of war. Those of us who practice it need bow to no one. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder, a militant host marshaled in friendly cooperation, proud of its intelligent service, jealous of its devoted spirit, and determined to fight for the honor of its name. We are part of the American philosophy. We are the vanguard of a great people's spirit of sanctified intelligent brotherhood. We are soldiers of the common good who have answered the call to the colors.

THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL WORK

Rev. Frank Nelson, Rector of Christ Church, Cincinnati

One hesitates, at such a time as this, to add another word to the very great address of your president. It is so full of wisdom, and truth, and vision that it seems to me in many ways a pity to take any of the impression of it from your minds. I beg you will not allow me to do so, but through whatever I may be given to say you shall read anew the words that he has spoken to you, that you may go forth from this meeting into the many other meetings that are to come, and then from those to your own work in the various communities, with a new .pride that you have been called to social work, if that is your calling, and with a new reverence and respect for social work, if you are not a social worker, and with a new determination to give to it the best you have. For, as he has said truly, in social work today in our modern communities there is salvation; there is hope for men and women and children-not only the down-and-out, the poor and despised, the outcast and the weak, the feebleminded and delinquent, but for every man and woman of us. For we are bound up in the bundle of life together, and we must render service to our fellow-men and women who need that service, not only that we may save them from weakness and pain, but that together we may stand in self-respect before God, ourselves and the generations to come; that it may be known that here men not only live, but live together. The time has gone by when it was sufficient for a man to render to his fellow-man what personal service it was given him, in opportunity and means, to render. The problems of our modern complex life are too difficult for that, and it is a very remarkable testimony to the depth and wonder of man's deep and constructive love for man that he should have wrought out this great complex organization of social work; that he should have designed and achieved it, in the face of almost incalculable difficulties, in order that he might reach out into the needs that touch men today and bring to them service and love, and use it as an instrument of his great, eternal, constructive sense of obligation as a man to men. Only as we keep that clear and strong and alive in our hearts through all the methods of our work, through all the conferences of the coming days, through all the complex organization of social service, can it be true and worthy and achieve the end for which it was designed.

It is a wonderful thing, this social work, in changing the conditions that

surround the people of our time, in bringing hope and courage to individuals, in relieving pain and suffering in society, in eliminating the degrading influences of vice and shame. And it is a wonderful opportunity that is given to men and women today to find in social service a means of expressing the best that is in them by giving themselves to this great profession of human service. There have been great professions in the past. There is the great profession of the ministry, for which so many people think today the time has gone by, because they do not know its greatness and its glory and the wonders of its continuing service to mankind. There are the great professions of medicine, of the law, and of teaching. I cannot stop to speak in detail of each of these; but I want you to see that the things you seek in social work are the things that have kept these callings up. Men go into them because they are called to render human service, and not for gain, money, position, fame, or prestige. A man can only be truly a member of these great professions as his soul is purged and cleaned from anything in it which ministers to himself. And now comes this new profession of social service. It, too, is not a remunerative calling. Thank God the social workers are underpaid, by the standards of modern economic life. If ever social work comes to be commercialized so that it is financially profitable, then social work will enter upon its period of degradation. It must be maintained as a true profession into which one goes for what he can do for his fellow-men; one which involves sacrifice, which enables him to use what God has given him in the ministry of human welfare in order that he may give something of what God has given him to the common possession of the race. And so I thank God that social work has come to be a true profession, and I ask every man and woman here ever to hold in deepest reverence this gift from God that has come in these great days.

And yet there have come great dangers through the organization of social service. There is first, the danger that comes because we have to have great institutions and organizations to carry on this work. That danger is that the old original sense of brotherliness, the personal service of a man to his fellowman, shall be lost sight of because we are dealing with groups and with conditions. We are coming to think—at least we are often acting as if we thought— that the man was made for the institution, and not the institution for the man. And I would have you hold to this fundamental vision of social work, when dealing with the technique that is necessary in all institutions, that the institution is made for the man, and that the value of the man is always greater than the value of the institution. Always the institution is here to serve the man. It is the man's servant, and not his master. To compel even the lowest of the children of men to conform to the standards of the institution rather than to make the institution serve the man's needs is to reverse all our standards of value. To make a man is the sole objective of all our organizations and institutions.

Another great danger is the de-personalizing of social work. It is a danger

that has come with the knowledge of law. We are hearing a great deal today about biology and sociology and psychology and all the other "ologies." They are very great things, great instruments that have enabled us to understand ourselves and our fellow-men. They are great instruments for service put into our hands to enable us to give intelligent service, to find a place in our social system for subnormal girls or boys whom before we had thought just stupid or depraved. Now we are learning where their place is, and are finding ways of helping them to play their part in the common task of life. It is a wonderful thing, this knowledge of law that is coming into all modern social work. But again and again there comes to be a sort of sense that a law is a magic thing that works of itself. There is no such thing. The law is a great thing as we come to have an understanding of it, as we get to know it, and know how to use it. But always we need to realize that man is the master of the law. In the face of the law, we have got to find some way of keeping our sense of the value of the person supreme in all social work, bowing in reverence before it, never despising it, never treating it lightly, never looking down upon it.

