ter. What child does not cry for what it wants, no matter how hurtful the result may be? And who relies on the judgment of a child as of any value, even where its own interests are concerned?

Lastly, the cases of actual brutality are deserving of notice. There are those who gratify their animal instincts and passions, without regard to the consequences entailed thereby upon their offspring. Intemperance, vice, and crime are rife; and unless the children be rescued speedily from the suffering and neglect to which the vices of their parents necessarily subject them, premature disease, mental and physical, is certain to be engendered; and the statistics of crime show that the inevitable result of such treatment is to swell the criminal classes. The child of the outcast and the criminal has no home. The blow, the curse, the drunken brawl, the threat of punishment unless crime is committed, the ignoring of decency, of education, and of religion, point to but one result. Fortunately for these unhappy children, the humane of both sexes and of all classes are not lax in their efforts to reform and rescue them from their lives of sin, misery, and helplessness. The very women of society who are often reproached with being alike heartless and frivolous, respond in the most liberal manner, and devote more of their time than is dreamed of in aid of the wretched children of the poor. No appeal to a woman's heart for aid to rescue a child who is cruelly treated has yet met with a repulse. The inherent maternal instinct predominates over every other sentiment or passion; and the array of institutions in this country supported by both men and women for the rescue of the helpless, the outcast, and the lost attests the fondness of the American people for the children of the community; for in no other country are laws in such cases more stringent or more thoroughly enforced, although much legislation on the subject is yet needed. A wise expe

rience has shown the necessity of creating societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, to enforce these laws. The duty of public officials in such matters, except in glaring cases, too often is neglected. But the records of these societies show that the humane and the intelligent, in every city and State where the organizations exist, are unswerving in their efforts to secure to little children that consideration by the community which their future so imperatively demands. Until some better mode of reaching the evil is pointed out, the work of these child-saving

societies deserves the support of every humane person. They are the dread of all who practice cruelty to children; they incur the resentment of those who are unable to control their action by political, pecuniary, or personal influences; but their work speaks for itself, and illustrates more strikingly than any other creation of the American people the crystallization of the humanity of the age in a most concise, compact, and efficacious form. ELBRIDGE T. GERRY.

CHURCH ATTENDANCE.

A NON-CHURCH-GOER.

IT is a generally admitted fact that in these days only a small proportion, even of intelligent and eminently respectable people, are regular attendants upon religious services on Sunday. It is believed, and frequently deplored, that the proportion is diminishing year by year. The increasing aversion of people who cannot be called bad or depraved to church attendance is generally ascribed to the spread of unbelief; but this does not wholly account for it.

The world has, indeed, been moving very rapidly during the last generation, and theology, which used to be in the van of human thought, and in some measure to lead in human progress, has fallen to the rear, and is in imminent danger of being left altogether. The results of scientific and philosophic inquiry have widely diffused an intelligent common sense, which will not accept teachings that were once potent over the human mind. People do not like to be fed on the dry leaves of an antiquated theology in which the sap of life has ceased to flow. Dogmas which used to keep the superstitious mind in subjection, and rule the lives of men through their hopes and fears, have lost their power, because enlightened thought declares that there can be no such terrific chances in another life as the world used to believe.

It is useless to fight against the tendencies of the age, or to deplore them as evil, for they are in the line of human progress. Men are better and not worse than in the olden time, and yet they believe less in the supernatural and the unprovable. The majority of intelligent and well-meaning people, whose purposes are good, whose aspirations are high, whose conduct is upright, do not and cannot believe what the churches teach, and they are weary of its reiteration. In fact, the keener their apprehension,

the clearer their mental vision, the stronger their powers of thought and the broader their intellectual culture, the less willing or able are they to stoop to the yoke of belief which the church imposes. It is not the daring atheist or the reckless evil-doer that is now chiefly found in the ranks of non-attendants at church, but the sober citizen and the father of a family, who is loyal to his convictions and faithful to his duty.

Why does he not go? Why should he go? It is for the church to attract, and it repels. It proscribes thought and free inquiry. It cramps the brains of its ministers until it is only the intellectual light-weights that seek its service. The mediocrities of the seminaries go to the pulpit. They offer nothing for the mental or moral digestion and nutrition of healthy men. They minister chiefly to the superstitious, the narrow and the morbid, and the masculine sex is disappearing from among their followers.

There is no doubt that people are repelled from the pews because the pulpit is behind the age. The notion can no longer be kept up that "unbelievers" are bad. It has to be admitted that they are, as a rule, intelligent, earnest, and altogether honest. They still cherish the hope, at least, of a future life, and they certainly have no "enmity toward God." They want to lead decent and well-ordered lives, and bring their children up with good principles and high ideals. They recognize the needs of their higher nature, and have no objection to its being called a spiritual nature. They recognize the value of appeals to the purer feelings and the loftier sentiments. They know that through the eye and ear the soul may be reached and benefited. They would be glad on their weekly day of rest to subject themselves to elevating influences, and bring their families within them. Having this want, and recognizing this need, they still keep away from the "sanctuary," partly because it so inadequately provides for them. They do not find there satisfaction for the soul, and modern society, dominated by an antiquated ecclesiasticism, is failing to provide for the spiritual wants of man. It is therefore failing to arrest the working of those forces in human nature that tend to moral degeneracy. Science is to-day doing more for morals than the Church.

But, as was stated at the outset, unbelief is but one cause of non-attendance at church. There are many who would put up with a good deal of decayed theology, and try for themselves and

their children to obtain benefit and satisfaction from churchgoing for the sake of the sustenance of the better nature and the stimulus to the higher impulses, inadequate though they be, were they not actually repelled from the church-door by the demands made upon them if they enter. A common excuse for not going to church is the same as a common excuse for not getting married. Men of modest means and a fair share of pride and self-respect "cannot afford it." They would willingly pay in the form of pew-rent a reasonable compensation for such benefit as they could get; but having obtained their seat and paid for it, they find themselves subjected to constant solicitation for a hundred purposes that have no connection with their reasons for wishing to go to church. Perhaps the church which they wish to attend, through a policy which they had no part in making, and which they would never have approved, is involved in debt, and they are asked to help it out of foolish bankruptcy. They are asked to subscribe for foreign missions, though doubting the benefit to distant savages of the five dollars' worth of teaching which it costs a hundred dollars to give them. They are called upon to contribute to various charitable enterprises and entertainments,—not called upon simply, but persistently urged, when they have their own personal notions about charitable aid, in accordance with which they do in private what they can afford or feel disposed to do. They find that in what claims to be the temple of the meek and lowly Saviour, who gave his special blessing to the poor, and was himself more slenderly provided for than the foxes and the birds of the air, they cannot feel at home unless they are comparatively rich. The Church to-day is a beggar, not humble and meek in its demands, but greedy, persistent, almost impudent. Our seeker for sustenance and inspiration for his better nature finds himself in a congregation of daughters of the horse-leech, ever crying: "Give, give!" and he flees in weariness and disgust from their importunities.

And yet it is not his pocket alone that is sensitive. His selfrespect and pride are hurt. He thought, perchance, that among the professed followers of the meek and lowly one, there might be a sort of equality of position, as among joint heirs to a common inheritance compared with which earthly resources are said to be insignificant. But he finds that the continual calls for contribution and for aid in the entertainments and charitable sideshows of the Church serve the purpose of gauging a man's