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228 INTRODUCTION TO PARLIAMENT PAPERS. English Christianity to supply metaphysics and doctrine to Hindus by missionaries than to give them bread when starving by thousands and hundreds of thousands. To this, on the eleventh day, Bishop Keane said : " I endorse the denuncia- tion that was hurled forth last night against the system of pre- tended charity that offered food to the hungry Hindus at the cost of their conscience and faith. It is a shame and a dis- grace to those who call themselves Christians." Col. T. W. Higginson characterized the situation as one calling for humility on every hand, when we ask ourselves how well any of us have dealt with the actual problems of human life. With the seething problems of social reform penetrating all our community and raising the question whether one day the whole system of competition under which we live may not be swept away as absolutely as the feudal system disappeared before it ; with the questions of drunkenness and prostitution in our cities ; with the mortgaged farms in our agricultural sec- tions ; with all these things pressing upon us, it is hardly the time for us to assume the attitude of infallibility before the descendants of Plato and the disciples of Gautama Buddha. The test of works is the one that must come before us. Every Oriental that comes to us concedes to us the power of organ- ization, the power of labor, the method in actual life, which they lack. They deny us no virtue except the knowledge of the true God. They don't seem to think we have very much of that, and that knowledge, as they claim, is brought to bear in virtues of heart as well as in the virtues of thrift, of indus- try, of organization, and in the virtue of prayer, in the virtue of trust, in the virtue of absolute confidence in God. We have come here to teach and to learn. The learning is not so familiar to most of us, perhaps, as the teaching, but when it comes to actual life we might try a little of both. Mrs. Anna G. Spencer's essay on the eleventh day remarked the dawning of a new form of religion throughout the world ; the far East as well as the nearer West ; shaping the reform movements of Christianity, and of other great historic faiths as well, along lines of essential moral and social law, the turn-