There are two great antidotes for these dangers. They are antidotes not ordinarily found in the social service language of our day. They are antidotes which some of you will think old-fashioned. They may seem to you to have been made unnecessary by the organization of social work and by the discovery of law. The first is God. When I say "God," I mean God. I do not mean my own idea of God. I do not mean any one of your ideas of God. I do not mean any name of God which anyone of you may give to God. As long as there are men there will be as many names for God as there are men. When I say "God," I do not mean the organized service of God. When I say "God," I mean God, just God, God himself, God, the Person back of all this universe. What that Person is like, I do not know. I have certain faiths about it, but that is my concern, not yours. Back of all this life is God, the Person. As you remember that in all your social work, remember that life is from the Person, and under the mastery of the Person, and accountable to the Person, then the Person, as we know it in ourselves and men, comes to have new significance and power, new sacredness and sanctity, calls forth from us a new reverence that we do not have if we think of life as an institution or a great collection of laws. The vision of God, and that you and I are sent from God to man to be His messengers and servants; that we are not acting of ourselves nor in our own strength, but only as men sent from God, in that way only may we see the wonder of personality and know the truth of brotherliness. Through the vision of God we can see, beyond and above the failures and discouragements, the worth of our service and of those we serve.

It is no easy task to believe in God and to see him in all this life. When a man really tries to see God, to see this life in the face of God, yet looks out upon the vastness of this universe, the multiplicity of its life, the universality of law, and looks, too, into the face of the ghastly and appalling evil that is in the world,

is honest enough to look into his own soul and see the depths of evil there-the conceit, the shame, the desires, the cowardices, the greeds, the cruelties there, only held in leash-and still believes in God, he has found the secret of all masteries. Seeing God, he dares to undertake the task of responsibility for a service that is other and greater than himself, and he finds in God a sustaining enthusiasm and power that can come in no other way. I bow in great reverence before those men and women who, out of the life that is in them, and without faith in God, go out and serve their fellow-men with enthusiasm and power day after day. They do it with a sacrifice to themselves that bids us, who believe in God, bow our heads in very shame at times. But I say to all of you, if you will somehow seek that vision of God and make it a vivid reality, a spiritual force, then you will find a reassurance in social work that will sustain you and send you out with a new power. Because God, being a person, and you and I being persons, and the moron, the criminal, the hopelessly insane, the delinquent, the weak, and the poor being also persons, we are all the children of God together. If we have this vision and this faith in serving them, our service is made worth while to us, and we are sustained in the face of seeming defeat and despair.

The second great antidote is another thing which might seem obsolete to social workers, one which social workers have rejected sometimes because it seemed to make useless or not worth while this social service. And that is immortality. I suppose the great majority of people are consciously agnostic about immortality today, that is, when an individual is up against the problem of immortality for himself. But by immortality, I do not mean something that is beyond, in the future, after death, a sort of disconnected place to which we will get some time by the grace of God. It is a deeper and more serious thing that I mean by immortality. There are two parts to it. One is the immortality a man believes in for himself; the other is the immortality of the race. Someone says, "Why work so hard over these problems, dealing with the morons and the rest of those defectives and delinquents? They are incurable." We are doing it because we want the next generation to be freer from these problems than we have been. We are for the immortality of the race with a patient faith which we cannot justify by reason. Why should I pay the price, with my own life, that my children shall have a little better place to live in? Because I am bound up in the bundle of life with the race, and I believe it is the will of God, the will of life, that this race shall go on to better things. Because we have inherited the goodly heritages of the present, from the past we shall be cowards if we do not try to make that immortality of the future a nobler kind of life than that of the present.

But I mean also a deeper immortality than that. Are these men and women and children we are serving just incidents in the immortality of the race, just vehicles for the carrying on of life from generation to generation, without significance in themselves or for us? There is no man or woman here who thinks that

of himself or herself. You do not think you are merely incidents. Your life, your opportunity, your privilege, is precious to yourself, and it is precious to you because that power and quality of immortality is inherent in every man and woman and child. The potential immortality that rests in everyone, the power and quality of immortality that belongs to all, is that which makes a man stand up on his feet and separate himself from the herd and look up to God, and conceive God, and imagine God. It is the immortality in him that enables him to do it. It is in every single human being-in the one born out of wedlock as in the one born within the shelter of home life-therefore shall they be counted the greater sinners who so dare to misuse the creative gift that God has given them. That potential power of immortality belongs to the poor little imbecile who, through no fault of his own, has been deprived of his powers of reasoning, but whose imbecility does not kill the spirit that gives the brain its final life. That potential immortality is in the habitual offender who has thrown away all vestige of control, who scorns truth and honor and decency, who is living most of his life under the brutality of the third degree or of the brutalized wardens that keep him in control. As we come to believe that, and to see men and women as having the power and quality of immortality, we shall not call them morons, and criminals, and delinquents, but shall call them by their names, John and Mary, and separate each one in his own consciousness, and know they are worthy of our service and of our respect. To be immortal is so stirring and awful a thing, so mysterious and extraordinary a thing, so significant in its meaning of the value of a person, that when we go out to serve with that faith we go in quite a different spirit, with a soberness and reverence and a power and patience that we never had before. When that power is in a person, though we may not be able, through ignorance or our limitations, to say to them that here and now they shall be saved to manhood, and to humanity, and to self-respect, yet we shall know that in immortality they may achieve the joy that has been denied them in this little first chance at life which they have now. Therefore we shall serve them with our best.

And so as you go back into this complex organization of modern life and resume the work you have been called to do, won't you take with you these two great antidotes: personality and immortality, and because of them go out to serve happily, thanking whatever God there be that he has given you a chance to be a man and to be the servant of your fellow-men.

THE MENACE OF RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE Professor Charles A. Ellwood, University of Missouri, Columbia

It is very strange that the topic which I have been assigned is one of the most difficult to speak upon at the present time. It would not have been fifteen or twenty years ago. Then everybody would have taken it for granted, and