The grim humor of the situation is apparent to none save sane saints and sane sinners. In other words, it is seriously proposed to cure some of the evils of over-organization by still further multiplying societies, especially of the non-religious type. This is, in religion and philanthropy, an allopathic application of the homeopathic principle, "like cures like," but in this instance, the method is too eclectic to warrant expectation of success.

4. The fourth waste in over-organization is through tempting willing workers into more activities than their time, strength, and ability warant. The theory of the extreme advocates of organization is that by their plan everyone can be useful somewhere. The possibility of a wide range of choice in activities increases interest and enthusiasm, and develops specialists. This is both interesting and formally true, but generally the theory is denied in practice. Theories as to way sand means in organized life must be tested, not by a priori reasoning, but by experience. Among some of our honored institutional churches, the theory may have proved true, but these churches, as a class, are exceptional, as the conditions that demand them are exceptional.

Witness the graves of your dead societies that have been made in your own ecclesiastical God's-acre, where rest the forms of the organizations half related or wholly unrelated to your church, the good they have done forgotten and "interred with their bones." Witness the number of organizations in your church now that are gasping for breath and showing other signs of departing life. Have these vagrant societies won the applause, affection, and service of the world, and brought into line halfalive Christians more difficult than the world to enlist in the service of Christ? Have not these organizations overworked the "remnant in Israel," and wasted that remnant's energies so that they could not make themselves really effective anywhere?

We need enough organization to embody the spiritual life of the church, but we shall not increase that spiritual life by tacking on more machinery. Power from on high is the first necessity. It will invariably express itself, not in nervous, individualistic effort, but through the inclusive fellowship of believers in adequately organized Christian worship and life.

The church finds the motive forces which are to redeem her machinery in a new appreciation of her work and her method. These are divinely prescribed to her in terms she can no longer mistake or evade. The way and will of God have had in our day a marvellous disclosure. That theory of nature, already more than a theory, a habit and attitude of mind and feeling which perceives all things in closely knit relations, finds them related in order, progress, growth, and sees them unified as the successive, gradual manifestations of one immanent force and life, has transformed thought and activity in every region and range of human life. But its aim is not reached until it touches the special, conscious organ of God in the world, his church. Its full message is spoken in the ear of faith. It is less a discovery for science than for religion. It is an event in the history of the kingdom of God comparable in light and force only to the Advent. Evolution deeply read is a revelation of the universal presence of God and the uniform process of his work. Without hesitation, therefore, the church finds the sphere of her work in the region of the divine operation, and the way of her work in the model of the invariable divine procedure.

I. "The world is the field of redemption," for God is in it, at work in every force, expressed in every feature. For us, then, who find in Christ our moral and spiritual definition of God, the world is, in the words of Tetullian, "naturally Christian." The life of God, which reached its fullest expression in Christ, is present and active in every part of it, harmonizing it, educing from it reason and morality. Beginning with first traces, far back in the origin of things, it tends ever to fuller expression - each range of being, we may say, being full of the divine up to its saturation point.

Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God.

Hence, man as man, whatever his aberrations, is the organ of this Christ life, and all human institutions are built up by it and forit. It is God's world Christ's world; no achievement of his redemptive work which has not its foundation stones deep laid in the very properties and relations of matter, no perfected beauty of Christian feeling which has not its first faint prophecy in the hidden affinities of cell and atom. The personal and social ideal of Christ for the human race is that to which it has been working up from the beginning. We trace the course of nature and his

tory as moving under the divine impulse, and on many different lines converging toward the realization of life according to the mind of Christ. Every phase of our modern life falls into place as a factor in the fulfilment of the relation of mutual love and service which we name Christian. Contiguity of dwelling, the expansion of population, the growing needs which must be supplied by commercial intercourse, the rapid circulation of ideas, are powerfully drawing the race together; and the sense of fellowship which is thus engendered, and a common body of moral sentiments, seem preparing the advent of a more organic uunity and brotherly relation among men. On every side cordial allies of the church arise and vie with her in the redemptive work which she had thought peculiarly her own. Happy homes, faithful work, honest trade, wholesome food, healthful dwellings, cheerful school-rooms, beautiful parks, beneficent government, public-spirited citizens, public libraries, good books, beautiful pictures, music for the people, public baths, vigorous exercise, wholesome amusements, all these, and the like, more or less consciously, are building up under our very eyes, in solid reality, that vision of a redeemed humanity in a redeemed world for which the Christian heart waits.

No longer do we think of forbidding them because they follow not with us; too evidently "they are on our part," fellow servants in the great, busy household of Christ, which this present world is. His business is being done here; these are His workers; all this material and social apparatus His machinery; here is the focus of His interest, the scene and sphere of His progressive triumph. If the church would find Him she must seek Him not in the skies, but down here on the brown, green earth. If she flees out of it as from a city of destruction, her Lord meets her as he did Peter in the beautiful old legend, and to her "Domine, quo vadis?" replies, "I go to my world and to my people, to be at work in your place." Yes, it is nothing less than desertion and disloyalty to part with earth for heaven, or disparage and disown any of the interests and energies of the various and wondrous world of human life. That old prophetic word from paganism, which, christened with fuller meaning, we may not irreverently put in the mouth of Christ, the church too is repeating: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." Even before she comes to this new attitude and feeling by cogent inference from her new discovery of the living presence and Christian purpose of God everywhere in his world, insensibly she yields to the charm and attraction of Christward forces working all about her. They are kindred and friendly; they reach out hands at once pleading and helpful. They seem to say, we are with you, and we want you. They are witnesses and allies for her gospel. They open to her a varied and effective calling. They rally under her standard and await from her the divine touch of power that shall release and apply their latent energies.

