CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library BR560.N4 R38 Relaious condition of New Yorl( City: ad „ 3 1924 029 255 607 olln Overs Cornell University Library The original of this bool< is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924029255607 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. Addresses made at a ChristiaD Conference beld in Chlckerliig Hall, New York City, Dec. 3, 4, and 6, 1888, BY Rbvs. J. M. KING. D.D., A. F. SCHAUFFLER.'D.D.,GBO. U. WENNBR, D.D., VINCENT PISBK, ANTONIO ARRIGHI, H. A. MONROB, R. S. MacARTHUR, D.D., RICHARD HARTLEY, Archdbacon MACKAY-SMITH, M. D'C. CRAWFORD. D.D. 5 Hon. B. P. WHEELER AND R. FULTON CUTTING, Bsq.; Rbts. JOHN HALL, D.D., W. T. BLSING, JOSIAH STRONG, D.D., FRANK RUSSELL, D.D., BitHor BOWARD G. ANDREWS, D.D., and Rbv. C. H. PARKHURST, D.D. NEW YORK : THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., 740 AND 74a Broadway. J TABLE OF CONTENTS. U/ ^ run ^ GaUi FOB THE Conference vii >^ MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1888, Evening^ Session. O i. Address: Present Condition of New York dtp Above Fourteenth Street 5 Rev. James M. Kino, D.D. Address: Present Condition of New York City Below Fourteenth Street • IS Rev. A. F. SoHAvrFLEB, D.D. Address: The Oerman Element 96 Rev. OboboS U. WlMiTEii, D.D. 1^ CONTENTS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1888. Afternoon Session. PAoa Address: The Bohemian Element 80 Rev. Vincent Pises. Address: The Italian Element 47 Rev. Antonio AnmoHi. Address: The Colore Element 66 Rev. 11. A. Monroe. Address: Our Duty to the Foreign Population 66 Rev. R. S. MacArthur, D.D. Evening Session. Address: The Baptist City Missions 78 Rev. Richard Hartley. Address: The Episcopal City Missions 90 . ■ ,• Archdeacon Maokay-Smith. * '■■ ■ Address: Th9 Urgent Necessity of Lay Co-operation in Christian Work.. Hon. Everett P, Whkelbe. 107 contents. V WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 188a Afternoon Session. PADS Address: The Methodist City Missions 117 Rev. M. D'C. Crawford, D.D^ Address: The Presbyterian Church Extension Societj/ . 129 Rev. John Hall, D.D. Address: The New York City Slission 188 Rev. W. T. Elsino. Address: Christianity as the World's Oreat Uplifting Power ..,, 160 Mr, R. Fulton Cutting. Evooing Session. Address; The Necessity of United Christian Action .... 167 Rev. Josiaii Strono, D.D. Address: House-to- House Visitation Rev. Frank RussRiii, D.D. 166 Address: The Latent Power of the New York Churehe$. 178 Bishop Edward O. Andrews, D.D. RBSOLtmON AND ADDRESS Rev. C. H. Parkhurst, D.D. 188 fi CALL FOR THE CHICKERING HALL CONFERENCE. New York City, November Ist, 1888. The population of New York City has for years been steadily and rapidly increasing, while at the same time the number of churches has been relative- ly decreasing. In 1840 there was one Protestant I church to every 2000 people ; in 1880, one to 3000 ; and in 1887, one to 4000. In view of such facts, we, the undersigned, cordially invite all who are interested in Christian church work to attend a Conference to bo held at Chickering Hall, on Monday evening and Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons and evenings, December 3d-5th, 1888, to hear full statements as to the religious needs and, destitution of our city ; details as to the agencies and missions of all the denominations, as now estab- lished ; the condition of our foreign population ; the increased and wonderful opportunity for efHciont work, and the necessity for the full and cordial co- operation in Christian activity of the laity. Also to consider what steps can be taken to secure a care- ful study of the existing conditions of our city, and VIU CALL FOB THE CHICKEBINO HALL CONFERENOB. what plans can be adopted for a wise and hearty co- operation among all the churches to meet our direct responsibilities. The forcg-oing call was signed by the following names : Rev. THOMAS ARJUTAGE, D.D., Pastor Fiftli Avenue Bap- tist Church. Rev. C. D. W.« BRIDGMAN, D.D., Pastor Madison Avenue Baptist CImrch. Rev. L. A. CRANDALL, Pastor Twenty-third Street Baptist Church. Rev. JOSEPH F. ELDER, D.D., Pastor Epiphany Baptist Ciiurcii. Rev. R. S. JUc ARTHUR, D.D., Pastor Calvary Baptist Church. Rev. HALSEY MOORE, D.D., Pastor Lexington Avenue Bap- tist Church. Rev. M. H. POGSON, D.D., Pastor Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Rev. WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D., Pastor Tabernacle Congrecfational Cliurcb. Rev. SAMUEL H. VIRGIN, D.D., Pastor Pilgrim Congrega- tional Ciiurch. '^ Rev. GEORGE C. F. HAAS, Pastor St. Mark's Lutheran Church. Rev. GEORGE U. WENNER, D.D., Pastor Christ's Lutheran Church. Rev, J. Y. BATES, Pastor Tremont Methodist Episcopal Church. Rev. W. W. BOWDISH, Pastor John Street Methodist Epis- copal Church. Rev. J. S. CHADWICK, D.D., Pastor Bedford Street Method- ist Episcopal Church. . Rbv. MILLARD F. COMPTON, Pastor WiUett Street Method- ist Episcopal Church. CALL FOR THE OHIOEERINO HALL OONFBRENOE. iz Rev. 0. 8. HARROWER, Pastor Central Methodist Epiacopal Church. Rev. MERRITT HULBURD, D.D., Pastor Trinity Methodtet Episcopal Church. Rev. BIDWELL lane. Pastor Forty-third Street Methodist Episcopal Church. Rev. ENSIGN MoCHESNEY, Ph.D., Pastor St. Paul's Method- ist Episcopal Church. Rev. C. p. MASDEN, Pastor Madison Avenue Methodist Epis- copal Church. Rev. C. R. NORTH, Pastor Eighteenth Street Methodist Epis- copal Church. Rev. E. S. OSBON, Pastor West Harlem Methodist Episcopal Church. Rev. PAUL QUATTLANDER, Pastor First German Method- ist Episcopal Church. Rev. J. R. THOMPSON, Pastor Washington Square Metiiodist Episcopal Church. Rev. O. H. TIFFANY, D.D.. Pastor St James* Methodist Epis- copal Church. Rev. GEORGE ALEXANDER, D.D., Pastor University Place Presbyterian Church. Rev. ROBERT RUSSELL BOOTH, D.D., Pastor Rutgers Presbyterian Church. Rev. HOWARD CROSBY, D.D., LL.D., Pastor Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Rev. JOHN HALL, D.D.. LL.D., Pastor Fifth Avenue Pres- byterian Church. Rev. CHARLES HENRY PARKHURST, D.D., Pastor Madi- son Square Presbyterian Church. Rev. JOHN R. PAXTON, D.D., Pastor West Presbyterian Church. Rev. JAMES S. MSAY, Pastor Hariem Presbyterian Church. Rkv. STEALY B. ROSSTTTER, D.D., Pastor North Presbyterian Church. a CAUi FOB THE CHICKERINO HALL CONFERENOK. CALL FOR THE CHtCKERING HALL OONFEBXRCC Rev. henry J. VAN DYKE, D.D., Pastor Brick Presbyterian Church. Rev. benjamin F. De COSTA, D.D., Rector St John Evan- gelist Protestant Episcopal Church. Rev. E. WINCHESTER DONALD, Rector Ascension Protest- ant Episcopal Church. Rev. DAVID H. GREER, D.D., Rector St. Bartholomew's Protestant Episcopal Church. Rev. ALEXAJfDER MACKAY-SMITH, Archdeacon Protestr ant Episcopal Church. Rev. henry MOTTET, D.D., Rector Holy Communion Prot- estant Episcopal Church. Rev. W. S. RAINSFORD, D.D., Rector St. George's Protest- ant Episcopal Church. Rev. II. MORTON REID, Rector Intercession Protestant Epis- copal Church. Rev. CORNELIUS B. SMITH. D.D., Rector St. James' Prot- estiint Episcopal Church. Rev. CHARLES C. TIFFANY, D.D., Rector Zion Protestant Episcopal Church. Rev. G. R. VANDE WATER, D.D., Rector St. Andrew's Prot- estant Episcopal Church. Rev. E. WALPOLE WARREN, Rector Holy Trinity Protest- ant Episcopal Cliurch. Rev. TALBOT W. CHAMBERS, D.D., Pastor CoUegiate Re- formed Church. Rev. EDWARD B. COE, D.D., Pastor Collegiate Reformed Church. Rev. ABBOTT E. KITTREDGE, D.D., Pastor Madison Avenue Reformed Church. Rbv. GEORGE H. SMYTH, Pastor Second Reformed Church, ' Harlem. Rbv. RODERICK TERRY, D.D., Pastor S yours 937,209 There are, according to this census taken by the Health Department, 2G,819 vacant suites of apartments above Fourteenth Street, and only 4370 below that line. In the district bounded by Uroadway, the Bowery, Chatham and Canal Streets, there were only 9 vacant. In the dis- trict between Canal and Prince Streets west of Broad- way that receives the overflow from the Bend, there are none. The districts running east from the Bowery be- tween Houston and Broome Streets were likewise report- ed, nearly, or quite full. New York in 1870 had 14^^^ persons to each house; in 1880 it had ICt^W. That was the last general census. London had in 1861-1871 and 1881 just the same pro- portion— 7 ,V per house. Philadelphia had in 1880, 6^ and Boston, S^^^V ABOVE