of the Y. M. C. A. in 1844, the Evangelical Alliance in 1846, and the National Reform Association in 1863. That middle third of the century was also the period of the greatest of Sabbath reform conventions, which rallied, it is said, seventeen hundred delegates in Baltimore, in 1844, under the presidency of John Quincy Adams.

"Out of the shadows of night

The world breaks into the light;

It is daybreak everywhere."

26. The daybreak that came with that middle third of our century has already been overcast with heavy thunder-clouds, especially in our own country.

there has been moral progress since 1867 in the world at large, but it would be hard to prove moral progress in the United States since that date. Three black "threes" stand out in our statistics of this third of the century. The consumption of liquors, by gallons, the divorces, and the murders (other crimes also) have each multiplied since then three times as fast as the population." To this third of the century also belongs the whole career of the Louisiana lottery, not yet really suppressed. It is the period, also, of the Sunday paper, which, in most instances, is not only a sin but a crime. It is also the period of labor insurrections and of municipal corrup tion; the period, in the world outside, of the breaking down of total abstinence in the two great religions, Buddhism and Mohammedanism, which had taught it to half the world only to have their work undermined by so-called Christian nations. It is the period also of forcing opium upon the Orient.

The House of Commons, in 1891, voted that the "system by which the Indian opium revenue is raised is morally indefensible," and urged the government of India to cease to grant licenses for the cultivation of the

MAP FROM THE CHRISTIAN ARBITRATOR AND MESSENGER OF PEACE." The degree of shading indicates the lesser or larger consumption of opium. An average dose of four grains, administered to those unaccustomed to the drug, is sufficient to destroy life. The lightest tint represents, on that basis, an annual consumption sufficient to destroy the population of the province 1.10 times; the darkest, 50.100 times.

poppy and the sale of opium except in quantities sufficient for medical use. But the evil is not yet suppressed. All Christendom should protest until Britain acts, paying no heed to the absurd report of the Indian Opium Commission in 1895, that a moderate use of opium in India is not injurious; that public opinion in India is not adverse to its use, and that prohibition of it is impracticable. (See my Intoxicants and Opium for later action.)

§ 27. One reason why these evils have grown apace is because the Church has not adequately recognized personal and social ethics as an integral and important part of its work. As Columbus discovered an unknown hemisphere, so we are just discovering a neglected hemisphere of church work (see frontispiece), the hemisphere of social ethics." Those critics of the Church are in error who assume that in British and American pulpits dogma has crowded out duty and creed has displaced conduct. All that can truly be said is that individual and social ethics have not had due emphasis in the utterances of the churches even in sermons, much less in creeds. They are a nineteenth-century development, not sufficiently recognized in the eighteenth-century creeds and disciplines of our churches, but only in more recent resolutions which are not law but only advice." The ink on the Presbyterian General Assembly's resolution against admitting liquor dealers into church membership was hardly dry before a prominent Presbyterian church admitted a liquor dealer, taking the ground that church resolutions are mere advice. 46 Three great denominations, the Methodist Episcopal, the Presbyterian, and the United Presbyterian, resolved that no Christian man should vote for a license party," immediately after which resolutions came the Democratic landslide of 1892. The only large denomination having a specific and binding ethical creed-in this respect to be commended— has not adapted it to the new ethical developments of

this century, but in pledging its new members to avoid specific "sins most frequently practised" makes no mention of lotteries, which in the eighteenth century, when these rules were made, were considered a means of grace; nor of Sunday .papers; and in its temperance pledge, though a total abstinence church in practice, includes only "spirituous liquors," a fossil phrase from the eighteenth century when fermented and malt liquors were considered temperance drinks.“

Not one of the large denominations, so far as we know, recognizes any of the social reforms as a part of Christianity in its official schedules of benevolence. How the efficacy of other church collections is decreased by lack of adequate church support of social reforms, for example, Sabbath observance! Offerings for church erection and ministerial education and home missions are of value in proportion as the people are on the Sabbath free to attend. the churches thus erected and hear the preachers thus educated and supported. Mr. Puddefoot, the well-known home missionary secretary, informs me that there are in the frontier towns home missionary churches where the only man in attendance on Sabbath morning is the preacher; churches where the communion has to be postponed from Sabbath morning until evening "because the deacons are all down in the mines." Surely, if only to increase the efficiency of other church benevolences, there ought to be in every church table of collections a column for Sabbath reform; better still if it is for Christian reforms as a whole, with wise division by church authorities.

Christian conventions discuss the "relation" of religion and reforms. Judging by the slight attention and small contributions they receive from the churches as such, and from the rare bequests, one would suppose they were not only "poor relations" but also very "distant relations"; whereas Reform is the latest and best child of the

Christian family, of which Charity is the first born. This latest and noblest child of Religion is left like a Lazarus to receive the dole of advisory resolutions and casual offerings "at the door." Reform is a Christ-Child for whom no room has yet been found in the ecclesiastical inn. Individual Christians and individual churches, especially institutional churches, have done much in promoting social ethics, but the national ecclesiastical courts and denominational standards have not yet recognized moral reforms as a department of church work. I do not say this by way of blame. If some in the Church need censure, others only wait for wise suggestion." What is most needed is not heat but light.

§ 28. Evils have of late grown apace not only because the Church has not yet recognized reform as its own child, but also because the Church has relied

Christian

upon the method of an individualistic age, Societies Multithe conversion of individuals, to overcome plying.

the new social evils that can be met only by social action. This is seen by many earnest Christians, and an unprecedented number of Christian associations have therefore been formed since the beginnings of union work in 1844; but, with scant exceptions, they have no official relation to the Church, whose neglected social work they do without its financial aid or its supervision. About 1884 the man who annually catalogued New York City charities told me there was not then one charitable institution of ten years' standing in that city which had not been founded and chiefly supported by Bible men, Christians or Jews. And yet there was hardly half a dozen of the hundreds of organizations supported by Protestant Christians for which the Church got any credit. They had been established, supported, and directed, in each case, by a few individual Christians, not by the Church as such, which had so far abdicated its opportunities of "divine service" that it had applied that large term to