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making, the increased luxury and enervation in many classes, the dying out of religious influences in sparsely settled portions of the old states, all tend to show a change in the condition of our land, which demands careful consideration.

The American ideas of morality, frugal living, education, home life, and respect for law are changing rapidly, and it is the duty of the Christian Church to lead the new thought of the times, or certain disaster and punishment must come.

Our country welcomes all to a new home and conditions more favorable for happiness and advance than the world has ever seen, but all who come to share its privileges must understand that the new civilization, so full of promise to them, is founded on love to God, respect for law, and a high moral sentiment.

The Church must embody this high standard, not only in its creeds, but in its life. In some way we have failed in this, for the gravest and most important consideration which confronts us is the fact that all over the country the artisan class is becoming more and more estranged from the churches, and is gaining its instruction and inspiration from unwise leaders, almost invariably of foreign birth, who argue from half-truths and unfair conclusions.

Everywhere among workingmen is unrest, a looking for some one to show them a higher good. A late author, himself a workingman, says of the artisan: "He has been revolutionized in character, passing from a simple life of few wants and necessities to a varied and complex one, where he is more sensitive to social disadvantages and more sensible of his power as a social factor."

Of the poorer class of workingmen he says: "It is unquestionably true that poverty is more inimical to society to-day, more dangerous to social order, freedom and democratic institutions, than ever before."

Mr. Lowell, in his admirable address on "Democracy," says: "Formerly the immense majority of men-our brothers knew only their sufferings, their wants and their desires. They are beginning now to know their opportunity and their power."

All this restlessness and change means grand opportunity. There is no room or place for discouragement, if we are true to our responsibility.

The duty is clear and plain, and the call of God direct. The Christian Church must be united in heart, must co-operate fully, must assume the aggressive, and advance along the whole line.

The times call for an applied Christianity that can meet all the needs and relations of man to man. It cannot remain merely defensive, and must prove its adaptedness to all needs and all conditions. The full brotherhood of men under one Father and in one household must be its watchword, with a meaning never known before.

True Christian men of all names are waking up to a fuller realization of these facts. They begin to understand that a religion worth the name must bring cheer into every home, hope into every life— bring into close touch and sympathy and mutual confidence all classes, must kill self-seeking and self-indulgence; and at any cost of time, money or comfort, its followers must live as Christ lived on earth, with the people and for the people.

The times are ripe for full consideration of these vital conditions, and this gathering is called that facts may be presented, considerations urged, and full conference be had, as to our opportunities and responsibilities.

The Alliance has no thought of pushing its own views, or making a place for itself. It has no theories to assert. It believes the first need is for careful and accurate study. Its only hope and suggestion is that in each community Christian men, without regard to name, will be willing to meet and carefully and prayerfully study the problems of its own locality. It is certain this will result in the adaptation of means to meet the wants and destitution sure to be discovered. This will warm Christian hearts into fuller confidence and sympathy with each other, and will advance all denominational interests in their relation to the whole Church of Christ as nothing else can do.

Such study and investigation will certainly warm up the whole religious atmosphere, give purpose to Christian life, and advance every good cause.

It will show to all outside the churches that this practical selfdenying interest in everything that touches their comfort and happiness means something new for them; that Christ came to make their lives on earth brighter, sweeter and happier; that Christianity means something more than easy church-going and self-satisfied living.

In this study and investigation, all denominations can join with perfect loyalty to their own convictions and form of worship; and in the evils to be met and remedied in each locality, many things will

be found which can only be successfully met by a cordial co-operation of all the churches.

Christian brothers, do we believe in the teachings of our Master? They have been in the world nearly two thousand years! Have they yet been fully tried? The Church has slowly and steadily grown in wealth and influence and doctrine; but have these teachings yet been put into practical operation?

If God and our hopes for the future were blotted out, and nothing but this life remained, the model of Christ's perfect life, if it could be imitated by man, and His teachings followed, would make this earth a heaven, and put an end to sin and evil here. This example and these teachings are committed to our keeping, with all the full hopes and grand possibilities they contain. What are we doing with them? Christ became a man, and showed how man should live with his brothers. As the Father sent Him, so He sends us to bear witness of the truth.,

Let us be perfectly frank with each other in this Conference.