FOURTEENTH STREET. U The population of this city, Protestant in sympathy, is perhaps 500,000. The churches have a seating capacity of about 300,000, and the average attendance on church services is perhaps 150,000. And 100,000 would be a liberal estimate for the meraborship of Prot- estant churches. The private and public beneficence of the city is un- doubtedly largely in the hands of Protestantism. The disparity in numbers need not cause despair. But we must always bear in mind that the law in religion is as rigid as in nature, that no elfect is produced without an adequate cause. It is within our power to make such alliance with God as to remove from the domain of debate the question of final victory. But we must not underestimate the strength of the opposition. The forces opposed to the extension of Protestantism are many and powerful, and all are enrolled within these mute figures : (1.) Romanism, with its magnificent ecclesiastical ma- chinery and its blind loyalty to a foreign politico-eccle- siastical power. (2.) Indifferentism, with all all its phases of pro- nounced or practical infidelity. (3.) Judaism, with its century- walled exclusiveness. • (4.) The inactivity and selfishness of professing Christi'ms. (5.) That portion of the foreign element which is diflicult to assimilate, and it is this element that multi- plies by births more rapidly than the native, and makes legislative, social, and religious problems difficult of solu- tion. Accordin.^ to the census of 1880, two-fifths of the population of the city were foreign born, and three- fourths of these were of two nationalities, Irish and German. The boundaries of the abodes of the most 12 THE KELIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY ABOVE FOUBTKENTH STREET. 18 undesirable and dangerous of our foreign population, the Italians and Bohemians, are as sharply defined as though impassable walls were built about them. (6.) Ten thousand saloons, or one to every 150 of the inhabitants of the entire city, stand over against the 355 Protestant churches, or one to 44G4 of the inhabifavnts of the entire city, as a constant menace. They breed poverty and crime. They increase in ratio faster than the churches and schools. They are open day and night. They make Legislators, Aldermen, District Attorneys, and Judges. They modestly claim to control 40,000 votes in this city; and twenty men, mostly brewers, hold 4710 chattel mortgages on saloon fixtures to the value of $4,959,578. Where is there another instance of such absolute power in the hands of twenty men ? The present Excise Board claim a reduction of ten per cent, in the number of licenses under their administra- tion, and this has been taken off of our estimates. But. we have not put into our estimates the unlicensed places where liquor is sold (Mr. Graham puts the number at 1000), and the groceries and drug-stores where immense quantities of liquors are sold, and where what are called the better classes are demoralized. The stars on the maps tell the location of the churches ; but if the saloons were represented by small clouds, the light of the stars would be obscured. (7.) The floating population temporarily resident must be added as a large demoralizing element. Multitudes come to this city and contribute to its dissipation and tc the support of its demoralizing diversions, who at home at least abstain from these things. (8.) I'hirty-two thousand three hundred and ninety tenement-houses contain an average of thirty-three per- sona each, with 1,079,728 tenants and with 237,972 families. Home is virtually banished by these abodes, and physical and moral misery necessitated. How can Christiaaity reach these people? Eight hundred and fifty-six of these tenements have been built in the last six months, and 63,393 souls moved into them. (n.) The hiving of respectable people in the common order of flats is a foe to the Christian Church and the Christian life, in that it destroys the individuality of the tenant, and with it also largely the sense of responsi- bility. They are often worse than the tenement-houses, because more inaccessible, and because the people in them are capable of broader usefulness and beneficence when their individuality and responsibility assert them- selves. This is not designed as a reflection upon the character of the people who are compelled to stay in these flats if they live in the city at all, but is simply the statement of a painful fact known to many thought- ful Christian workers. The suggestion of remedies for conceded evils, or of plans to overthrow the enemies of righteousness, is not assigned to me. The suggestion often made that the well-to-do should continue to reside in the midst of the tenement-house sections is not in accordance with sanctified common- sense. We can find no fault with the desire of the peopk in the lower districts to better their condition by moving up- town. The purpose and tendency of Christianity is to move every])udy up town, if not in locality, at least in condition. These waiils hold the powers and the hopes of those below Fourteenth Street. The safety of these wards depends upon the condition of those below Fourteenth Street. 14 THE REUOIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CTTY. Here, in the up-town centre, are the fountaina from which must flow not only the streams of wealth to send light and life to these destitute sections below Four- teenth Street, but also to either- side of this narrow island. Consecrated substance and consecrated personal effort can solve all these difficult problems. Christian citizenship possesses in this metropolis the appliances for promoting righteousness. These appli. ances baptized by the Holy Spirit take on strength, and massed, they become as omnipotent as God. f1 PRESENT CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY BELOW FOURTEENTH STREET. By Rev. A. F. Sciiauffler, D.D. There are those who have the impression in summer that, because they have gone out of town, therefore everybody has left town. The everybody that has left town in summer is perhaps one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand of the population, leaving about four- teen hundred and fifty thousand of tlie people in town. It is never true that everybody has left town; nor is it true that anything like half of our population has gone to the hillsides and valleys of New England, or to the beautiful lands across the sea. Some people also labor under the hallucination that because they have moved uptown, therefore there is nobody left down-town. And tliore are sonic who think that down-town — that is to say, south of Fourteenth Street, as a convenient dividing line — that down-town will sometime bo like the City of London, a place of storehouses and wholesale business places, with none but janitors resident there. If that ever is to be the case, neither you nor I will live to see it ; be- cause down-town is more densely populated to-day than it ever was before, in spite of the fact that up-town is growing at a prodigious rate. Wb have hero (referring to map upon platform) the north line of Fourteenth Street. The southern portion of the city is divided into wards, this line being the Bowery, this Broadway, this Canal Street running across 16 THE IIELIOIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY, here, and Rivington and Division Streets down horo ; hero the Bowery runs into C'liatham Street, the Elysium of the followers and dcscendnnts of Jacob (laughter); and the lino then running into Broadway, and down to the Battery and Tiowling Green. In the First Ward, which is the oldest ward on the Island of Manhattan, the population in 1S80 was 17,000 in round numbers. There are there to-day four churches and chapels, in reality only two churches and two chap- els, the chapels being very small and adapted to seamen or emigrants, and perhaps holding 100 to 150 when they are crowded. How maiiy times they are crowded I cannot Bay. Of course, the great church of this ward is Trinity Church, of ancient renown and grand good work. The Second Ward has only a small population— some 1600, with two churches and chapels. The Third Ward has a population of 3500, with only one Protestant place of worship, only one church. The Fourth Ward has 20,000, with two Protestant places of worship, one church and one chapel, or only one church to over 10,000 of the population. The Fifth Ward has 15,000, with only three places of worship, or an average of one to over 5000. The Sixth Ward has a population of 20,000, with three places of worship, or an average of one to over 6000. The Seventh Ward has some 50,000, with five churches and chapels, or one Protestant place of worship to every 10,000 of the people. ' The Eighth Ward has a population of 35,000, with eight places of worship. The Niath Ward, the moat American ward south of Fourteenth Street, has a population of 64,000, with twenty-one churches and chapels. BEI.OW FOURTEENTH STREET. 