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to beg from others. It may be wrong to give ten cents to a legless man at a street corner; but it is right, and even praiseworthy, to send ten tickets for some dismal entertainment to our dearest friend, who must either purchase the dreaded things or harass her friends in turn. If we go to church, we are confronted by a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side. Mr. John Richard Green, the historian, was wont to maintain that the begging friar of the pre-reform period, "who at any rate had the honesty to sing for his supper, and preach a merry sermon from the portable pulpit he carried round," had been far outstripped by a "finer mendicant," the begging rector of to-day. A hospital nurse once told me that she was often too tired to go to church—when free—on Sundays. "But it doesn't matter whether I go or not," she said with serious simplicity, "because in our church we have the envelope system." When asked what the system was which thus lifted church-going from the number of Christian obligations, she explained that envelopes marked