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its perils and its safeguards. Human nature, indeed, is essentially the same in the city as in the country. Sinfulness, at least, is a pretty constant quantity. But while the country usually stands for leisure, the city stimulates and intensifies all the natural dispositions and tendencies of man, especially of fallen man. The city is an artificial congestion of population. When the blood flows without interference, the temperature remains normal; but if it is forced or arrested on its course, a fever breaks out. Hence, from its fomented energies, as well as from its greater weight of numbers, the city is apt to control. In ancient history, Nineveh. appears to be almost a synonym for Assyria; Athens, for the art and philosophy of Greece; Rome, for the empire of law and arms. Their civilizations rose and fell with them. In the modern world there is a similar urban dominance. Not only does St. Petersburg dictate terms to Russia; Constantinople, to Turkey; and Madrid, to effete Spain; but the whole of Occidental civilization turns for its fashions, in dress, to Paris; in philosophy, to Berlin; in finance, to London. In the New World, Boston, as Dr. Strong says, is the storm-centre of New England weather. Chicago, the Western metropolis, has a mother's influence, for weal or woe, upon millions of her migratory children. Washington absorbs the attention of hundreds of political newspapers from coast to slope. All American roads lead to New York. It is hardly too much to say—as goes the city, so goes the world.

The gospel must follow these autocratic lines of influence. Our Saviour himself seems to command it. His great commission enjoins "that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name unto all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem," the religious capital. It was his own missionary method, obediently adopted by St. Paul, to make every city the nucleus of developing activities. The result was, that opposition to Christianity came to be known as paganism, or the life of the rural districts. The inertia of rest kept them long lingering in heathenism, until the gravitation of the city at length attracted them to the Cross.

This perilous importance of the city has, in every age, been enhanced by the corresponding fact, that bad men have been quick to utilize it as the fountain-head of their radiating streams of evil. Every one of the urgent perils, like immigration, ultramontanism, divorce, the social evil, the saloon, the conflict between labor and capital, which specialists are to discuss at this Conference, has its

chief base of operations in the city. There, in the citadel of each, the duel between Christ and anti-Christ becomes climacteric, hand to hand, to the death. There we must hold highest the Christian standard, with its crimson dye of Calvary, its white of holy love. its blue of heavenly truth-the American banner Christianized; for just there is the crisis of battle, where it must meet at close quarters the flaming flag of mingled sins and the black flag of eternal death, the fitting emblems of diabolic anarchy.

There also the hostile hosts of Peril are most deeply intrenched, behind the earthworks of permanent worldly advantages.

One of these, for example, is found in the facilities for concealment which a city affords to their crimes and vices.

The country and the village force people to live in the light. But sinners of the city can lurk in the ambush of a great crowd, and lie in wait for their prey. The sobering influence of a settled home, an established domicile, and an acquaintance with their neighbors, is largely removed. Thus, the very isolation of a city may seduce men to irresponsible and sheltered deeds of darkness.

The garrisons of anti-Christ obtain another bulwark in the physical perils of city life. Squalor and disease are natural defenses of sin. Difficulty in securing pure air, pure water and pure food tend to put virtue out of reach. The sewer describes in parable the waste and the contamination which flow beneath the surface of every city. You remember Victor Hugo's rhetorical treatment of the subject in "Les Miserables." "The history of men," he says, "is reflected in the history of the sewers, and the Gemoniæ narrated the story of Rome. The drain in old Paris is the meetingplace of all exhaustions and all experiments; political ecomony sees there a detritus, and social philosophy a residuum. It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself." The tenement is a kind of open cesspool, both material and moral; and we need take but two steps even from the refined parlor itself to the home of the deadly sewer-gas. Christianity must never forget that the soul's destiny is closely linked with that of the body. Christ's mission included miracles of healing as well as preaching the gospel to the poor. The peril of the city may thus fortify itself behind the complications of our twofold nature.

An allied peril of the city is, that it arms the enemies of God with a panoply of bad habits. The primary one, perhaps, is seen in that pre-occupation of mind which leaves to many men neither time nor

energy for the consideration of their spiritual interests. In the country, notwithstanding railways and telegraphs, books and periodicals, religion still has fewer rivals than in the city, where business and society are often so absorbing that Jesus may knock unheard at the heart's door, until the weary heart ceases to beat. This habit is fostered in the city also by the multitude of diverse activities, which break up continuity of thought by the allurements of frivolous and sometimes degrading amusements, which render the cultivated soil of character shallow or base, and by the fierce strife for wealth and position, which corrupts and secularizes the heart.

Around this interior habit of mind, others inevitably crystallize. Gradually the city deposits the shell of conventional and artificial life, which divorces action from reflection, and compresses the susceptibilities and aspirations of normal manhood within an incrusted coat of mail. The arrows of truth are parried from the conscience. The springs of good impulse are sealed. Custom shuts out the true perspective, and the things of vital importance can be no longer discerned. Learning is shackled with pedants; society, with mannerists; the church, with Pharisees.