17 The Tenth Ward has a population of 47,000, and two churches and chapels, or one to every 23,500 of the population. The Eleventh Ward has a population of 68,000, with twelve churches in it. The Twelfth Ward has a population of 37,000, and has five churches and chapels. The Fifteenth Ward has some 31,000, with fifteen churches. The Seventeenth Ward, the largest of all, has a popu- lation of 104,000, with twenty churches and chapels. The total population, that is to say that south of Fourteenth Street, as at present approximate'!, is 621.000. I say approximated, because we have no definite facts later than the census of 1880 ; and the total number of churches in this population being 127. When I sa.v the total number of churches, that includes the Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues which are not down on this map. as well as Protestant places of worphin. Tn 1868 there were 141 places of worship, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, south of that line. There are now, with nearly 200,000 people more, only 127 Protestant, Jewish, and Roman Catholic places of worship. That is to say, a city twice as large as New Haven has moved in south of Fourteenth Street, and fourteen Protestant churches have moved out. They stand as follows: Since 1888, Baptist churches, four less ; Methodist churches, two less; Presbyterian, six less; Ej-iscopal, four less; Reformed Presbyterian, one less ; Jewish sjrnagogncs, one more (with an enormous addition to the population) ; and Roman Catholic, two more. One Jewish synagogue and two Roman Catholic churches more ; and all the balance of Protestant places of worship less. Now we stand still worse than even these figures would [^1 18 THK RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY, BELOW FOURTEENTH BTREET, 19 show, becanse while the chiirches north of Fourteenth Street are very many and largo, seating from 1000 to 2000, hiany of the places of worship south of Fourteenth Street are very small. There are the mission stations like No. 30 Bowery, and like the Y. M. 0. A. on the Bowery, where they have religious services, and like the Seaman's Chapel in the First Ward. There are a number of frotostant places of worship that do not sgat in their utmost capacity more than 150. 1 know there is Trinity, and Grace, and the Broome Street Taber- nacle, and St. ^Matthew's, and other largo churches, but there are too many small churches, as compared with the density of the population— that is, taking the population as native and foreign born. I find that in the census of 18H0 there were 278,000 native foreigners, very many being children of foreign born parents, and 231 foreign born ; nearly one out of two, south of that line, born in a foreign country and imported here to be amalgamated and digested by our American principles of Christian civilization. Now, this is an enormous population. Five of our largest territories combined do not show the population of Manhattan Island itself. Five of our largest terri- tories combined; and while we hear cries for help from out west, wo want to remember that m my a western state and many a western territory is better supplied with churches and accommodations for church privileges than Manhat- tan Island itself in the north, leave alone this southern section of the town. Now, as matter of fact, the Protestant population- Presbyterian, Episcopal, Baptist, and Methodistr-has very largely moved north. The churches that were down-town have moved up-town ; the value of the prop- erty has increased, and they have moved out and gone north. A piece of land that was bought for $20,000 could be sold for $120,000, because business has made the situation valuable; and the churches have sold out down-town, some of them, and moved north, and have established themselves there. We do not find fault witli the churches for moving up-town, but we call your attention to the fact that the southern part of the island is proportionately being abandoned. They have moved away, and left vala- ablp churches, and loft us with a lack of Sunday-school facilities ; and the result is that the power is in the north, while the evil is down in the south, for the most part. If you will look at this map it will show you the dis- tribution of the churches, in the various parts of the town, south of Fourteenth Street ; and you will see that the churches there have clustered themselves together in advantageous localities. It is a good thing, as far as it goes ; but they have largely abandoned the non-advan- tageous localities that cry for the church and its work- ing power. By looking at the map you will see the streets marked out, and the wards. You will remember that I said there was one church in the Third Ward, and there is the church standing alone there to-day, doing all the woi'k for the Protestant faith in that whole section of the town. In the Tenth there are two in the northern extremity, and two down here, leaving the solid center of the ward, with its teeming tenement-house popula- tion, absolutely unprovided for, A vast section of town, filled with foreigners, where there is no church or mis- sion station— at least no church— whore people may go year in and year out to the grocery store, to the drug- store, to the physician, and to places of entertainment, 20 THE nELIGtOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY, and never bgo a plivco of worship, mucli lees ever hear a Protestant church bell or the voice of the minister. Over hero in the American ward the churches are clustered together, with five on two blocks ; and I hope that they have thoroughly evangelized people around there. Just think, five on two blof^ks ! In the Fifteenth Ward there are quite a number of churches, the growmg population being very strongly religious. Hero in the Seventeenth Ward wo have also quite a number of ProtcB- tant churches^ and the farther south you get. the more you will find the churches have abandoned the field, and have left the population to themselves. Dr. King gave you some statistics about the liquor saloons. 1 do not care to give you any figures on that subject, except to say that the southern part of the V'islai.d is brimful of them. It is so full th.it in some places there is a liquor saloon on every corner, and in some three and four on the block ; and in still other districts nine, ten, twelve, yea, fourteen on a single blook. The town is brimming over with these places, that are breeding mischief and vice and crime in our community. Now I would like to call your attention, in the few moments that I have remaining, to this one fact. We have more tenement-houses relatively than all the rest of the city put together. It is par excellence a place ; of tenement- houses, where from twenty to twenty-five ' families live in ono house. I divide tenements into -three classes. Tho first is the good tone ment-houso, which ii a kind of modified French flat,— it is not so flat as it is tall, but thoy call it a flat -where thoro is some one to answer tho door, and to tell you where to go in that great beoliive of humanity, and find tho ono you are looking for. Then there is tho next ono, which UFIiOW K0UKTEKNTH HTRKET. 