it is an universal proposition, if he who is not with me is against me, that the nation of individual which is not Christian is antiChristian. There are no other antagonistic forces in the moral universe. Around the positive pole those gather who look to the Cross. Around the negative pole those cluster who look away from the Cross. And as the aggregate of population is thus divided, so is the nation.

But if the people decide against Christianity, what then? Why the nation becomes anti-Christian, and there is no human help for it. Laws will not alter that majority; cannon will not efface it. The armies of Europe, when gathered outside the walls of Paris, could not change the character of the Commune which assembled within it. Nor was it physical force that shot that infidel communism to death, but it was the influx of a returning healthy wave of population which restored the tide of moral life. If our people by majorities should ever become reckless of religious obligation, there are no laws on your statute books which will secure the sanctity of the Sabbath, or the sacredness of property, or the holiness of life as the Life Giver regards it; nor will there be any power of arms that can then stand between our national institutions and their grave. You will know it by a revelation more sensitive than the census. You will feel it in the currents of commercial life; you will hear it in the whispers of agitated thought; you will see it in the gathering storm of Divine indignation. It is not a national decree that will then save our national Christianity. No! We must accept the consequences of our argument. The question of national religious character is to be determined by majorities. We accept it gladly. To the logical force and absoluteness of the contract, drawn by our Master, Christ, we appeal the question whether the Government of these United States is Christian or not.

Of fifty millions who inhabit this country, forty millions fear God and worship Christ; if, indeed, we have not made even too large a concession to all shades of infidelity and heathenism. I doubt if there be one million out of the fifty who, with an intelligent realization of the issue, would range themselves consciously as without God and without hope of salvation. The polls are the ultima ratio of our republican thoughts. If it could be carried there it would soon appear that this Nation is a Christian people and that this Government is a Christian State; and so we clear the way for a recognition of the principle that lies at the basis of this charitable work, around which our interests and our affections assemble today. This is a Christian people. This is a Christian State. If it be not, let him who maintains the opposite prove that this people and this Nation has carried itself against God and His Christ.

Affirming that the State is Christian, we proceed with the discussion of the topic assigned to us at great advantage. Between

the charitable institutions of a Christian State and a Christian Church, there are no antagonisms. On the contrary, the relations of the Christian Church to such institutions, are the most intimate possible, because they are offspring of its own Christianity. We use the term Christian Church, of course, not as a definition of a particular body of people, but as a synonym for Christians. And then the relations of the Christian Church to the charitable institutions which have sprung out of and been developed by its own Christianity are all included under the two terms, inspiration and guidance. Inspiration! The Christian Church has inspired every public charity that has ever blessed this sad earth; directly, or by reflex influence, they have been the offspring of its religion. Guidance! The Christian Church has moulded every form of public benevolence, given it shape, method, maintenance, since Jesus first taught the world to discover a neighbor in every man who is in need. Every hospital and orphanage, every asylum and almshouse, every house of mercy that has ever expressed the brotherhood of human nature, has been inspired and guided by the Christian Church. Charities are the offspring of Christian love. They exist only where Christian influences provide the atmosphere in which human affections move. Heathenism knows nothing of houses for the sick and desolate. Nor does natural affection, even in enlightened countries, except when influenced by Christianity, ever recognize the claims of afflicted human nature upon the universal brotherhood. One exception is to be recorded, but it only renders the general proposition more evident: Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, 500 years B. C., seems to have caught an idea of brotherhood, in its narrow sense, as related to the interests of his own followers. During his life time," the peaceful progress of the Buddhist was illumined by the cheerful faces of the sick in monastic hospitals for the crippled, the deformed and the destitute, and by the happy smiles of travellers reposing in Dharma solas by the roadside." So the learned Hardwick testifies. But Buddhism was a philosophy rather than a religion. The philosopher reformer taught the brotherhood of sect, not the brotherhood of man. And the notable fact is that the happy thought expired almost as soon as it was born. The hospitals lasted only during the life of the founder. The idea has never had birth again, except since the Man of Nazareth walked among the sad and destitute, and except under the influence of his conceptions of universal brotherhood. Heathenism of the nineteenth century repeats what were universal thoughts and usages of heathenism at the time of Christ. Although it has received so many luminous rays of the Gospel, and learned so much by contact with the spirit of Christianity, it creates no hospitals except for the wounded and sick among the animals that it worships. Its influence over the human instinct of compassionmay be seen on the banks of the Ganges, where it leaves the sick of its own households to perish on the sands, and the dying to be

swept away by the merciful waves of the sacred river. But you will find the objects of its tenderest sympathy in hundreds of wounded and gibbering ogres that crowd the magnificent halls of the Dourgha Khound, at Benares.

In striking contrast to that, from the very moment that Christianity began its mission, it walked with open hand and loving heart towards all that were destitute and sorrowing. Among the first acts of the Apostles was the serving of tables for the poor, which has seemed a strange ministry and a novel thought even to some Christians in these later days; and among the earliest charities of the Church was the sewing circle where Dorcas gathered around her the poor widows of Joppa. Pliny, in his celebrated letter to the Emperor Trajan, mentions it as a novel idea, but not to the discredit of the new sect, that they had already established "handmaids of the Church," who ministered in charity, and St. Synesius sends his greetings to members of a kindred fellowship. So early had the exercise of charity been organized in the Chris-· tian Church.

But the State knew nothing of these offices of mercy until the Roman emperor became obedient to the Gospel, and the cross and the eagle, side by side, had become the symbols of imperial power. It was not the spirit of the Augustan age nor the amenities of the philosophical Cæsar which developed individual benevolence into public beneficence, and gave it the sanction of secular authority.

