various adult Bible classes. Undoubtedly the greatest effect produced by the forum on the religious life of Boston is to be found in a changed state of mind among church people. They have been aroused and quickened, jarred and irritated, and set to thinking and reading as to the relation of religion to the whole realm of life. Even those who have never wandered into a forum meeting have not escaped its lessons as set forth in the daily press, sometimes in startling headlines. The meeting at Ford Hall, Sunday night, is often the topic of the week in store and factory, in office and boarding-house. While only a thousand or twelve hundred people may have participated directly in the meeting, perhaps a hundred thousand, some of them scattered all over New England, have eagerly watched for the report, especially so when some ticklish subject was up for discussion or some unusually striking personality took the platform.

If true religion is to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly, as the prophet Micah had it, then the forums everywhere are democratizing the discussion of religion with remarkable success. Justice is the passionate desire of these audiences everywhere, and the note of kindness in any address always meets a quick and warm response. And while many an ardent propagandist, both conservative and radical, comes to the forum in a cock-sure spirit, he often goes away much chastened and subdued. And, oftener than not, the humbling dose he needs is administered by the audience rather than by the appointed speaker of the hour.

While it is a general forum principle to avoid all strictly sectarian and partisan discussions, one must have a very narrow conception of religion not to see that a live forum is shot through and through with a powerful religious dynamic. And the entire procedure and the dominant spirit are democratic. While no topic is sacrosanct to a well-trained forum audience, it is clearly recognized that some topics are futile.

And as to the kinds of people who may be permitted to share in the discussion, there is no limit save one which is self-operating. The frivolous-minded person absents himself. The individual who prefers a movie, a dance, or a flirtation to the earnest, serious temper of the forum goes to his own place. But everybody else in the community is there or is represented by one or more of his kind. All classes, cliques, and creeds are present in the model forum.

Here you have a thoroughly democratic audience-Jew, Catholic, Protestant, unbeliever, native and foreigner, employer and employee, student and mechanic, radical and conservative, rich and poor, coming together for one and the same purpose, keen to listen, eager to answer back. The fundamentals of life, individual and collective, are seriously discussed in a manner that gives everyone his right to be heard and no one a privilege to monopolize the discussion. Everything that touches life is pertinent and the topic set for discussion invariably has its moral and spiritual implications. This is "democracy in religion" in action. Such a beacon light burning in any community for a period of years cannot fail to throw its beams into every nook and corner where religious-minded people gather, while its effect on the great throngs who are churchless and yet hungering and thirsting is dramatic and pathetic to a degree.

Let me give one example. Boston, like every great city, has a considerable Jewish population. Eighty per cent of the Jewish young people are unattached to the synagogue, either orthodox or liberal. They are, for the most part, born idealists and extraordinarily alert mentally. They cannot be drawn into any kind of a religious service, so-called. They will have none of it. But it would be difficult to keep them away from a real community forum run without bias and having no axes to grind. From the first night it threw open its doors, all through its fourteen seasons, the Ford Hall forum in Boston has had in its audience a large contingent of these young

Jews. They come of course to discuss economic, social, civil, and industrial questions, but in connection with this discussion and through other topics presented in course, they find themselves facing the most serious personal questions of life. Its effect on them may be best judged by a friendly comment from Rabbi Harry Levi, of the liberal Jewish synagogue on Commonwealth Avenue, who remarked that the Ford Hall forum was a half-way house to Temple Israel for these young Jews. Thus many of these young people are saved from indifference, agnosticism, or atheism to a modern democratic interpretation of the religion of their fathers.

And other men and women of Christian antecedents, who long since have become estranged from the church in which they were brought up, find themselves influenced by the forum discussions to make a fresh evaluation of the church. They are often greatly surprised to note that the church, too, has grown and progressed like themselves since the days when they were last in touch with its activities. I well remember the head mechanic on one of our steam railroads, who had gotten entirely out of patience with churches in general, coming to me privately at the close of a forum meeting where he had been a regular attendant and asking me very earnestly where he could get a manual of the church in which he had been trained; he wanted to study afresh the up-to-date pronouncement of the creedless church on which he had turned his back ten years before.

There are still others attending forum meetings, and in large numbers, who will in all probability never find their way back into church membership. Poor substitute indeed as the forum is for a church, it seems to bring to these individuals the inspiration, guidance, and fellowship which they crave and which they will not or cannot find in any church. It is no small contribution to democratic religion, I would judge, when innumerable earnest, serious-minded souls find in the forum, or through it, a means of encouraging and

cultivating a sense of brotherhood based on justice, mercy, and humility. I have seen week after week in forum meetings a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan crowd, representing every prejudice and antagonism known to our American life, come to a unity of feeling, a self-forgetfulness, a high pitch of enthusiasm over a mutual discussion of some topic of the most vital concern. This is a process of forming public opinion under the power of emotion, something that Benjamin Kidd declares to be of the very first importance for these days. When that discussion deals with the relations of men to one another and with the relation of man to the universe, which is the range of forum topics, it is shot through and through with religion. And what could be more truly democratic than the forum method of discussion, which exalts the expert, hears the voice of the people, and snuffs out the irrepressible talking nuisance?

While the forum is no proper substitute for the church, even though some people outside the church have found it adequate for that purpose, it is unmistakably a most fitting and successful substitute for a worn-out, brokendown, perfunctory Sunday evening service. It is right here, doubtless, that the forum makes its most direct and manifest contribution to democracy in religion. The forum has already salvaged many a Sunday night service to the great blessing of the community and to the distinct advantage of the church undertaking such a broad and generous service for its neighborhood.

There are many downtown churches in cities all over the land where they do well if they can muster an attendance of one hundred on Sunday evenings, even though the auditorium may easily accommodate five or ten times that number. That was the case with a church I have in mind. It was in the heart of the downtown district in a city that numbered its inhabitants by the hundred thousand. Less than seventyfive people would file into the aisles of this cathedral-like auditorium on Sunday evenings, although the very same

preacher would be heard by several hundred in that same church on the morning of the same day.

But it was entirely different when the forum got well under way, and it was directed and presided over by this same preacher. There were not seats enough in the auditorium to accommodate the people who desired to attend. They came from all over the city and from miles around. The audiences exceeded a thousand every Sunday night. Two hundred extra seats had to be brought in, and then people sat all over the pulpit stairs and stood behind the choir-loft and out in the vestibule, where they could hear but not see. And this continued for five years, the interest and attendance and support growing stronger every year.

There came to these forum meetings socialists and atheists who had not darkened a church door in twenty-five years, a multimillionaire was a frequent attendant, country folk drove in from the towns outside the city, Jews and Catholics were attracted even though the meeting was held in a Protestant church building, church members from the morning congregation, who never before had gone to meeting Sunday evenings, were there and the program lasted two hours and a half, and then it was too short for most of them. Remember this went on for five years, every Sunday night during the winter season. And it was a weakness in the church that resulted in a change of leadership which cut the forum off at the time of its maximum strength.

The meetings of this forum were opened with prayer and closed with a benediction. Meeting in a church and led by a minister, the churchly environment was unescapable. And yet it was a meeting quite apart from the church, where no axes were ground, no propaganda declared, no overlordship exercised. Some of the most outstanding men and women of the country brought their messages to these people. Discussion proceeded in true forum fashion. Many were amazed to see men speaking from a church platform submitting