81 is a grade lower. You pull the door-bell, either the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth, and an invisible power opens the door, and leaves you to stumble your way up as best you can. and find those you have called to see. Then the next lower grade i«« tenement-houses is what I call the slam-bang kind, where the door keeps slam-banging all tho time, where peddlers and Jews and tho city missionaries all go in and out, and fiiid their way through the place as best they can through the pitch darkness that pervades the place — so dark, that to illustrate it perhaps I would better tell a little experi- ence that I went through, that happened some time ago. I remember going into one of these great, large tene- ment-houses on a very warm, bright noonday. The place was in pitch darkness, and as I made my way up- stairs my knee struck something soft, and I heard the cry of a child. She had been sitting there all alone in the darkness, and I never knew of her presence until I had knocked against her. I always listened at the bot- tom of the stairs to see if anybody was going up or com- ing down, and to give the signal that I was coming up ; but there was perfect silence, and I nearly killed the little one by pushing her against the brass^headed stairs where she was. In that tenement population there are thousands of church members who have come to New York and moved into the tenement-houses, and know not where to go. And if we are to reach them in that southern part of the island, they have got to be reached by the Chris- tian going into the tenement-houses and reaching them there and drawing them out of that house into some place of worship, where they shall hoar of God, and of the great truth, and of eternal things. But the situation is still worse, if anything, than I 23 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY, BELOW FOURTEENTH STREET. 23 have indicated, for while we have some churches that are full, like the University Place Church, Grace Church, St. Matthew's, and others that I could name, there are others t||nt are pitifully empty, I made the rounds some time ago on a beautiful Sunday morning in some of those churches, and some of them fairly large — and this was the count on a bright Sunday morning : In four churches there was one with 126 people, another 38, another 28, and another 110. Tliose are the num- bers in the four churches that I visited that morning, and that I counted myself. If anybody tells you that he estimates that in his church there are 500 in the con- gregation, you can cut him down 50 per cent., and you will be about right. There was a gentleman once who called upon me to speak in a hall. I asked him how many it would hold, and he said it would hold about 1200, and that it would be jammed right up. When I got there I saw that the house wouldn't hold more than 600, and when the au- dience assembled I counted them, and there woi'e just 137 people there ; and just then the enthusiastic brother nudged me in the ribs, and said, " Magnificent congre- gation, isn't it ? " If anybody estimates the congregation, cut him down half, and you will still be beyond the number a little. The next Sunday was a beautiful Sunday, and I went forth once more to count the people, and I found them : In four churches there were 58 in one, 48, 28, •and in another 26 — and a bright Sunday morning it was, too. That was, of course, in the southern part of the island; and I could go on the next Sunday morning, on a beau- tiful day, to four more, and on the next Sunday to four more, and I shouldn't find 100 in any one of them. This will set forth a little of the state of things in the southern part of the city. There are good churches, doing good work, but they are like angels' visits, few and far between ; whereas there are other churches that are struggling to maintain themselves, and overcoming obstacles almost insur- mountable, and are more than measurably successful. I have been requested to close by telling what is nocded. Do I need to do that? I have told you what there is, and having stated that, doesn't that show what there is needed ? But I will tell you what is needed. We don't want any more brick and mortar around ; but we do want, and desperately too, more flesh and blood. Brick and mortar are very good in their place, and in their time, but I would rather have poor brick and mor- tar and good flesh and blood than good brick and mor- tar and poor flesh and blood. We want to increase our good flesh and blood ; and we want consecrated flesh and blood ; and if we cannot get it in the line of (Voluntary laborers, we must have paid workers down there. We hire men and women to go to China, but New York, south of Fourteenth Street, is China, Bohe- mia, Italy, Ireland, and all of the others, with a sprink- ling of America to give it some taste. | Mark this: the world can come to Now York and beg, and it has come here ; China, Scotland, France, Ire- land, and Italy have come here ; and the whole world has knocked at the door of New York for money for evangelical work and help — and they are right. We have got the money ; there is no doubt about the money being in existence here. But I want to call your atten- tion to the fact that while the world comes to New York for money, New York can go nowhere for money. Just imagine, for instance. New York knocking at 24 THB RELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY, BELOW FOURTEENTH STREET. 25 the door of Baltimore, or Philadelphia, or Boston, or San Francisco for money ; but they all knock at our door. If New York is going to be evangelized. New York has got to do it. If wo are not going to bo hea- thenized, wo have got to do the work ourselves. Wo have got to do the work right here in this island ; and the first requisite is to see the needs, to realize the diffi- culties that there arc, and to realize the necessity of the call for sanctified services. And I believe the Church of the Living God will go forward with the work in New York and evanjielize the city. Is it possible ? Don't let us ask that. It is possible, of course. Will it be actual ? Don't ask that ; ask how soon it will be actual. And if wo take our stand, as the result of this convention, there will be an onward move- ment from north to south and from east to west ; and we shall strive to bring these foreigners under the power of the Evangelical Church. And they make as giand citi- zens and as grand followers of the Lord Jesus Christ as anybody on the face of the wide world. I should like to speak more definitely about the Ger- mans, but I am to be followed by Dr. Wenner, who knows more than I do about them, perhaps ; although iny father was a German, my mother was an American. And now, in conclusion, I want to call your attention to this one fact. We have got the best men and women in New York that the whole world affords ; there are no better anywhere. (Applause.) And we have got the worst men and women in New \ ork that the whole world affords ; there are no worse anywhere. (Laugh- ter.) Chicago, however, is perhaps a little ahead of ua on this, for she has established in her city Anarchist Sunday -schools. We have established our Sunday- schools to teach men to love God and love one another. The Anarchist has established his Sunday-school, of, which he has three in Chicago, and I bel.eve will have some in New York, unless wo are careful, to teach men to hate God and hate their fcllow-men. And if you end I are going to do away with this danger in this city, we have got to forestall that start of Anarchist teachings, in order that we may meet this condition and preoccupy the mind with divine teachings and the word of Ood. But if we do not do that. Anarchy is going to do her work, and whoever does it most earnestly will wm the day. Shall it be Christianity, or shall it be Anarchy? What says this great audience here to-night? ^Ap- planse.) THE GERMAN ELEMENT. 87 THE GERMAN ELEMENT. By Kev. George U. Wekner, D.D. The German element of tliis city is not a plant of recent growth. They have been identified with the history and the growth of this city for two centuries. On the opposite side of Trinity Church, on the lower corner of Rector Street, there was a German church two centuries ago, but it remained almost the only church, with the exception of the Reformed church on Liberty Street, down to nearly the beginning of the present cen- tury. From those churches and from the people who be- longed to those two congregations, some of the best, some of the most benevolent and most worthy families of this city have sprung. 