as often as you can in these social ways. If you call on the minister, that is only one or two or three calls; while, if he should attempt to call on you in the same way, it would be an impossible task. Suppose any one of you should attempt to call on everybody else in this church next year. You would find you would have to neglect all other business seriously. If you were successful in one, you could not be in the other and more important aims of life. Remember, then, to meet your minister more than half-way. How can he preach to you, unless he is acquainted with you? I do not believe much in sermons adapted to all the world, but not to any state of mind in particular. It would be much

like a physician writing out prescriptions for society in general instead of prescribing for a special case. Your minister needs to know you.. He wants to know you. Give him credit for that. And, if he does not call this week or next or for six months, it is because he is trying to do all the time the things that must be done, and feels impelled to do first those things that seem the most needful.

3. Another thing you can do. A society to be organized and compacted into a successful working organization needs not only to be acquainted with the minister, but with each other. And here let me say a word with regard to social castes, classes, grades, and conditions. An orthodox clergyman said to me awhile ago that he found it impossible to get a general sociable of his society. They come in layers or sections. If the upper layer comes, the lower stays away: he cannot get the people to come together. Now, friends, it seems to me that, if we choose to keep up these factitious distinctions everywhere else, it is a very poor thing to keep them up in the church. Here, in the presence of the Eternal, our Father in heaven, the one God of us all,- here, at any rate, when we remember that these distinctions are so ephemeral, and that it is only the eternal part of us that is to endure, we ought to be able to forget these things, and clasp hands as children of God and co-workers for the welfare of humanity. Here in this country, of all others, we ought to forget

such petty distinctions. There are few social distinctions that are worth anything in America. Yet the people constantly try to make them. There are persons who live in one part of a town who will not recognize those living in another part, although they themselves may have lived the most of their lives there. They were common people last week this week, having become suddenly rich, they do not associate with common people. These petty, mean distinctions,— let us not have them, at any rate, in the church. If a man knows that he is a gentleman and a woman that she is a lady, you never see that gentleman or that lady anxious or troubled about lowering themselves by speaking to some one humbler than themselves. It is only the person not quite sure of his social footing who is anxious about compromising himself.

Try then to help your minister to weld the religious society into a social organism. Let there be a thrill of sympathy running through it making it one: so that it can act as a society together, whose business it is to help on the welfare of men and women and make the world a nobler, sweeter place to live in.

III. There is another way in which you can help the minister. I approach this with something of trepidation, but I want to speak a little about the Sunday-school.

1. It is with me a very serious question whether there is really more than one in ten that pays for its existence, that it is really worth while to have; and this for the reason that they are managed in an inefficient way. They are not treated rationally, earnestly, as though they meant anything or could mean anything. And yet I do not feel like suspending the one connected with this society, for the reason that the children are accustomed to come. If we did not furnish

them one here, they would find one elsewhere, and would learn things that they would have to unlearn, things worse than the poorest that they will learn among us. Yet how can we make the Sunday-school what it ought to be? How redeem and lift it up to its true place? As it is now, if half of them were abolished and the children would go to church

instead, it would perhaps be better for them. I remember my own childhood. I went to both church and Sundayschool. But, so far as noble inspirations are concerned, the sentiment of devoutness, of worship, of aspiration, of a sense of being lifted up and brought into relations with the divine, I got more in the church, although I understood only a little of what the minister said. I breathed in this air of devoutness and worship and aspiration. They moulded and shaped my life, though I did not know that it was being moulded and shaped. So I got more religious life in the church than in the Sunday-school. I believe this is true of many in existence now. It is not the fault of the Sunday-school, but of the method in which it is conducted. How shall we make it better? People in the pews are ready to criticise and find fault about it; but what shall we do?

