This "other side" of which I am speaking rests its claim, not on exclusive Christian presumption, imposing as are these figures. History is enamored of all faiths; justifies every form of religion. Two hundred and more million souls to-day rest in the contemplative life that is related to the Vedas that were chanted on the banks of the Ganges three thousand years ago. Three or four hundred million souls to-day rejoice in the thought of Buddha, he who helped make Asia mild and rendered four continents pitiful. Israel, an insignificant handful, a local clan-captive, clan captive, dispersed Israel-has Israel has been a Gulf Stream flowing through the nations, modifying harshness, tempering cruelty, outliving and outshining the glory of Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, and Greece itself. Islamism, with its message of submission, has mitigated and is mitigating the native savagery of fierce races. Not only the past but the present testifies to the permanent need of the church. The social status is to-day safeguarded by the very preachers who are dismissed if not contemned by the collegians. Hampered as the pulpit may be, it is, for all that, the freest calling which the human mind has yet attained. I challenge all the other professions to offer as much freedom of investigation, courage of the advance, aye, power of leadership, as is represented to-day by the fettered ministry of religion.

Go find anywhere and any way a hundred lawyers, a hundred doctors, a hundred editors, a hundred teachers, even, ar. I will put the hundred ministers gathered in a similar way over against them, and their freedom from tradition and convention, their power in molding society, influence in safeguarding morality, will equal, to say the least, any one of the cognate professions that share with theirs the honorable title of "liberal," in the academic sense of "free"-a profession independent of the trammels of greed, wage, and craft.

The individual soul is rapidly discovering the inadequacy of these modern substitutes for the church. The Young Men's and the Young Women's Christian Associations carry in their very initials defeating limitations. The mighty agency that will redeem the community

will not recognize age, sex, or creed lines. The "Y" and the " M" and the "W" and the "C" will fall away, but the "Association," the heart of the church idea, stays.

During my twenty-five years' ministry in Chicago I have seen the rise of women's clubs, men's clubs, social clubs innumerable. I have seen hundreds of women unconsciously yielding to the pressure of the times, withdrawing their executive energies from church life and work, identifying themselves instead with what seemed the more available, practical, profitable club forces. They did find valuable schooling, energizing activities; but the time is near at hand when many of them are ready for something more fundamental and universal. As a moral and spiritual force the movement has probably reached its maximum; it is dying from being found out; it has touched things superficially; it has gone after strange gods. The " function,' dress elements, and political ambitions have blurred spiritual vision and blunted moral earnestness. As a kindergarten in social education, a training-school for better things, a woman's gymnasium in which she learns to use effectively her own faculties, these clubs have been invaluable. But as an adequate expression of mature life, a place to use trained skill, as a substitute for the church, they are obviously inadequate.

It is even so with the men's clubs. Slowly we are finding that the world cannot be reformed by means of banquets. Clubs, lodges, unions, leagues, have done and are doing yeoman service for progress and reform, but all of them carry at the center an element of inadequacy.

All these modern substitutes for the church exploited by men and women, separately or unitedly, seek congeniality and efficiency by selection. "Nice" people hope to enrich their lives in one another's presence freed from the distractions of the other kind. All these exclusive compacts fail of the fundamental democracy that belongs to religion and after all is better embodied in the church than anywhere else. Certain "nice" people have elected you into their membership. This nicety you will

help guard with your black balls only to find that eventually it grows tiresome and stupid to you. There comes inevitably the time of disillusion to the devo tees of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and societies, when they discover that they hold no monopoly on excellence; that many interesting people are outside their boundaries, and that their own hearts overreach the limitations they have so championed. There is a growing life in all these that yearns for an organization big enough to hold men and women, genial enough to include rich and poor, wise enough to reach the old and the young, and loving enough to like those who are unlike themselves; and this is what the church assumes to be, nay, comes nearer being than anything else known to man.

The need of society is the need of the individual soul. The individual heart hungers for communion with the eternal, thirsts for the "living waters that spring up into eternal life.” No potency, success, or culture can protect the soul from loneliness, sorrow, separation, and death. The cradle and the grave forever demand consecrating thought. "No man liveth unto himself, and no man dieth unto himself."

The church, with all its faults and limitations, is here to stay, and the question to a sensible man or woman can never be between the church and no church, but between the existing church and a more adequate one. Religion cannot be eliminated out of the life of man except by immolating the man. How more adequately to house, incorporate, in stitutionalize, embody religion, is always an imperative question.