'J'he Lorillards, the Astors, the Havemeyers, and the Wolfes, who have done so much for the prosperity of this city, are the descendants of those Germans of the Lutheran and Reformed chut-ches in the lower part of our city. Down to 1848 there was very little growth in the German character of this city. In fact, it got to bo so much Americanized that the proceedings of the German Society had to be kept in English because there was nobody who could write German well enough to write the minutes. I mention this as an answer to those who say that the Germans are so clannish, and that they won't be Ameri- canized. They are the people who will, perhaps more than any other, adapt themselves to the country in which they are. Give them a generation to do it in, and they will adapt themselves to their surroundings. But in 1848 there was a spirit of unrest that came over Germany, and from that time on there has been a constant stream of emigration to this country ; and New York, as the key of the New World and as a place of unusual attraction to an incoming people, of course re- tained a great many. Since that time the population of this city has grown in very great proportions, so that to- day it is fair to estimate the German population of this city at about 400,000 people ; the population of those who were born in Germany at a little less than 200,000, but counting the children, who may still be counted as members of the German family, the population is about 400,000. That is the present condition, so far as the population is concerned. I have but a few moments to speak, and in those few moments I shall speak first of all of the field itself; secondly, of the workers ; and thirdly, of the means of doing the work in this field. As I have stated, the $old contains a population of about 400,000. Now, more than one-half of those are Protestants, the northern races especially. While the percentage of Protestants to Catholics in Germany, who have come to this country, is as fifty-five to forty-four, it is fair to say that nearly seventy-five per cent, of the Gorman population are Protestants ; so that we have here a Protestant German population of about 300,000 in this city. Now, these people are not opposed to religion. There are a few infidels, and a few Anarchists, but the vast majority of them can never forget their early home training and home influences which they have brought over with them, although it is true that there are a great 28 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CJITY. THE GERMAN ELEMENT. 29 many who endeavor to escape from those influences ; but the churches. They are pretty equally divided up among in reahty the great mass of the German people arc^Uonominations. The Lutherans have about 10,000 out of Christians to the core. AVe have about fifty German churches and chapels, large and small ; and the member- ship of those fifty churches is about 16,000. Now, you will say that this does not speak well for their Chris- tianity, and I confess it is a poor showing, but there is an explanation of this. In the first place, they come from I the 16,000 communicants, and, vt course, are the more prominent among the German people ; but there is a very largo and growing clement in the other churches. There is, however, a peculiarity of the Germans — that they like to divide up into their different parties. It has be6n true of them politically from the beginning. Even parishes ; they come from parishes in the old country,! Tacitus, speaking of them, says : " This division of the and they expect that they are to enter parishes here ; I Germans among themselves is very bad among them, but they expect that somebody is going to look after themji a very good thing for us," and it'was so until Bismarck in a religious way, I married a couple a short time ago,i brought them all together into one nation. They were aad after the ceremony the young woman asked me what 1 constantly divided up among themselves, and so it is church she belonged to. I had presence of mind I here. There is no community or connection between enough to tell her that she belonged to the church onlthom. I speak of this with reluctance; even the First Avenue and Nineteenth Street, and that she must| Lutherans, who ought to be better, are divided up into by all means come there. If I had questioned her about' four or five different sects. the matter, or asked her as to her fitness to join thef Secondly, these people are hampered very much in church, or had made a great many preliminaries about L' doing any work, besiilo their own little work in which I her becoming a member, I would not have got her ; and \ I learned from that little episode to tell the people that they belong to my parish, and let the burden of proof lie upon them. But this accounts for the fact that so many do not belong to any church, and do not show any inter- est in religious work. In the second place, I wish to speak of the workers who can do the work among these German people. In the first place, there are these fifty churches and chapels. =,, The Germans for the German churches first of all. f, They themselves are able to do the work better than any- body else — and they ought to bo. We are divided into ten different denominations. There are about fifteen Lutheran, and the others are divided among the Re> formed, Presbyterian, Baptist, and so on among the rest of thoy are engaged. There is this one peculiarity about their character, which makes it difiicult for them to do successful work, and that is the lack of the power of or- ganization. Organized Christian work is unknown to them ; and therefore we must consider their traditions and the place from which they have come, in judging of the work wliich they have done. Then, again, there is another difficulty with them, and that is the absence of lay co-operation. The work is done by the ministers and by the officers of the church ; and laymen are very seldom engaged in that work. That is one of the things they have to learn. This absence of lay co-operation is one of the principal weaknesses of the German Church. In the third place, the failure on their part to adapt 80 THE REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. THE GERMAN ELEMENT. SI themselves to the wants of the English language. They are determined to keep the English language out of tho German Church; and in this way they make it almost impossible to reach the young folks. It reminds me of tlie old story of the hen that raised the brood of ducks and when they got big enough they swam away, and left the poor old hen on tho shore. As the consequence of this detern.i^iation, tho German parents are unable to have that influence over their children that they should ha VI-, and German pastors have lost to a great extent their own influence over the young people, and all be- cause of their tenacious opposition to tho use of tho Eng- lish language. It is, perhaps, hardly fair for mo to expose our own weakness in this way, but I must do so in order that you may be able to sympathize and judge of the amount of progress which they are making under these circumstan- ces. But, now, the^e is another branch of the workers which I must consider, and that is tlio English churches who are doing work among the Germans, by gathering tho children into their Sunday-schools. There is scarce- ly an English church that has not made an elTort to get German children into tlioir Sunday-schools, and that has not a large number of German children in their Sunday schools. I regard this as a very good thing in some re- spects, but in other respects an unfortunate thing, be- cause the English cliurches do not understand how to treat these children, and so far as I have been able to see, there is no systematic ciTort in a number of tho English churches to get these children to join the church. One of tho most prominent churches in this city has one hundred and forty church members, and one thou- sand children in its Sunday-school, which is entirely out of proportion to tho church. members. It gathers the children in there, and keeps them until they are twelve or fourteen years of age, and then tliey are compelled to come to UB for instruction and admission into tho church. A fhort time ago a very excellent family of children came to me from one of the best Presbyterian churches in this city. They came to me from one of the very best Sunday-schools in our neighborhood, and one of them said they wanted to come to my church, and they want- ed to be confirmed. I said, " Why don't you stay where you are ? '' "Oh,"' they said, " wo want to bo confirmed, we want to join the church." I said, " I cannot take you. You have been there all your lifetime." They had been brought