Let me give an illustration of the difficulty. I refer to a fact; but I shall use the fact in a fictitious way, because I do not wish to be regarded as personal. A father had a son in a Sunday-school last year. The child did not learn very much. There were no lessons given to be learned at home. When the teacher was through with the lesson, which was made as easy as possible, stories were told or read to the children. The father grumbled about it. He said nothing was required of his boy, and it was hardly worth while for him to go. A few weeks after, the teacher was changed. The new one was in earnest. She gave the boy lessons to be learned at home. Then this same parent began to find fault again. The boy was worked hard all the week in school; how could the Sunday-school expect that he would learn lessons for Sunday? it ought not to be required of him. Two complaints of an exactly opposite nature from the same source and in the same Sunday-school.

2. The trouble is the Sunday-school is not treated seriously enough by the parents. They regard it as something entertaining or amusing for the children, or as something for getting them out of the way. Help the superintendent and teachers to make it have more meaning. Let the children

know that it is treated as seriously as the day school; that something is to be done there; that something is to be taught; that it has a definite object. The children will take their tone from you on this matter. Let me talk to the child, and I can find out what father and mother think of the Sunday-school, and whether they think of it at all or not. mean something at home, and half the work is done.

Let it

Then, in regard to the teachers, remember that the minister cannot create the teachers. The superintendent cannot create them. If there are good teachers for half the school, that little group cannot create teachers for the other half. I know that the average teacher in our Sunday-schools is not an ideal one. How can you expect them to be? They are volunteers. They are not paid. They are willing to take the class for the hour; but only a few are ready to work, to study, to sacrifice for it. This is the kind of teaching that we have to rely on. If we had a few paid teachers who should make it their business to be ready, we might revolutionize the whole system in six months; but we have nothing of this kind, and hence let me say this. If you do not like the teacher that has charge of your boy or girl, then come and teach yourself. Here are persons ready to do the work for you. You cannot dismiss them if they are not satisfactory, because they are not in your pay. You cannot very well find fault with them conscientiously, because, as a general thing, they are doing the best they can. Come then yourself, if you do not like them, and make better teachers. Do you say you are too busy? I have learned one lesson in my experience in the ministry. If I have anything I want done, I never go to a person who has nothing to do. People say: I am busy, I cannot take time to teach in Sunday-school. I want the rest on Sunday morning. If I want anything done, I always go to a busy person. Why? Because, if there are any men who have plenty of time on their hands, they are the people who are indisposed to do anything or else are incompetent. It is the busy people that we want in the Sunday-school. If you have nothing to do outside the Sun

day-school, do not come and offer your services as teachers. We do not want you. If you are very busy, because you are competent, because you are interested and earnest, come and give us a fragment of your time. You can do it as well as other busy people, if you will. Come and help us make the Sunday-school mean something, if you think it should mean anything.

IV. I want to appeal to all churches to help their ministers in another department; and that is the one of our outside missionary work, the cultivation of that field which reaches beyond the limit of his own parish.

1. You know how broad this field is. There is, for example, a little struggling church down in Louisiana, or out in Nebraska, reaching out its hands to us for help. A building needs to be put up. Something demands to be done, in order that the little society may not be crippled in its home work. Then, in a great city like this,- and the same is true in smaller places, there are the poor that are "always with us"; and the better class of these poor people cannot be helped by the ordinary mechanism of charity. We cannot have any substitute for the tender human heart and hand in doing the most needed part of the charitable work of the world. There are people tender, sensitive, used to better things, who need not so much money as encouragement, a little help, comfort. Who shall do this? The minister cannot do it all. It must be done by the people in the pews. Then every little while there is a call for money to meet some other want, to carry some missionary operations through, to spread abroad the literature that represents the thought of the modern world, to teach, enlighten, uplift the people who sit in darkness. Money is wanted, effort is wanted, thought is wanted, time is wanted, care is wanted. Who shall give it all? Not the minister surely. He cannot furnish money; he cannot furnish time; he has not the hands, the brain, the heart, the strength to do one-tenth of it all. Who shall do it? Who, if not the people in the pews?