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rate the teachings of Jesus in their lives, and those who are not so endeavoring, are the organizations known as the churches. In the same proportion as each church develops in its appreciation of Jesus and in its endeavor to emphasize the social necessities of a perfect individual life, will its influence be felt in transforming the environment in which it is placed.
Further, it is clear that the progress of the Christian transformation of society must proceed, precisely as in the method of Jesus, along the line of conversion or, more exactly, the regeneration of the individual. At this point he who seeks to inaugurate a greater Christian society has the invaluable aid of the church's effort. For generations churches of all shades of evangelical faith have been endeavoring to lay deep this foundation of a progressive social regeneration. It has often happened that such a programme has seemed ineffectual; men have often endeavored to substitute a system of ethics for the dynamics of a personal faith in God. But such efforts have generally resulted from or preceded a weakening of conventional morals and a degeneracy in society as a whole. The test of a Christian society's morale has seldom been the utterances of its ethical teachers, but the religious fervor of its masses. Strip from the England of the seventeenth century the burning zeal of the Separatist and Puritan, and we have the Restoration and the Court Preachers. Concerts and kindergartens are very necessary as complements of revivals and mission halls, but as saviors of a nation's civilization and purity they are as grass before the storm. No thoughtful man will underestimate or antagonize the remarkable combination of professional and amateur philanthropy that has within a few years burst forth in social settlements and institutional churches. But, so far as one can at present judge, such forms of social effort, profoundly Christian as they are, can never remove the need for the older and more permanent work of the missionary. No civilization can be Christian that balks at the fact of divine sonship. No social reform will be thorough-going and lasting that stops before endeavoring to bring every human being into the righteousness and fraternal love that spring