There follow naturally the gradations of caste, which first divides the world into classes, and then keeps men apart and antipathetic, like Hindoos. The problems of city life thus become so involved that the well disposed are tempted to give up in despair; and the selfish, ignoring public perils, devote themselves to luxurious indulgence.

Thence emerges the consequent peril of skepticism, which seems indigenous in cities. "What is truth?" scornfully ask the Pilates who are bred to urban ways. Amidst its continual unrest, the city is terribly endangered by the witchery of easy new theories, and by experimenting with patchwork reforms. This is especially true now, when mechanical inventions eclipse the old miracles of mythology. The progress of our time is a giant Polyphemus, going forward at tremendous strides, seeing clearly whatever he can see at all, but keeping his single eye fixed on material things. Wordsworth complained in his day that plain living and high thinking were no more. Principal Shairp retorts in our day that plain thinking and high living are the all in all. The city, where modern life concentrates, grows quickly impatient with Christ's deep-cutting requirement of regeneration. Entertaining vague and exag

gerated hopes of what physical science may do for the removal of moral maladies, it consents to have its hurts healed slightly. doubts and doubts, like one superficial and blasé.

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Now if these specimen phenomena of the enduring life of the city indicate its permanent peril, how enormously is that peril swelled by the unparalleled change in modern social conditions! Novelty itself is a peril, because it lacks the safeguards of experience and precedent. It is undoubtedly true, as Dr. Dorchester has shown, that great cities were never before so numerous or populous as now; and it is certain that the growth of the city at the expense of the country has been more rapid within sixty years than in any preceding period of history. Vienna and Berlin, as Mr. Loomis reminds us in his "Modern Cities," are each nearly equal to Gibbon's estimate of ancient Rome. Paris is almost twice as large. London is four times as populous; yet, only with about one-fifth of the total population of Great Britain, it has about one third of the city population of that island. Thirty per cent. of the population of Massachusetts lives within twelve miles of the State House, and the same proportion of the people of Illinois live in Chicago. New York City, with its immediate environs, has almost as many inhabitants as all the rest of the great Empire State, including the inland cities. The census of 1880 shows the ominous general ratio of growth in cities. In 1820, 4.9 per cent. of the entire population of the United States lived in cities; in 1840, 81⁄2 per cent.; in 1860, 16.1 per cent.; in 1880, 221⁄2 per cent; and in 1890 it is likely to approximate 30 per cent. These facts in themselves alone create a crisis of peril. They aggravate all the old perils, and they are accompanied by new perils that are even more threatening.

As Dr. Dorchester has impressively intimated, there probably never was a population at once so largely foreign and so heterogeneous as ours. While London has only about 2 per cent. of foreignborn inhabitants, the whole of our new nation, in 1880, averaged over 12 per cent; and every large city had a far greater proportion. For instance, Philadelphia County had 24 per cent.; the counties containing Boston and St. Louis, each about 30 per cent.; those including New York and Chicago, nearly 40 per cent.; and San Francisco County, 442 per cent. At the same time, each aggregate represented some forty nationalities. Of course, the early colonists of America were also foreigners, but they were usually

homogeneous in their new communities, and they generally came from the better classes of the Old World. But our immigrants are of all kinds, and chiefly from the lower elements. They include not only honest workmen, but also Jesuits and other plotters, visionaries and revolutionists, communists and anarchists, exiles and sometimes Government paupers, from almost every nation under heaven, Christian, infidel or heathen. The worst of them commonly settle as parasites in the large cities. Moreover, they frequently aggregate in separate localities, speaking foreign languages, maintaining foreign customs, and perhaps propagating alien religions or irreligions. For example, in our city of Chicago, which is really typical rather than exceptional, we have some 30,000 Bohemians gathered in distinct congeries. Their women are superstitious Romanists; their men, generally, apostate Romanists. There are hardly five evangelical preachers in the land that can speak their language. They form a missionary field, as isolated and as foreign as that of the Indians, Mormons or Chinese. Something of the same isolation, at least, widely marks in our greater cities the far more numerous Germans, who are now the mightiest nation in the world, perhaps, for both persistence and colonization. Cæsar, we know, boasted that he had driven them back, finally, beyond the Rhine, and yet within three centuries they were sitting on Cæsar's throne. Long ago they transfused their blood into the veins of Great Britain. To-day, although they are among the few European races still occupying the ancestral home in which history finds them, they are at the same time busy colonizing half of Christendom; they continue to multiply in undiminished numbers; and everywhere they stubbornly cling to their social customs, which are indeed predominantly Christian but which show traces of their hereditary paganism. With many admirable virtues as citizens, they are frequently deficient in spiritual religion. The question is, whether the American city is to assimilate these agglomerations, or is to be assimilated by them.

This massing of foreign populations in the city is largely responsible, together with our greed of money-getting and our vehemence in pleasure-seeking, for the new and perilous desecration of our Christian day of rest and worship. Centuries of experience show that the religion of Christ must keep or lose spiritual power in almost exact proportion as the scriptural Sabbath is hallowed or profaned. As we learn to fill consecrated time with secular thoughts,

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