragement. I am glad that young men and women shun the dogmatic spirit and distrust the professions menaced by it; I am glad that our colleges teach history so well that their students cannot bide the thought of miraculous interventions with the benignant order of special revelations and divine partialities; I am glad that the law of equity is so well understood, justice so well apprehended

as a fundamental attribute of being, that the student refuses to believe in eternal torments as a reward of mortal sins, or in infinite beatitude being won through finite credulity or a lack-luster obedience to ecclesiastical traditions and mandates. I greatly rejoice that the community is getting so coherent, so conscious of a communal life, that it has lost relish for sectarian pretensions and all patience with creedal barriers. I am glad that life is assuming such significance everywhere and always that it grows indifferent to the special sanctities of particular dates and places.

All this is proof that out of this decadence must come the more adequate expression of religion. We see on every hand a ripening for this larger thing, a church based on the central and common needs of the community; a church that will abolish denominational and race consciousness, make sabbatical the seven days in the week, scriptural all high prophecy and lasting poesy, and companionable the widest reaches of society.

One

Such a church will win back those who have gone aside into social and intellectual exclusions, hoping thus to reach the grace of noble living. by one these seceders will find that they cannot shrive their souls at pink tea altars or at banquet tables where the bread and wine fall short of the communal sanctities possible only where simplicity, sincerity, and universality serve. I recognize educational, ethical, and social values in these substitutes; their existence is an arraignment of the church, but their inadequacy proves that they are but extemporized substitutes necessitated by an era of transition, an era always painful but profitable.

But, it may be asked, " Are not these substitutes capable of growth?" They are growing, and their growth is in the direction of the new church. When they will meet the old needs and offer a permanent social center, an adequate civic instrument, they will be the church.

But such an institution must rest upon two indispensable and fundamental elements; viz., democracy and reverence. There must be recognition of the brotherhood that includes all ages, both sexes, and reaches out to all classes, and the

sense of the All-in-One and the One-inAll-a recognition of the supernal and the eternal. Soon or late the soul must tabernacle in the thought of God. Worship in some form or other is the universal expression of the sensitive and developed soul. Eliminate the dogma out of it, fill it with all philosophy and poetry, art and wisdom, that you are capable of, and the sentence is increasingly true, "The heart of man crieth out for the living God."

But this is the one element in the church that seems to be outgrown. Upto-date young men and women just from college tell us they have ceased to pray; that they no longer believe in prayer, but in work. They sometimes boast that they like to go to church late so as to miss the devotional exercises. May not this very protest witness to a growing devoutness? Is it not reaching after a more adequate expression? Forms of worship will be outgrown, but worship never. Not until poetry, painting, sculp ture, architecture, and music become stale and unprofitable will the soul cease to aspire or the heart forget its God. For all these serve at the altar of religion; they are exponents of the church that is to come-the church with a rational basis, an inclusive not an exclusive spirit, a practical mission that grows by doing, lives in action.

This church will be out-looking and reverent; its members will be conscious sinners rather than pretending saints; in its pulpit the prophet will stand who will not dare "split the full gleams of the

study into half-gleams for the pulpit.” Such a church will have a building that will be an open home where the pride of caste must not enter to destroy the last hope of democracy. That church will be a comfort to the burden-bearers; it will edify, build up the deformed and dwarfed spirits of men.

If all progress is not a sham, if prophecy be not a lie, if human aspirations be not a cheat, if Jesus and the anointed of God have not lived and died in vain, aye, if the Almighty himself is not to be disenthroned, this church, which has always been in the world, is to become more and more the visible church, and ultimately the Church Universal. Men are learning to appreciate the divine gift of reason, the holiness of free thought, the sacredness of the individual, and consequently the fruitlessness of sectarian warfare and the wickedness of dogmatic bickering. Men are learning to put less dependence on the forms of theological thought, which must change from generation to generation, and more dependence on the fundamental needs of our moral nature, the enduring distinction between right and wrong, the imperishable marble of character.

For the building and extension of this church the colleges will again offer their brightest and their best. Business men will open their purses, and old and young, men and women, rich and poor, will hasten to advance the Father's work while it is day, for while it is day, for "the night cometh when no man can work."

T

O think of the National civil service as a fit career for educated young men is still an alien conception to the American mind. Our colleges and universities are supposed to train men for the professions, for teaching, for journalism-for almost every calling in private life that demands technical knowledge and skill; but for the public service, which requires more and more insistently, as the years go by, the most perfect technical equipment, we make no special provision. Yet every year college and polytechnic graduates in considerable numbers enter various branches of the service, and if one were to visit Washington to-day he would find not a few bureaus of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the Interior Department manned almost exclusively by such graduates.

Immediately after the Civil Service Law of 1883 went into effect collegebred men began to appear at Washington in increasing numbers, to take departmental positions. True, there were in those days comparatively few "places" in the departments that possessed special attractions for such men, but the city itself was year by year becoming more and more a center of culture, while in several of the scientific bureaus there was promise of the expansion that has been realized, to a great extent, in recent years. A large proportion of the college and university men who turned to Government work in the middle eighties were absorbed by the Patent Office, where vacancies in the examinerships of different grades were filled by means of examinations under the new law, and the filling of these frequent vacancies was one of the most conspicuous tests of the efficacy of the law, as applied to any considerable group of candidates. As in all Government employment, the patent examiner is fairly well paid on

admission to the service, and the young graduate who secured a $1,200 or $1,400 examinership in his first year out of college thought himself fortunate. There was also in those days some demand for men of scientific training to take posts in the Weather Bureau, which was then included in the War Department, but has since been transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Then there were, of course, the Geological Survey, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Naval Observatory, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum, and various other Government offices, and interests intrusted to Government care, in which some degree of technical knowledge and education was and is indispensable in most of the appointees. The Department of Agriculture, with its manifold scientific activities and agencies, has practically been created since that time.

But in the first years-and to a limited extent this has held true up to the present time-college graduates were scattered through the departments, frequently doing relatively unimportant work-in many cases tasks that could have been as well performed by high-school or academy graduates. The fact is that the pay was better than the same grade of service would have received in any other employment, and the law and medical schools of Washington, with their evening lectures, offered the ambitious young clerk tempting facilities to obtain a professional education. Such a man might enter the service as a $1,000 clerk, begin taking law or medical lectures, at the end of his first year get a promotion to a first-class ($1,200) clerkship, and by the time he had passed his final examinations and received his diploma a beneficent Government might have added another $200 a year to his stipend and all this without any appreciable change in the routine of his daily duties. He presented himself at his