Not till Christianity began to actuate the State under Constantine, did personal compassion learn to step beyond narrow limits, and combine publicly in labors of love for the desolate and destitute of our race.

However else the pages of history in the middle ages may be soiled, they contain grand records of royal and of martyr deeds of charity. The Church of Christ, during those times of darkness, was a potent factor in the gradual amelioration of manners and habits, in the instruction of tempers and character, in the formation of sympathies and affections, out of which, at last, emerged the civilization, refinement and gentle thought of these latter ages. Indeed, he has read the history of mediævalism almost in vain who does not attribute to the influence of Christianity the progress of society from barbarism, through feudalism and chivalry, into that state of mental, moral and communal habits which prepared the possibilities of the fifteenth, the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. And among those instruments-instruments even if we do not receive them as forces- were the monasteries, the monastic hospitals, the orphanages, and the men and women whose views constrained them to lives of sympathy, compassion and charity. A subsequent misuse of these grand factors in social amelioration should not blind our eyes to the merciful use which was made of them by Divine Providence during the centuries of their healthy maturity.

The Christian Church was working all this while upon and by the State, when, in all that Cimmerian darkness of selfishness and cruelty, followed the slow steps of governmental progress. We owe it to Christianity, and largely to the positive and incidental influences of the charitable institutions of Christianity, that the breaking up of the unity of the empire into petty lordships was followed by a reaction of independence of cities and associated governments, until at last followed the comparative freedom which now blesses the people of all the nations of Christianized Europe and America. The causes at work will not be hidden from him who realizes that, with scarcely an exception, those educational and regeneratory forms were included within the charitable institutions of the Church. Out of them burst the Reformation with all its emancipatory power,—for Luther was a monk. From that era the history of public charities walks in light. The world at the present day owes its benevolent institutions to the Church, or to the Christian influences controlling the State: not to the State as separated from Christianity. No charitable institutions of our commonwealth would have existed were it not for the Christian Church whose holy thoughts devised them, nor could they be maintained were it not for the beneficent spirit of Christianity which, inspiring and moving the State, orders and maintains them.

"Orders and maintains them!" There we touch the critical point in this discussion. The practical issue is just there. In what way and by what methods shall the Christian Church, acting through the Christian State, order and maintain its public charities? The reports of this Conference of Charities, and the whole experience of our generation in respect to such institutions, show that in proportion to the withdrawal of Christian watchfulness and guidance of our Legislatures these benevolences sink into corruption and lose their sweet mercies. The moment that human selfishness touches them in the shape of greed for office or political party ascendancy, is the moment when they begin to lose their character as charities. Consequently, the Christian Church, or, in other words, the influence of Christianity, must continue to order and maintain what it inaugurated, and Christian people must in some effectual manner make their will and power felt over the legislators who assume to govern these institutions of benevolence.

Public opinion is the ultimate arbiter in our Republic. Public opinion is the actual ruler, for it not only shapes our laws, but it is the force which stands behind the laws and renders their execution possible. Nor can acts of legislation be effective unless upheld by this strong arm of public opinion. Here, then, the Christian Church finds its opportunity; for it is its privilege to form the public opinion of our people. No other force is more potential. The Church largely guides the press in America, and, if it chooses, can control it. And the Christian Church holds the pulpits of

America. There is no other opportunity like that. There is no nation on the face of the earth which can be so easily reached as ours by a healthy public sentiment breathed through the religious teachings of the Sabbath. Political questions are forbidden to the Christian pulpit, not only by the highest policy, not only by the principles of religion, but by the very terms of the Constitution under which we hold our privileges. The absolute separation of Church and State, by the fundamental laws of our Government, forbids a minister of religion to use his official position in the Church in any way to interfere with or effect the secular legislation of the State. But moral questions, and especially questions of benevolence, do not fall into that category of forbidden things. There is no possible conflict between a Christian Church and a Christian State in discussing these topics, and in reference to them the State has nothing to fear from the influence of the pulpit, but everything to hope for from it.

And, therefore, in the healthful use of the pulpits of our land, the Church of Christ may rightfully form a public opinion which shall guide the State both in the principles of its benevolence and in the details of their management. If I am not mistaken, this Conference depends altogether upon the might of instructed public opinion for its power. It has no legal authority to arrest a wrongdoer or to correct an error in the management of State benevolence. Yet the voice of its censure is more potent than law. The public opinion which it expresses is more to be dreaded than a "lash of scorpions." It was public opinion gradually crystalizing around the facts which Howard revealed to astonished England, that wrought a revolution in the management of English public charities. It was public opinion taking shape and gathering force under the manly eloquence of Wilberforce, that destroyed the slave trade. It was public opinion, very quietly operating under the guidance of William Welsh, that brought the whole of the magnificent public charities of Philadelphia under the control of a board of men disconnected with politics, and having no possible interest except to manage them for the welfare of the beneficiaries. Politics are wise enough to follow public opinion, for a decisive and determined public opinion means votes. Around this Conference of Charities, therefore, the Church of Christ should array its forces. The Boards should be allowed to feel that they act with the sympathy, and utter the will of the Church. This sympathy should not be silent and only to be inferred. It should speak out. By that I mean that the several churches, Protestant and Catholic, should sustain the Boards. They should utter their concurrence with its noble purposes and wise methods of attaining them. They should speak through synods and conventions and classes, or by whatever methods they are accustomed to reach the public ear and heart. Especially should the pulpit take up this theme. It has nothing to do with public policy. It should sedulously abstain from mixing

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