The churches are sick; the ministry is on the decline; but to rightly diagnose the case is to discover the remedy. In this decline I find inspiring encouragement. I am glad that young men and women shun the dogmatic spirit and distrust the professions menaced by it; I am glad that our colleges teach history so well that their students cannot bide the thought of miraculous interventions with the benignant order of special revelations and divine partialities; I am glad that the law of equity is so well understood, justice so well apprehended

as a fundamental attribute of being, that the student refuses to believe in eternal torments as a reward of mortal sins, or in infinite beatitude being won through finite credulity or a lack-luster obedience to ecclesiastical traditions and mandates. I greatly rejoice that the community is getting so coherent, so conscious of a communal life, that it has lost relish for sectarian pretensions and all patience with creedal barriers. I am glad that life is assuming such significance everywhere and always that it grows indifferent to the special sanctities of particular dates and places.

All this is proof that out of this decadence must come the more adequate expression of religion. We see on every hand a ripening for this larger thing, a church based on the central and common needs of the community; a church that will abolish denominational and race consciousness, make sabbatical the seven days in the week, scriptural all high prophecy and lasting poesy, and companionable the widest reaches of society.

Such a church will win back those who have gone aside into social and intellectual exclusions, hoping thus to reach the grace of noble living. One by one these seceders will find that they cannot shrive their souls at pink tea altars or at banquet tables where the bread and wine fall short of the communal sanctities possible only where simplicity, sincerity, and universality serve. I recognize educational, ethical, and social values in these substitutes; their existence is an arraignment of the church, but their inadequacy proves that they are but extemporized substitutes necessitated by an era of transition, an era always painful but profitable.

But, it may be asked, "Are not these substitutes capable of growth?" They are growing, and their growth is in the direction of the new church. When they will meet the old needs and offer a permanent social center, an adequate civic instrument, they will be the church.

But such an institution must rest upon two indispensable and fundamental elements; viz., democracy and reverence. There must be recognition of the brotherhood that includes all ages, both sexes, and reaches out to all classes, and the

sense of the All-in-One and the One-inAll-a recognition of the supernal and the eternal. Soon or late the soul must tabernacle in the thought of God. Worship in some form or other is the universal expression of the sensitive and developed soul. Eliminate the dogma out of it, fill it with all philosophy and poetry, art and wisdom, that you are capable of, and the sentence is increasingly true, "The heart of man crieth out for the living God."

But this is the one element in the church that seems to be outgrown. Upto-date young men and women just from college tell us they have ceased to pray; that they no longer believe in prayer, but in work. They sometimes boast that they like to go to church late so as to miss the devotional exercises. May not this very protest witness to a growing devoutness? Is it not reaching after a more adequate expression? Forms of worship will be outgrown, but worship never. Not until poetry, painting, sculp ture, architecture, and music become stale and unprofitable will the soul cease to aspire or the heart forget its God. For all these serve at the altar of religion; they are exponents of the church that is to come-the church with a rational basis, an inclusive not an exclusive spirit, a practical mission that grows by doing, lives in action.

This church will be out-looking and reverent; its members will be conscious sinners rather than pretending saints; in its pulpit the prophet will stand who will not dare "split the full gleams of the

study into half-gleams for the pulpit." Such a church will have a building that will be an open home where the pride of caste must not 'enter to destroy the last hope of democracy. That church will be a comfort to the burden-bearers; it will edify, build up the deformed and dwarfed spirits of men.

If all progress is not a sham, if prophecy be not a lie, if human aspirations be not a cheat, if Jesus and the anointed of God have not lived and died in vain, aye, if the Almighty himself is not to be disenthroned, this church, which has always been in the world, is to become more and more the visible church, and ultimately the Church Universal. Men are learning to appreciate the divine gift of reason, the holiness of free thought, the sacredness of the individual, and consequently the fruitlessness of sectarian warfare and the wickedness of dogmatic bickering. Men are learning to put less dependence on the forms of theological thought, which must change from generation to generation, and more dependence on the fundamental needs of our moral nature, the enduring distinction between right and wrong, the imperishable marble of character.

For the building and extension of this church the colleges will again offer their brightest and their best. Business men will open their purses, and old and young, men and women, rich and poor, will hasten to advance the Father's work while it is day, for "the night cometh when no man can work."

O think of the National civil service as a fit career for educated young men is still an alien conception to the American mind. Our colleges and universities are supposed to train men for the professions, for teaching, for journalism for almost every calling in private life that demands technical knowledge and skill; but for the public service, which requires more and more insistently, as the years go by, the most perfect technical equipment, we make no special provision. Yet every year college and polytechnic graduates in considerable numbers enter various branches of the service, and if one were to visit Washington to-day he would find. not a few bureaus of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the Interior Department manned almost exclusively by such graduates.

