land to be guided by experience. There is rising now on all sides a call for more aggressive work in the field of Christian sociology. I revere greatly any thoroughly evangelical institutional church. Such a church takes up a great number of departments of philanthropic work not ordinarily pursued by a church but given over to the young men's and young women's associations. If a single church wishes to do all that, very well. But I have more reverence for churches that unite and let such work be done by the Young Men's Christian Associations, by the Young People's Societies of Christian Endeavor, and by the College Settlements.

You have on one of your streets a noble institution where young ladies every week, from Smith and Vassar and other of our famous colleges, recent alumnæ, many of them born in homes of the greatest refinement and luxury, give their lives to the instruction of the poor. Girls are taught sewing. There are various branches of instruction insisted upon for boys as well as girls, and a certain religious influence of an utterly undenominational and unsectarian kind, is thrown around the pupils. This scheme is only about five years old, but you have united in it now the alumnæ of Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Ann Arbor, Cornell, Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe. You should ask all who study the topic of Civic Centres and Social Questions Unions to take advice of these College Settlements, of your city missionary society, and of your associated charities.

There is certainly a demand at the thirty-two points of the compass for the moral reorganization of cities. While I would have the church do its utmost, I would not have society proceed in this country upon the supposition that political parties have nothing to do in this matter. Your Law and Order League some people object to because it does work that political parties should do. I believe in the Law and Order League, but it ought not to supersede faithfulness on the part of the representatives of the people in political office.

Have we come to this, that we elect and pay men to carry out the laws, and then must form voluntary organizations to watch those we have elected? Are we proceeding on safe principles when we allow our great political parties to contend

over the spoils of office, and do not expect them to keep their oaths of office? Your Law and Order League seems to take it for granted that neither party when in power will carry out the law faithfully according to the oaths of the officials. This is a horrible state of affairs. We must rise to a level where people will demand that pledges made before elections shall be carried out after elections. And if Civic Centres, Social Questions Unions, are steps by which the church may lift citizens to that level, I say, God bless them! Chicago has set the example of a definite organization of this kind. Its constitution is much like that of the Glasgow and Brighton Social Questions Union. Chicago means to try this scheme. She has numberless philanthropic organizations. She is very well equipped with aggressive churches. Let us keep our attention fastened on the city of the great lakes. If she succeeds, there is no reason why New York or Philadelphia, or any city in the land should not. Alexander Hamilton, in his anxiety for the preservation of American institutions, advocated in his final years the organization of a "Christian Constitutional Society," of which the two objects were to be to defend jointly the Constitution and the Christian religion (Lodge's Hamilton, p. 267.) If the queen of the great lakes makes a success of her Civic Centre, let us have a Christian Civic Centre of the Hamiltonian type in every city of two hundred thousand population from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate. [Loud applause.]

LECTURE V.

THE PEERLESSNESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS.

I.

It is an exceedingly suggestive fact that in the World's Parliament of Religions, only Christianity expressed any serious hope of becoming a universal faith. This is a very striking circumstance in the glowing dawn of the twentieth century. "No religion except Christianity," says Dr. Barrows in his impartial and official history of the Parliament, "put forth any strong and serious claims to universality." (P. of R. p. 1572.) No other religion ventured to emphasize its expectation of governing religious convictions and daily conduct among all mankind. As Christianity fronted the future, she carried on her forehead the Morning Star. No other religion on the globe had this celestial ornament.

All the merely ethnic faiths have reached their culmination. All have failed to regenerate the lands that have received them. The Occident does not look toward any of the nonChristian faiths for its highest hope, and soon the Orient will not.

Christianity conquered ancient philosophies and religions. by sheer superiority of spiritual force. It met the wants of man; it appeased the measureless hunger of the human heart as no other religion had ever done, or come near doing. It absorbed whatever was excellent in the creeds it superseded, but its peerlessness was in its own matchless original equipment. Thus Christianity triumphed over the paganism of Greece and Rome, and all the schools of their philosophies, and even over their despair.

As it has triumphed in Greece, Rome, Germany, England, America, so Christianity will triumph in Japan, China, India, Arabia, Africa, and the isles of the sea, by incontestable spiritual superiority.

Two great historical facts dominate the whole topic of the Peerlessness of Christian Missions in Ancient and Modern Times.

1. The ancient religions and philosophies over which · Christianity triumphed had failed to satisfy the hunger of the human heart and left the world in a state of moral decay and despair.

The Gods of Olympus did not regenerate Greece or Rome. Platonism did not. Eclecticism, Stoicism did not. The foremost populations of the world were notoriously verging toward political and moral ruin when Christianity appeared with its words of inspiration and hope.

2. The modern religions and philosophies with which Christianity stands in contact and conflict, have failed to satisfy the hunger of the human heart and have left their most loyal lands in a state of decay and despair.

Buddhism prevails only in the half-developed populations of the Orient. Confucianism leads its votaries up a short ascent to a wide table-land of secular morals and then ceases to rise. Brahmanism degenerates into idolatry and carries with it the multiplied curse of caste. Mohammedanism tolerates polygamy and slavery, and rules so ignorantly and rapaciously, wherever it has power, that it is a proverb that every green thing withers under the hoofs of the horses ridden by the Turkish Sultan. Pantheism and mere rationalism in Europe drop easily to the frightfully low levels of agnosticism and pessimism. The son of the great Thomas Arnold of Rugby, for example, can drop so low as to say:

"The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD: Dover Beach.

This is agnosticism and pessimism mingled, and evidently is not a faith that will conquer the world. It is a transitory tendency of a small academic current in what mistakenly calls itself advanced culture in Europe.

Matthew Arnold I revere as a literary artist. A man with his opinions cannot possibly be a great poet, for he lacks power to inspire, lacks soul. And Matthew Arnold, great artist as he was, seems to have lacked the philosophical faculties. He thought himself that he was poorly equipped in the higher intellectual endowments. And, as compared with his own father, he lacked reverence, elevation and spiritual insight the dome windows of the cathedral of the spirit. Much agnosticism and pessimism come from absence of dome windows. Cicero, you remember, says that if a man were brought up in a chamber with but a single aperture to admit light, he might think that window essential to his vision and fear that the destruction of the opening might destroy his sight. Throw down all the walls of the temple, and you have universal vision. That was Cicero's idea of death. Matthew Arnold was born and brought up in a room poorly lighted by philosophy and by radiance from on high. As the advance of his years made him æsthetically more and more critical and as the light that he loved grew less and less broad, he seems to have thought that there was night outside. Now that the walls of his temple have been thrown down, let us hope that he rejoices in the illumination of the noon.

II.

The Peerlessness of Christian Missions is to be seen, first of all, in their Origin.

When the morning stars sang together, God began to seek man by giving him capacity to seek God. If we are to have any adequate conception of their spiritual dignity, the begin