The church discovers, both to chasten her pride of privilege, and to inspirit her with the sense of multiplied power and honor, that she is not alone in or against the world. Neither in pride nor in despair can she say, “I, even I only." She is not the solitary champion of Christ in an

alien world, but the leader of his host. If I may seek a metaphor up to date from that feature of our naval strength which gives us highest assurance of supremacy on the sea, she manoeuvres in squadron, but as the flagship, in the van, giving the word of command, bearing the secret orders, leading, informing, inspiring the whole fleet.

Or, to borrow a closer analogy, the church learns that she is not the body. She is one organ in it, but the most central and important of them all, having much the same relation to the total kingdom of God that the brain has to the body. A body without a brain is a helpless instrument of the mind. The life and health of the brain are found in dependence on and ministry to the whole body." So is the church related to all the other forces in human society; she cannot live apart from them; they cannot perfect their service apart from her. She finds her meaning and justification in what she does to vitalize and spiritualize business, and politics, and charity, and literature, and education, and every other interest of society. She is not to usurp or encroach on their domain, but hallow and invigorate their labors, by revealing their divine aim and destiny, and inspiring them with a noble and holy motive.

The church's recognition of the divine mission of all agencies which serve the welfare of man will not dispense with her or reduce her to identity or level with them. She gains, indeed, a supremacy and authority such as she has never known before, and a distinct, exalted function, which should absorb all her energies and summon all her ardors. The more we recognize the Christian possibilities deep in the constitution of nature and society, the more sacred and imperative is the peculiar privilege of the church to make them actual. It is but the promise and potency of a Christlike world which she finds in the forces and movements about her. The social order seems indeed not far from the kingdom of God. Political, industrial, social arrangements seem trembling on the verge of realizing the Christian state. The world is being shaped, as Bushnell would say, into a "fact form " of the gospel. The mechanism of society is writing in material symbols the formula of the Christian spirit and principle. But the factors of human society are not material and mechanical; they are vital and spiritual. Christianity of mere form and relation but points out with new vividness and urgency the lack of the living spirit and energy. Our social and industrial conditions, which in their outer aspect seem prophetic of Christ, a true Preparatio evangelica, judged by spirit and results, often appear terribly unchristian. Poverty, and wrong, and pain, and cruelty and hatred remain. The world of labor and of life is still to be conformed to Christ by the renewing of its mind. Altruism of relation must be infused with unselfishness of soul; solidarity of interests be warmed and quickened by Christian love. The figure of clay, shaped by the plastic touch of natural forces, awaits through the lips of the church the breath of life, that it may become a living soul.

She is to proclaim how the Christian principle of love, working in all associations, will operate to enrich the world and benefit and bless society when they are brought fully under its dominion. She will realize her

ideal by embodying it first in her membership, and sending forth Christian men and women to communicate it to the rest, and by their activity and example through schools, through Christian families, through uprightness in professions, through a noble self-abnegation in political life, through unselfish devotion to the pursuit of knowledge and art, through a thousand channels in which the Christian spirit can work to embue all human relations with the quality of Christ's self-renouncing love, and change the world into the kingdom of God.

How vast, various, and immediate the work that awaits the church, and what new incentives and ardors awaken to provide motive forces that are to redeem and remodel her organization.

II. But the new motive forces come to the church not only from a new understanding of her mission, but a clear command as to her method.

The fact that God in Christ is in and at work in the world, which locates and defines the work of the church, also reveals her divinely ordered way of working. She must do God's work in the world after the manner of His own working, and all the world in all its parts, all stages of its history, and ranks of being tells clearly one undeviating story of the divine process. It is the method of growth, of steady, progressive development. This is a constant fact, and therefore a divine truth. It amounts to a new insight into the nature of things and the nature of God. He does everything in that way, and nothing can be done for him but in that way. The church is not exempt from this law. She must submit. There are for her no magic results, no instantaneous effects, no finalities. 1. She is herself but in process. Her faith and ideal are ever forming, never fixed and finished; ever an aspiration, not a full possession. She serves a race likewise midway in the ascent of truth and virtue. She must guide it onwards into new ideas and ideals. She has not merely to point to a standard fixed in the past, or repeat a message heard once for all, she must discover and lead to new heights. The combined moral sensibilities and aspirations of the living church, the signs of the times, the duties of the hour, the light from science and history and criticism, and comparative religion, are surely changing the type of Christian which enlarging moral sense tolerates, advancing our moral standards and ideals, demanding a new code for scholar, politician, merchant." New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth." The imperative word of virtue was diligence or integrity or honesty; now it is service. The spirit approved has moved on from uprightness to altruism.

How open-minded, sensitive, studious, meditating, searching, exploring. must the church be, how versatile in faculty, swift to hear, apt to teach, prompt to act, fit to help! and how can she be all this without system, method, organization, to find and apply each in its proper place her resources and talents?

2. A second application of the method of growth the church has to make in that which is her prime office, the culture of Christian character. No one event, however critical or

It takes a lifetime to make a Christian.

convulsive, can do it. The superiority of nurture to revival we had