up in that Sunday-school, but nobody had spoken to them about joining the church, and so they came to me to be confirmed. I said, "Go back to your min- istor, and tell him what you want, and some way will bo found by which your wants will be met." And now I say, if you will take our children, it seems to me that it is your duty not only to carry them on until they are twelve or fourteen years of age, and then to let them slide, but to see that they are brought to a profession of religion, a profession of Christianity, because if you neg- lect them then, they will be gone from you forever. (Applause.) In the third place, I wish to speak of the mode in which the work can bo done in this field. I would a great deal prefer, of course, that we Lutherans could do the work, and take our 400,000 people, and have them all; then we would have a grand church in this city ; but wo cannot do it. We have our fifteen German churches, and it is just as much as we can do to hold our own. Our people cannot do anything further. I haven't noticed a percepti- ble growth in tho vitality of any of our ohurches for a large number of years past. It is as much as we can do to B2 TRK RF.M(H(JU8 CONDITION OF NEW YOKK CITV. tako cai-0 of tlioso wo liavo, and if wo cannot extend in- to that groat mass of people, I am frco to say that you aro welcome to do all you can do among Die Kvangelical Protestant population of the Germans. Now, then, there is a way of doing it. First of all, wo ought to strengthen the churches that are already at work I have a personal acquaintance with almost every one of the German pastors of this city, and I think I can testi- fy in trutn to their very excel lent, character, and the in- telligent, earnest, and persevering work that is being done by them. But they cannot make bricks without straw. They ought to bo help, d in their work, and supported and encouraged. Our Germati Y. M. C. A. ought to be helped. It occupies small and contracted quarters. It ought to have a building by itself for the asking. In the second place, it seems to me there is a prcat deal of work which can be done, and ought to be done, by these English cliurchcs who liave our children in their schools ; and I will simply point out the way. If you can auord *iuOO for your organist, or your music, you can certainly afford $C00 for a German assistant to take into these churche*, and to do real pastoral work among the German families and churches here. And when you have a church, when you have a building, it is ft waste of money— it. is a waste of means, if you do not get a few more men in there to do that kind of work. 1 tlierefoie would suggest this as one of the means by which the German population can be reached. The Germans have grown to be a great power in this 'city. Those few German soldiers who came across the borders of France a few years ago were easily driven back; but they were the forerunners of a mighty army, and then a few montlis afterwards Europe awoke to ac- knowledge Imperial Germany, and she has never bad -I THE GERMAN EI.RMENT. 83 reason to regret it. for German supremacy means peace for Europe, and perhaps peace for the world. The few Germans that came to this city within the memory of man were treated very much like the Chinamen by the hoodlums of the Bowery. But now they have grown in- to a mighty army of 400,000 on this island alone. They aro hore for good or for evil. I am sure they are not the dangerous classes of tliis community. There may be a few Anarchists here who bring disgrace upon the German name, but those who know tlie Gorman character know that, so far as the German people are concerned, who come to this country with their Christian training and surroundings, it means safety, security, and intelligence. But how about their children, those who grow up among you, who grow up under your institutions — under ours? They, unless they are cared for, will goon become the hoodlums^will soon become the dangerous class. I think it is our duty to come up to the help of these peo- ple in their work — in the care of their own nation. (Applause.) 5? THE BOHEMIAN ELEMENT. By Rev. Vincent Pisek. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1888. Afternoon Session. The devotional Bervices were conducted by Rev. L. H. Cobb, D.D. Mk. Dodge : It was expected that Mr. John D. Slay- back, of the Methodist Church, would preside at the meeting this afternoon, but he has been called out of town. The object of this conference was stated very fully last night, that Christians of all names and de- nominations should carefully and thoughtfully study the conditions and needs of this great city in which we live. Very full and graphic and startling statements were made as to the general religious destitution in the upper and lower parts of the town. We then talked together of the large German element in the city, so powerful, so interesting, so hopeful. This afternoon we continue our study of the conditions of the people of our city and the elements which make up our peculiar cosmopolitan population. We shall talk together, first, of the Bo- hemian element, a large and interesting element in our city ; and I take great pleasure in introducing to you the llev. Vincent Pisek, who is a clergyman having, obarge of a Bohemian coQgregation here. i< li •J Now York City is the fifth largest Bohemian city in the world. Prague, the capital of Bohemia, has 250,- 000 Bohemians ; Vienna, 200,000 ; Chicago, the third, 40,000 ; Pilson, in Bohemia, 36,000 ; then New York with 30,000 Bohemians. Besides these 30,000 Bohemi- ans, there are about 10,000 Slavonic Hungarians, whose language is almost the same, and literature exactly the same as Czech. It is often asked if these people are Germans. Some one answered, " Just the same as the wolves are sheep. "^ The late President Hitchcock, of the seminary, said regarding the same characteristic of the people, *' Unlike Germans, Bohemians do not love war, but when attacked they know better how to die than surrender." They are by nature a peaceful race and peaceably disposed, and unless led by bad leaders will always live quietly and peaceably. The language is one of the Slavonic dialects, something like the Russian or Polish. There is not a word of Gorman in it. I feel greatly honored to address this highly intelligent, beautiful, and Christian audience. You would say in the Bohemian tongue : Povazuji to za velikou cest oslo- viti toto vysoce vzdelan6, krAsn^ a krestanskS poBluch* acstvo. I am told that the language does not sound very harsh or unpleasant to the ear, but that in print it looks bad 36 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. indeed. It is hard to learn. A youngslady who wanted to engage in missionary work among Bohemians began studying, and after some time had to give up for about two weeks, because, as she told me. she had to give rest to her jaws. (Laughter.) She could not stand it any longer. Still, the language can be learned, and it possesses a large literature and a perfect grammar, and it is the only language into which you can translate the classics exactly. I need not tell you that the Bohemians, among whom it is my privikgo to work, are not that sort of shiftless, homeless people who are somotimes called Bohemians, My people got their names from Bohemia, a country situated in the northwestern part of Austria, richt in the heart of Europe ; a country containing about six millions of inhabitants. They came into Bohemia nbout the middle of the fifth century and have remained there ever since. Like everybody else, they hate to move ; and it is only great poverty, misfortune, shame, or fear that drives them away from that, their mother country. The New York Bohemians represent three classes of people of Bohemia, the poorest, the good-for-nothing, and the culprits. The last named class aims at leadership, and it is these few but bad leaders that do all the liarm and are responsible for the mistiust with which the American people are beginning to look upon all for- eigners. All Bohemians can read and write in their mother tongue. In that respect they are ahead of other nation- alities represented in this city. They are clean, they look intelligent, they dress neatly; their children look remarkably pretty for that cla^s of people ; they always stand high in our schools and are very affectionate. They give the teacher no trouble in managing them, if TIIK nOHEMIAN ELEMENT. 