afford to go. Seeing that church privileges for a family cost, on an average, in our city churches, less than one moderate smoker's cigars, the weight of this objection can be judged. I should have thought a certain shame would have prevented its being offered. I can assure "A Non-Church-Goer" that church-goers love to give money for what they think will promote education, morality, and religion, and that with them it increases the popularity of a pastor if he is very faithful in urging them to open their pocket-books for benevolence. I must also tell him that I was inclined to regard him as having written not in earnest, and as having attempted only to gather into shape the wildest current prejudices, largely because he gives utterance to this objection to the Church, and because, in doing it, he repeats the quip that it costs a hundred dollars to get five dollars to the heathen. If he had said this deliberately, with intention to be believed, he would have been guilty of slander. The statement is a falsehood, unredeemed by a shadow of evidence. Our missionary societies publish full financial reports; anybody can read them; they are managed by careful business men, and as economically as any other enterprises; and only a small and reasonable percentage is spent for management, a smaller percentage than is spent by our life insurance companies, which do their business at home.

Our non-church-going population, like our church-going, may be divided into its two classes-those who think and those who do not think. Of the latter, the vast majority have inherited or absorbed a general belief in Christianity. They do not go to church simply because the churches have not yet got hold of them. The progress of the churches is reaching them, and will gradually get them. But the thinking non-church-goers are, to a great extent, unapproachable, because they are unbelievers. For their unbelief, however, the churches are, to some considerable extent, responsible. A very great part of them do not believe because believers make Christianity incredible to them by their unconscionable demands on their credulity. Tell a man that he must give up the results of his studies of geology and biology, or give up the Bible, and he will give up the latter, unless he has the sense to know that these dilemma-swingers speak without authority, and are the Church's silly people. If the Church could kill off its mallei hæreticorum, there would be far fewer heretics to be hammered.

But I cannot pause to develop this attractive subject, and to do so would be a concession to "A Non-Church-Goer." What these slaves of tradition say is not what the Church says. The Church is founded not on their traditions, but on Christ Jesus; and the world is accepting Christ Jesus as Master as never before in its history. The churches are full of enthusiasm and zeal. The work of converting the world goes on rapidly. The islands are already evangelized. We have just welcomed Christian Madagascar to our sisterhood of nations. In each successive decade India doubles its Protestant population. Christian nations ruled two hundred millions of people at the beginning of the century. Now they rule six hundred and eighty-five millions. Whether by conversion, colonization, or conquest, the world is rapidly becoming Christian. This is the greatest age for the spread of our faith since the first century. And in the face of all this, with the marvelous enlargement of nominal Christianity all over the globe staring him in the face, and the rapid increase in church communicants under his very nose, our "NonChurch-Goer" shuts his eyes (and his purse) that he may open his mouth and babble about an " antiquated theology," and a Church which "has ceased to attract," and "the majority of intelligent and well-meaning people" who "are weary of the reiteration" of the Church's faith!

WILLIAM HAYES WARD.

REV. DR. PULLMAN.

CHURCH-GOING in the United States is not diminishing, it is increasing-in what ratio to the increase of population can only, at present, be a matter of estimate. The public religious services of the Church have never been so numerously attended as now, nor by so large a proportion of intelligent and responsible people. And the most striking religious phenomenon of the age-the rise of the children's church-makes it certain that religious instruction and worship are more universal among us than ever before. The local exceptions to this statement are dependent on local causes.

That numbers of decent and intelligent people are nonchurch-goers, is not denied; but if the fact is more frequently deplored than formerly, it is because their position is more clearly seen to be anomalous and deplorable. The Church is

more keenly alive to its own function, and perhaps to their merits, than ever before; and makes no secret of its strong desire to bring them into the many-mansioned house of worship, love and duty. For this purpose it is ready to make—and, in its splendid Protestant variety, it does make—many adaptations of itself to differences of means, belief, intelligence, and culture; but it can make no concession of the foundation on which its temple stands, and by virtue of which alone it has the right to be. Possibly a slight concession from the other side-some modification of the truculent spirit and the rasping tonguewould make matters easier. It is not conducive to amiable feeling to have the fault-finding non-church-goer call out, in effect: "I am out of your dilapidated and beggarly old ark; and I can stay out, too, for I don't believe there's going to be much of a shower; but if you will let me a pew cheap, and stop preaching things that I don't believe, and not ask me to do or to give anything more, I will come in." This is about what Walt Whitman wanted-a place in which to "loaf, and invite his soul." The position is an untenable one. A church made up of such constituents could have no church-value. The idea of paying your money at the door, without further responsibility, except to be amused or edified, as the case may be, is not the church idea. It is the theater notion; and it only needs the liberty to applaud and hiss in the church to make the resemblance complete. All the malcontents in the Cave of Adullam cannot rear and maintain a church on this idea. The experiment has been tried, by men of exceptional furnishing for the task, and its futility has been demonstrated by recent conspicuous failures.

