best in the civilization. Our national government is taking the first steps at the headwaters of the Mississippi to store up the supply of power that has in past ages gone to waste. When the level of the river falls, when farmers need irrigation for the fields, and lumbermen need water to float their timber, and the miller needs power to turn the wheels of his mill, then these resources will be turned to use, and the work of the valley will be performed. Religion is the reservoir in which a nation stores its reserve of moral power.

II. PREVENTION

Second, it is the same fact viewed from another angle to say that the nation demands of religion the function of PREVENTION. Thousands of religious workers throughout the United States might testify that it would seem to them like the coming of a new heaven and a new earth if they could look upon their personal religious work as in the line of advance, of progress in any sense. Their desperate struggle is to keep religion holding its own in their communities, or to prevent its going backward toward the point of extinction. I have no doubt that Christ will at last overcome this world, but it is an open question whether the twentieth century in the United States is to be a century of advance or retreat for religion as a whole. Job triumphantly endured the test of adversity. It remains to be seen whether America can sustain the severer test of prosperity.

I know a good old lady who says she doesn't believe any one can live in a city and be a Christian. Many people better informed than that good lady is likely to be, are seriously wondering how long it is going to be possible to live in the country and be a Christian. The traditions handed down in the Puritan elements of our population are sapped and mined in every direction by the conditions of modern life. Even if we retain the beliefs of our childhood about religious standards and duties, we often find our feelings compromising with familiar practices that our beliefs condemn. What can we expect of people with less definite traditions, people who have cut loose from the associations of childhood, who are adopting new institutions, using a new language, adapting themselves to new surroundings.

DISCARDING THE BIBLE

A Bohemian scholar who mingled with his countrymen in Chicago two years ago told me that they are in danger of relapsing into general atheism. He said they seem to have discarded the Bible, and the best substitute they have found is Herbert Spencer. The world means something on the whole to every man. If it does not mean the place where the father of our Lord Jesus Christ has sway, it means something less. By as much less that, it means for any man, he is a drag and a danger to the work that Christian civilization must perform. This does not mean that every man who helps to build civilization is a Chris

tian. It means that every man who is not a Christian makes it so much harder to preserve what is Christian in our civilization.

Entirely aside from the importance of Christian character for the individual, all our work for the spread of religion is of fundamental social importance, in preventing the decay of those conditions which retain what has been accomplished in the past. If this work of prevention is not performed, whither shall we resort for the security of civilization? IF WE LET RELIGION LAPSE, WHERE SHALL WE STOP IN PRESERVING CIVILIZATION?

Shall we give up all that religion has meant since Luther and Calvin, and surrender with it all that Protestantism has done for civilization? Shall we let go all the religion that came to us in Jesus, and with it give up everything that Christianity has done for civilization? Shall we throw away the religion of the later prophets, and satisfy ourselves with the tribal civilization of those Hebrew clans that knew nothing but a God for war, and war for their God? Shall we discard all but the sensuous elements in paganism, and lose that saving modicum of restraint by which the mythologies of Greece and Rome made a certain refinement of taste do duty in the place of conscience? If the religion of Christ does not prevent reversion toward low civilization, what other security is left? From the farther shores of Lake Superior, across Lake Huron and Lake Erie, processions of enormous freighters are bringing to this clearing house (Cleveland) the material to be fashioned into the implements of our industries and the structures of our civilization. It is an allegory of the meaning of our rural population for the life of the nation. Religion has the function of securing the conditions which will prevent these sources of moral supply from falling into conditions from which no human material qualified to continue the work of civilization can be drawn.