37 .'j 'i he knows how. (Laughter.) The people live together in settlements, following the factories where they work. They are all on the east side of the city, near the Second and First Avenues. They begin at Fifth Street ; then there is quite a colony in Thirty-eighth Street. Fifty- fourth Street, and Seventy-third Street. The largest settlement is from Sixty-first to Eighty-fifth Streets. In Seventy-fourth Street, between Second and First Avenues, surrounded by about two thousand Bohemian families in the immediate neighborhood, is my church. Ahout half the number of Bohemians are cigar-makors, the other half carpenters, tailors, and other artisans. There are no rag-pickers, no peddlers, and, exceptions to the rule being so very meagre, I might say that there are no beggars and no thieves among them. I don't think they are smart enough for the business. (Laughter.) Up to the last two or three years the Bohemians have boon able to make a comfortable living. Since then they have been beginning to suller want and privation. The greatest evil among our Bohemian people is the tenomeut house system of making cigars. To get work the Bohemians are obliged to move iiito the tenement- houses owned by the bosses. Here they have to pay terrible rents for horrible apartments. In theee apart- ments they have to work, eat, sleep, rear their children, and all in one and the same room — the room filled with poisonous vapors, and often under petty tyranny of their Jewish bosses, obliged to work on Sundays and get nothing else to do the rest of the week. Law was ap- pealed to in vain. The mortality of children is dreadful, and yet our Health Department does nothing to stop the evil. Another remark I wish to make is, that there are no rich men among Bohemians. The Italians, the French, "88 THE RELIQIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. and the Germans liave a class of what are called the nice people ; among the Boliemians there are none. They are all poor — a common working class. The richest man in my congregation, probably, if he sold everything he had, it would amount to ^2500. Furthermore, until I organized the night class to teach them the English language, they had no chance to learn it. They have their own stores, entertainments, theatres ; two Bohemi- an daily papers. Even in the factories where they work, Bohemian is spoken ; so that positively they have no chance to learn English, and I have met people who have lived in the country for twelve years and could hardly speak a word of English. The first word, how- ever, that they learn on coming to America is " Hurry up," — the great characteristic of American people. (Laughter.) As to their religion, they are Roman Catholics by birth, infidels of necessity, and Protestants by history and inclination. "When the mission work was first or- ganized among the Bohemians, there was but a handful of Protestant followers. The number has considerably increased since then, although a good many are con- stantly leaving the city, by the advice of the pastor, and going West to buy farms, where they are doing well. They make exceedingly good farmers. One great ob- stacle of the mission work in New York among the Bohemians was the want of a suitable edifice for church worship. That want, thanks to the generosity of the ladies of the Presbyterian and the Episcopal churches and the Church Extension Society of the Presbyterian church, has been supplied. We have a beautiful church, and I wish there were^ore such churches in New York. We are blessed with success in the new house of God. Both the church room and the Sunday-school room are THE BOHEMIAN ELEMENT. 89 P (. filled with as attentive listeners as any P^ea^^^'^ ^^^^^ desire to have. Since we went up there to work, the Freethinkers started two schools in the ^nj^ediate neigh- borhood-ono in the same street, and the Roman Cath- Tcs bought nine lots a few blocks away. Before we Id the foundations of our building they An-^ed the>x age church, school, and convent. For one Christian wofker that wo had in our church they sent three Tests and three nuns to work. Our church was called rthem " the Devil's nest ; " the pastor "the Satanic Majesty in white skin." Sunday after f-day ^«J^- the opening of our church, the deepest fires of the in- fernarwere promised to those who should dare cross the threshold of our church. . ,, j • *!,„;, Bohemian people have Protestant blood m thei veins You know that Bohemia at one time was all Protestant. It was the first Protestant country m Europe. John Huss lived one hundred years b fore Luther. The English Bible owes its ongm partly to the Bohemian. Anne of Bohemia married Richard "- of England. She brought along with her tj England Jhe Bohemian translation of the Bible, and Wicklille is Baid to have asked, "If the Bohemians can have the Bible in their language, why can t we m ours Hay- ing Protestant blood in their vems, the people are not afraid of the priests or their threats. I will give you an *^In Roman Catholic churches, before the wedding, both the bride and the bridegroom must go to confe^ion. One of ihi Bohemian brides went to confession, and the priest asked her some questions that she considered im- pertinent, so she jumped up and slapped his face and Talked out of the church, published the V^^^^^^ the Bohemian newspaper, and was mamed by a Prote». 40 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. tant minister, I marry about 150 Roman Catholic couples every year. I am a great marrying man (Laughter.) When they are married they get a certifi! cate which they generally frame and hang on the wall. One day a priest entered the house of one of those peo- pie and, seeing the certificate hanging there, said, W hy ! were you married by a Protestant ? " " Yes " " Do you know that under the laws of our church you are not married at all?" "Is that so? But." asked the woman "what will you call, then, this child of mme ? He did call it a name. Before he came in she was sweeping the room ; so she took the broomsticl: and applied It to his back and drove him out of the room down the stairs, and up the avenue. ' They also do not want to stand the miracle-making and other practices of the Romish Church as well as other nations do. These things turn them against all priests, and, I am sorry to say, against all religion. My work is not among the believing Bohemians, but among the thousands who are made infidels by the shameful practices of the church they were born in. A Roman Catholic church on Fifth Avenue and a Roman Catholic church on the east side and a Roman Catholic church in pajml countries in Europe are three diiferent and dis- tinct churches. They work according to the credulity they find among people. Let me just translate to you something that has wonderful effect and that is much believed in by the Hungarian people— not the Bo- hemians. This could not be published in Bohemia, but il can be published in Hungary. Going" among the Hnngarians, I find this tract mostly on their breasts. It is called the Balan letter—" The Balan letter, which was sent to Leo, the Pope, from Heaven.'* I will trans- late only part of it. The whole would take too long. 1^ (1 S THE BOHEMIAN ELEMENT. 