We rejoice rightly in the increasing growth of our churches, in many forms of new and earnest work, in great sums given for missions and for charity, in the large proportion of young men in our colleges who are firm in Christian principle, in ministers and teachers more faithful than ever before. Most of all, we rejoice in the faithful few-" the Church with.n the Church "-who are ceaseless in their devotion and self-sacrifice, but are we not throwing upon these hard-worked, overworked pastors and members the burdens which all should share?

Of the vast number of nominal church members, what proportion is doing its full share in the vital work needed by these rapid times?

How many are content to attend one service a day, to give small sums, and occasionally to speak well of religion, if it costs them nothing? How many expect the pastor to do all the work with such help as he can get from a few "enthusiasts" in the church?

How many understand that their money is only a trust for the advancement of Christ's cause on earth? After all, how pitiful the whole large aggregate of money given appears, compared with the amounts spent in luxuries and show by those who profess to have given their lives and all they have to the lowly Jesus-Master of us all.

How can an army expect victory if the rank and file stand by

idly criticising, or seeking its own amusement and profit, while the officers and file-leaders are in the thick of the fight?

If grand results have come to our country from a religion so strangely handled by its professors, what results would follow if every man were alert and consecrated?

We profess to be a Christian country, and we have advanced, perhaps, further than has been reached before-but the leaven has not entered the whole mass.

Probably one-half of our people never enter a church. When we send out missionaries to foreign countries, rum and licentiousness go out with or before them from our Christian land, and get to work before our ministers can learn the language.

Every advance of our Christian civilization westward, forms first a settlement so crowded with saloons and gambling houses that it is a hell on earth, and its character half formed, before our churches are on the ground; and then men and means are so scanty that often it is only a forlorn hope.

We pride ourselves on our magnificent growth as a country, our increasing wealth, our pride of life, and our material prosperity; but all history shows that these are always the precursors of decay and ruin, if a deep foundation of morality and religion has not been planted.

"Material

At the Harvard anniversary, Mr. Lowell said: success is good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and consolation of mankind."

We have been educated into a sort of fatality-a belief that God would always care for our country, and we had little to do but to stand still and see His salvation. But this is not gospel or common sense. For the first time in history, a country teeming with every treasure has been put into the hands of an intelligent people, with God's word in their hands and His promises behind them, and His cheer always. We must "work out our own salvation with fear and trembling," but with the joyous certainty that God worketh with us.

We need a new revival, not only of higher spirituality, but of the complete acceptance of the idea that each Christian man has a real work to do for which he is responsible-such a revival as the Crusades were, or the Reformation! such a stirring of the whole

Church as came to both sections of our common country, when every man was willing to give all he had, even his life, to the cause he believed vital.

There are indications everywhere of the possibilities of such a new birth. And our earnest hope is that this Conference may be the precursor and promise of its coming.

CHAIRMAN: I now have the pleasure of introducing to the Conference, as the presiding officer of this session, the Hon. John Jay, of New York, who for many years was the honored President of the Alliance. (Applause.)

Mr. Jay, on taking the chair, said:

After listening to the impressive address of the President of the Alliance, we can the better appreciate the significance-which, we trust, will become historic-of this remarkable assemblage at the national Capital.

Among the sermons preached in New York, on Sunday last, on the dangers that beset us as a nation, was one by Bishop Potter from the text of St. Paul, "It is high time to awake out of sleep ;" and this gathering of citizens from distant parts, representing the millions who hold to the Bible and cherish the institutions founded upon its truths, shows that the nation is awakening to the perils, foreign and domestic, which threaten the purity of its Christian civilization.

We should never forget the fact of which that philosophic reasoner of the Roman Catholic faith, Dr. Brownson, so forcibly reminded us, when he said that our American civilization was "the furthest point in advance yet reached by any age or nation."

Its intellectual and moral strength in our Revolutionary struggle were recognized by the world, and Burke rightly attributed that strength to the character of the emigrants to America from various lands, exhibiting "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." They brought with them the best and most heroic blood of the peoples of Europe-of the Hollanders, the Walloons of Flanders, the Huguenots of France, the English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish, of the Norwegians and Swedes, the Germans and the Swiss, of the Bohemian followers of John Huss, of the Albigenses and Waldenses, of the Italian Alps, of the Salzburg exiles, the Moravian Brothers, with refugees from the Palatinate, Alsace and southern Germany.

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