The position of the self-justifying church-absentee is even less tenable now than formerly. For not only has the Church, in many of its branches, placed itself fully abreast of all the demonstrable progress of the age, but its value to the social organism is more apparent. And the fact stands clearly out, that, with all its imperfections on its head,-its defects of administration, excess of conservatism, and occasional illegitimacy of method, -the Church is the chief bulwark of the social order, the generating center of moral force, the educator, comforter, and inspirer of man, the ladder by which he climbs out of the abyss.

It is quite as idle to consider what humanity might or would be without it, as to inquire whether, in a case of decapitation,

the head or the body would lose or suffer most. The Church is altogether indispensable to human welfare. And in these brave, bright days of hope and progress, made brave and bright by deeper faith, higher morals, and larger achievement than have ever before blessed mankind, every one who is at all conscious of duty, need, aspiration, or who posesses intelligence, wit, worth, or other power, ought to be in the Church either as penitent, learner, helper, teacher, worshiper, reformer, each or all. Every one who has a stake, small or great, in the social order, is bound to contribute to the cost and sacrifice by which that order is maintained. Organized society, at its best, is but a thin crust over a seething ocean of evil and destructive passions, which continually threaten to break through and destroy. The attempt to keep these formidable passions in check by brute force has always ended in catastrophe. The only method by which society can protect, advance, and bless itself, is the method of conversion, -changing evil into good, its enemies into friends,-and this is the method of Christianity and its church, pursued to-day with tireless energy and sacrifice, under better methods, and with better results than ever before.

Law and government, the ostensible guardians of order, fall into ineptitude unless continually supported and controlled by a sound and vigorous public conscience; and to this conscience the Church is chief tutor. Let it be noted that the amazing intellectual activity of this age, with its unsparing criticism and bewildering conflict of opinion, is not a school of morals. Intellectual vigor can coëxist with moral paralysis. Educated men lie, and thinking men steal, by whatever ingenious periphrasis their skill may disguise their act. Conscienceless intellectual power is only splendid deformity. And the men of this make-up constitute our really "dangerous class" to-day.

It is conspicuously untrue to say that science is doing more. for morals than the Church. Science may apply its method to ethics with some valuable results, but it can never supply the adequate moral motive. It is not too soon to claim true science as an ally of religion; but it is also important to note that the pseudo-science of pretentious doctrinaires has done much to confuse and unmoralize the age. That moral character which is the safeguard of society is only formed by the special and methodical training of the individual will.

Now, ignorance, vice, and violence, craft, greed, and fraud

are the ever-active enemies of society. And the non-voter and the non-church-goer are their allies, the "dead-wood" of the social order. The one makes bad government possible; the other renders moral anarchy not impossible. Both are unfaithful to duty, and virtually claim to be a privileged class,-the gentlemen-pensioners of society. That among the shirkers who cumber the ground of an active and hopeful era, there are men of intelligence and respectability, is admitted. Some of them stand aloof because they profoundly distrust all accepted methods, and have no faith in the proffered substitutes. They seem, to themselves, to stand

"Between two worlds,

One dead; the other powerless to be born."

It is this condition, the last result of an over-driven critical faculty, that makes them

"On the battle-ground of heaven and hell stand palsied."

But this partial excuse does not cover the case of a man who openly justifies his withdrawal from a great interest and institution of society and life, by a pretext which, under analysis, amounts to this: "I have too much brain and too little money to go to church; therefore, I stand aloof." He uses and enjoys the privileges and security of society without contributing to the cost and effort by which they are maintained. Who support the Church? Men and women who greatly care for human welfare. Do they owe the captious and fastidious non-church-goer a Church from which has been eliminated all the beliefs that give it value to them?

A man may call the Church a beggar, and the State a beggar, because they both ask money and service from him; but I know of no more impudent beggary than that which is content to owe its moral welfare and social security to institutions which it freely condemns, but will neither support nor reform. Such men are spendthrifts of the moral capital accumulated by a dutiful and God-reverencing ancestry. And the climax of this kind of thing is reached in the complaint that no provision is made for the spiritual salvation of the great class of reading, thinking, and active men. The fact is that the most of these men are in the Church to-day, deeply interested in its welfare, and trying, at least, to