Third, the needs of the nation demand of religion the function of INVESTIGATION. I do not mean investigation to find a new Gospel, but investigation that will make plain the precise obstacles which in our day the Gospel must overcome. Sin is the same old sin. Salvation is the same gift of grace, but the form of sin and the channels of grace may vary as the infinite play of light and shadow between sun and cloud. Neither John the Baptist, nor John the Apostle, nor Augustine, nor Zwingli, nor Roger Williams-not even President Wayland nor Martin B. Anderson -without a special course of training in acquaintance with the new conditions, would be competent as a general or district secretary of the Home Mission Society. Any experienced worker among the different types of our population to-day could tell them facts that their philosophy had never dreamed of, about aspects and combinations of opposition to Christ that present religious effort en

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counters. No scientific laboratory in the world has a problem any more distinct than the problem of applied religion. No scientific laboratory has a problem a thousandth part as complicated as this problem. Every efficient religious leader must of necessity_be a successful scientific investigator. make-up of men's ideas, the form and spirit of their occupations, the number and kind of rival interests, are not the same as they were yesterday or last year or last generation. Religious workers can no more count on finding their religious tasks where their predecessors left them, than the Russians at Port Arthur can count on finding the Japanese torpedo boats in the morning where they took leave of them over night. The first rule in spiritual as in carnal strategy is never to be ignorant of the enemy's position. Only investigators of the most skilful type are able to satisfy this condition of successful religious work. As a sample of what I mean by investigation, I wish every religious worker in the land, especially those that are dealing with rural conditions, could read a paper by a rural pastor in Illinois, on "The Rural Problem from the Point of View of the Church," published in the American Journal of Sociology for May, 1903.

IV. INVENTION

Fourth, the companion function, the correlate of investigation is INVENTION. I heard President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University say that the science of education is hardly at the close of its stage of infancy, and that its maturity is chiefly a matter of the future. Education is not conversion, but from the social point of view the preliminaries of conversion are essentially educational. There was the same human nature in the Ethiopian Eunuch, or Zaccheus the rich Pharisee, or Paul of Tarsus, or the Corinthian Jailer, that we find in an Arizona cow-boy or in a New York tough. But modern men, whatever their type, are not in the same state of mind which was found in men of similar types in earlier generations. any individual is to-day in the same state of mind that has been met a million times before, the methods adapted to those million cases ought to reach him also. Allow me to suggest, however, that religious methods do not necessarily satisfy the national demand, even if they reach the primary religious needs of the individual case. The aim of Christ has always been through the individual to the kingdom. This aim corresponds with the national need. The nation as such wants not individual Christians but Christians converted into citizens. I have great hesitation in making the suggestion, for it is very easy to be misunderstood.

DANGER IN EMPHASIZING FIGURES

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In order, however, to raise the inquiry, I ask whether there is not a danger in the amount of emphasis we place on the number of baptisms as the measure of success in religious work. I know that we estimate bap

tism as a sign and testimony of an accomplished work of grace. But are we not in danger of assuming that the whole work is accomplished, at that stage? When we propose the question thus distinctly we are all aware that this is merely the first stage of religious development. The real goal is not burial with Christ in baptism, but rising with Christ to newness of life. The proof that the sign of baptism has been genuine is the measure of the spirit of Christ that the new convert carries into his duties. From the social point of view, religious programs contain far too little in the way of applying generated religious force to the waiting work of the world. Suppose our naval gunners had no thought beyond discharging the gun. Suppose they did not try to hit any target, would they be likely to develop much markmanship? Religion is not finished with a crisis of the emotions, any more than the work of a locomotive is finished with the generation of a certain temperature in the boiler. Religion, like mechanical action, and like life in general, is adaptation of power to the work in hand. If we asked oftener, how much have converts done toward making the life of the community Christian, instead of merely how many converts have been baptized, we should doubtless progress more rapidly in satisfying the national demand for invention of means to make religion available for national work.