Immediately after the Civil Service Law of 1883 went into effect collegebred men began to appear at Washington in increasing numbers, to take departmental positions. True, there were in those days comparatively few "places " in the departments that possessed special attractions for such men, but the city itself was year by year becoming more and more a center of culture, while in several of the scientific bureaus there was promise of the expansion that has been realized, to a great extent, in recent years. A large proportion of the college and university men who turned to Government work in the middle eighties were absorbed by the Patent Office, where vacancies in the examinerships of different grades were filled by means of examinations under the new law, and the filling of these frequent vacancies was one of the most conspicuous tests of the efficacy of the law, as applied to any considerable group of candidates. As in all Government employment, the patent examiner is fairly well paid on

admission to the service, and the young graduate who secured a $1,200 or $1,400 examinership in his first year out of college thought himself fortunate. There was also in those days some demand for men of scientific training to take posts in the Weather Bureau, which was then included in the War Department, but has since been transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Then there were, of course, the Geological Survey, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Naval Observatory, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum, and various other Government offices, and interests intrusted to Government care, in which some degree of technical knowledge and education was and is indispensable in most of the appointees. The Department of Agriculture, with its manifold scientific activities and agencies, has practically been created since that time.

But in the first years-and to a limited extent this has held true up to the present time-college graduates were scattered through the departments, frequently doing relatively unimportant work-in many cases tasks that could have been as well performed by high-school or academy graduates. The fact is that the pay was better than the same grade of service would have received in any other employment, and the law and medical schools of Washington, with their evening lectures, offered the ambitious young clerk tempting facilities to obtain a professional education. Such a man might enter the service as a $1,000 clerk, begin taking law or medical lectures, at the end of his first year get a promotion to a first-class ($1,200) clerkship, and by the time he had passed his final examinations and received his diploma a beneficent Government might have added another $200 a year to his stipend—and all this without any appreciable change in the routine of his daily duties. He presented himself at his

desk promptly at nine o'clock each morning; at noon took a half-hour for luncheon; and at four in the afternoon (it is four-thirty under Roosevelt) the official day was ended and the Government clerk was free to become a student, if he chose studious ways-or a "sport," as inclination might lead him. He was entitled to thirty days in every year as a vacation on full pay, and if he had an illness of any kind a doctor's certificate was all that was required to obtain additional leave of absence without sacrifice of salary. On the whole, it is not strange that the Washington clerkship had its allurements for the average young college graduate of slender purse and unsatisfied longings to see life and master a profession at the same time. Many have availed themselves of the opportunity thus presented, and after a few years of application to professional studies have resigned their clerkships and struck out for themselves, foregoing the comforting assurance of a Government salary. Many others and among them some who started with as high hopes as the best are drudging away to-day at the same desk and beset with the same dull round of petty tasks as when they entered the service ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. They receive, it may be, several hundred dollars a year more than when they began, and yet they may be kept doing essentially the same work year after year. Aside from the cumulative element of experience (which is highly valued in all Government employment), their fitness for Uncle Sam's service is probably not noticeably greater now than it was in the beginning.

A development in the service that was perhaps unlooked for when the first examinations were held seems to have operated as a check on the influx of college men into ordinary clerical positions. The Government was far behind private business houses in making any general use of stenography and typewriting in its work. For some years after the Civil Service Law went into effect the demand from the departments for "eligibles" proficient in these new crafts was surprisingly light. The writer well remembers being set at the task-to him a somewhat painful and laborious one-of

writing out in longhand from "roughs many letters a day for the signature of the head of one of the executive departments. An entire "division " was employed at this work. Six men (three of whom, it happened, were college graduates), supervised by a chief and an assistant chief of division, were required to dispose of routine correspondence which might have been handled by one competent clerk, with two stenographers and typewriters of ordinary efficiency. Incidentally, it may be stated here that the salaries paid in the "correspondence division" of this one department aggregated about $14,000. For equivalent service a railroad company would expect to pay perhaps one-fourth as much. In the writer's time only one typewriter was employed in the division, and his work consisted almost altogether of making copies of documents of record which had to be transmitted in the office correspondence. Although he was an exceptionally efficient stenographer, he was seldom called on to take dictations of correspondence. Such conditions continued in the more conservative departments down into the nineties; but the adoption of business methods, though long delayed, was not to be prevented by obsolete prejudices or antiquated habits of thought. When the change came, it was far-reaching. The old practice in the departments of asking the Civil Service Commission to certify "eligibles" with only general qualifications has been practically done away with. Now the demand is for clerks who are qualified as stenographers and typewriters. Now and then a college graduate thus qualified appears and takes such a position as offers, but as a rule the man who cares enough for the opportunities of the service to devote time to special preparation has in view a place in one of the scientific bureaus.

There can be no doubt that the operation of the law has tended to the improvement of the status of the department clerk, of whatever grade. The merit system, as established and maintained at Washington, has brought into the service a large number of men and women who represent definite educational standards, if nothing else. Time was