The fifth function which national needs demand of religion is CONCENTRATION. Again I venture to use an illustration which I hope will not be misconstrued. I am not criticising I am merely raising a question which has been considered a great many times by all our missionary workers. I may propose it in this form: In the report of the Home Mission Society for the year ending 1903 the number of baptisms by representatives of the Society in Illinois is in round numbers about one to each forty thousand of the population of the State. Of course this total represents but a small fraction of the results accomplished by the religious workers of our own denomination, and a still smaller fraction of the total religious achievements of all the Christian workers in the State. But let me use the figures for the sake of making an extreme illustration. The demand of national life on religion is that religion shall exert a formative power upon life. Does religion satisfy this demand to the utmost when its forces scatter so that one man is brought to Christ among many thousand? Would the effects not be multiplied if the forces exerted were concentrated so that their aggregate effects were exhibited within smaller areas? It is a literal fact that in every European country with a State church the influence of the religion of that Church, such as it is, moulds the life of every township more than the active religious forces shape the life of our average Western towns. Our foreign populations come from countries

where religion is a dignified public institution. It is represented not merely by the State clergy, but by the cathedrals which are the most imposing structures that the people know. In this country the immigrant finds that the ministers of religion are sustained by no public authority, and the buildings called churches often compare unfavorably in architecture with the hotels, banks, schools, and theatres, and sometimes even with the saloons. Now I am not pleading for the form of religion taught in any State Church. I am not pleading for a State Church of our own. Baptists are not likely to be tempted in that direction at this late day. I ask, however, whether we Protestants, and we Baptists, Protestants of the Protestants, emancipating ourselves from officialism in religion, and in freeing ourselves as we believe from superstition and error in religion, have possibly surrendered more than we ought of the prestige and power of religion as a social force? Have we done all that is possible to concentrate religious efficiency? Is it not feasible to make religion, without political entanglement, more of a public institution, a public power, a visible moulder of national life?

VI. COÖPERATION

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Sixth, partly in answer to this question I name as the last phase of religious function to be mentioned, COÖPERATION. I do not refer to coöperation of the different individual members of local churches with each other; I do not mean the coöperation of the different societies in our denomination, of which we have been saying so much in recent years; I do not refer merely to coöperation between different Christian bodies, but rather cooperation of religious agencies in general with every organization and enterprise that has a right to exist in society, and that in any way is contributing to the welfare of men. I said a moment ago that all life is adaptation of power to work. From another point of view all life is coöperation of agencies for doing different kinds of work. The farmer in raising a surplus bushel of wheat coöperates with the man who

wants to earn his living by work on the railroad. The railroad man coöperates with the farmer and with the miller. All three cooperate with the households in which food is consumed. The professional men of all types cooperate with farmer and transporter and manufacturer and consumer in creating and maintaining social conditions in which consumption and enjoyment are feasible and satisfactory.

THE RICHEST LIFE

That nation leads the richest life in which there is the most systematic and thorough cooperation of each activity with all activities. We are slow to perceive that all the work necessary to build up the kingdom of God in the world is not being done by ostensibly religious effort. We may call it, if we will, mere hewing of wood and drawing of water in the service of the higher life, but the fact remains that school, and newspaper, and trade union, and farmers institute, and grange, and political machine, and social club, and shop, and the thousand and one minor machineries of life, are consciously or unconsciously engaged in completing the sum of human welfare. Religious workers need to learn how to join their efforts with those of men interested in the innumerable minor details of life. Religion ought to be the least isolated activity in human society. It ought to weave itself into every human interest that has a part to perform in producing human welfare. By this coöperation religion and life become one.

We often ask whether religion has a future. RELIGION NOT ONLY HAS A FUTURE, IT IS THE FUTURE. The problems of religious leadership demand the most splendid talent and the most strategic enterprise that human resources can command. The men who shape the policy of such a society as this are the most dignified board of strategy in the world. It is their function so to employ these means that I have named, Preservation, Prevention, Investigation, Invention, Concentration, Coöperation, that they may together promote the consummation, the merging of national life into Christian life.

members all told who are working hard to keep the church open. If we could get about $200, I think with a good pastor, few as we are, we could raise say $175 or perhaps $200, if we had the right kind of a man. One who would take with the young people and live right here all the time, who is willing to work hard to gain souls for the Master. Of course this is a hard place and needs a good man, but to think of no church, just a Sunday school, in a town of this size seems dreadful. Now, please can't you help Thorpe? This is my prayer, that God may bless, and open some way that we can do something for his kingdom." There ought to be an answer to this woman's prayer.