41 ■■:■: It begins : " In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. This letter I give on this world to Ijco, the Pope, in Rome, my servant. This letter has such power that when one reads it or listens to it he receives indulgences for 100 days, and nothing will harm him. either fire or water or iron ; not oven enchantments will harm him. Whoever will read this letter and is in danger of his enemies, he will conquer them ; but he must first sign himself three times with the sign of the cross: ' The cross of Christ above me, the cross of Christ in front of me, the cross of Christ behind me.' This letter will then keep him from harm in day and night and every hour, and from the terrible devil. Jesus, Mary, Joseph I This letter was written over the picture of St. Michael in Rome, in Peter's Church, where Leo, the Pope, was praying the most, and no one could touch the letter nor come near the letter unless he wanted to read it or copy it. Then the letter opened to him of itself. It was written with golden letters. I, Jesus Christ, the son of the Living God, possessing all power of godhead and everything, I command you, first, that you shall keep the fasts of the church, that you will keep also the seventh day, that you should do no evil on Saturday, for it is the day of the Holy Mother, who, if she did not pray for you, I, Christ, would destroy you because of your sins. I command you under eternal damnation that every one, old and young, should go to church and do the commandments of the church," etc. Then it gives a number of commandments, and says : "I. Jesus Christ, command you under eternal damnation of your souls that you should believe this letter and that I truly in the power of godhead have written it with my hand and given it to Leo, the Pope." Then it gives some sound advice— they should not kill one another, they i2 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. should not steal, and so on ; and then, " But if you should do this, then, I again, the Son of God, with my own power, will destroy you." After recounting most awful of earthly punishments, it ends : " I, the Son of God, with my own power and my own hand, wrote this letter for your good." This letter is prized very much. In the Jesuit church in Third Street, sacred blood, three drops for ten dollars, was sold to the people. A woman came to me, bringing a little tract which she wanted me to translate, which she got in the church on First Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, which was not then finished. That will give you an idea how they do build those magnificent churches. She wanted me to translate that little tract for her. I did. It promised for $5 and prayers made before certain pictures in that basement to give her indulgences for some two hundred thousand years. When people see these practices, and are a little intel- ligent, as a good many of our Bohemians are with the Protestant blood in their veins, it sets them against re- ligion. That explains the degree of infidelity which I find and have to work against among the Czechs in New York. ** Do the people who join your church ever give any- thing to its support ?" I am asked. Yes, our Bohemi- an people do give to the support of the church. It is a wonder that they do. Nearly nine tenths of the land of Bohemia was taken away from the Protestants after the thirty years' war and given to the Jesuits and to their adherents. The church, consequently, is very rich^ and they are never asked to give; and yet these people, never asked or used to give, give so liberally that sometimes I am astonished what the word of God will do. I wish I bad time to give you examples. I will only speak of THE BOHEMUN ELEMENT. 48 II what happened yesterday. One of our members came to me and handed me thirty«seven dollars — that meant six weeks' wages to her — for our church. When we col- lected money for our church she could Hot give anything, they had so much trouble in the house, so she came now to give her share. I told her that the church is all paid for. " Why, then," she said, " let it go for the steeple. We ought to have one." We had nine dollars more to pay for our communion cup. I announced this fact at the church service. The Sunday-school children at once began secretly to collect for it and surprise their pastor. At the same time our singing society did likewise and soon had enough; but before they brought the money two children opened their Christmas banks and one lady gave five dollars, thus paying it all . So they endeavor to help along the work. I try to make it as easy as possible for our people to be- come church members. Do they become consistent mem- bers ? Yes, very good, indeed. I find that the best rule to test the genuineness of conversion is really the rule of dollars and cents. (Laughter.) Let the people know that if they become church members they will have to pay, and I assure you that unless they have a good deal of the love of Christ in their hearts they will not want to become church members. That is the only safe test that I know. Try it. We invite all people to the Lord's Supper who feel the burden of sin, love Christ, and want to commemorate his death. At one time I was not so liberal, but I was taught a lesson, like Peter on the housetop, which I wish I had time to tell you. At the first communion we had in our church we extended the invitation and 500 people with tears in their eyes and with the light of God shining in their faces wont to the Lord's Supper. Those I 44 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. Bame people afterwards were publicly excommunicated in the Roman Catholic Church and consigned to destruc- tion. Shall I bo allowed to BUggeat some methods of evan- gelization of the people ? First, have a little more patience and sympathy with the weaknesses of the poor people. Do not expect as much of them as you expect from the people of your up-town churclics that have had good religious influences and training all the while around them. Let these mis. eion churches be considered more in the light of train^ ing'schools, and not supposed to be bundles of porfoc-' tion. They will grow. Wo took in our church a man that kept a lager-beer saloon. I knew that he had learned to love Christ. Ho applied for membership and no one of our elders protested. I did not tell him he should close his business. I let him alone until he found it out himself. Three months after he closed the place on Sunday — the only lager-beer saloon closed of tiie twenty on the block — and before a year was past that man closed the business altogether, without anybody sug- gesting it to him, and started a restaurant; and dying ho left one hundred and ten dollars to our church for the organ in our Sunday-school room of the 7)etv church. Wo had no idea at that time that we were going to have one. We had Anarchists come to our church, and they became as good members as could be desired. There aits one among you. Also, I would suggest that you take a lesson from the liquor saloons. They work among the poor people, and see how they try to make their places as attractive as possible. Have your churches pretty inside and out- side ! Also build chur<3he8 and not chapels. The Sun- day-school, if possible, should be separate from the THE BOHEMIAN ELEMENT. 45 i^hurch rdom. . Third, give home government to Ireland 'Cl n.ean to the mission churches ; and fourth, let the /missionary pastor make his home among the people he serves. i .. t .1 Now, 1 suppose 1 might be allowed to say what I need, although I am reminded that my twenty minutes are past. We are doing a good work. Through the influence of our church Anarchism was killed, classes for the English language established, young men sent to college and sontinary, crowds of children taken to the public schools that otherwise would not have gone-scores of f am. lies helped West; in the last Ave years sixty seven families ^ho lived together without marriage vows were legally marriccf,-and most important of all-many people brought to Christ What we need is a place where our young ^ len can go. l^fore you close the lager- beer saloons you must have a place where the young people can go Their homes are small. After they got home from work they can hardly move around there; they have to go out in the evening before .they go to bed. Where are they to go ? There is no place, li-they stand on the conicr the club of the policeman will drive them away. They go to the lager-bccr saloons, f^o I would like to have a place like the Young Men's Christian Association, also the Young Women's Christian Association, and also 1 would wish to have a day nursery. If ouh people are to make a living, both the husband and the wife must go to work . Their babes are left to the care of their more grown-up children-boys or girls ten or eleven years old, who are thus deprived of school. $30,000 will cover all we need. Freely ye received, freely give. Mr. Dodqb : It is certainly very hopeful to all of us to hear that the nationality from virhich the Anarchistsof 46 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CTTT. Chicago were recruited is so easily and ploaeantly reached. I want to say one thing in explanation of some state- ments made by our friend. We can readily understand and sympathize with men coming from lands where they have been persecuted for their religion, that they should feel strongly and speak warmly. But we have no ob- ject here in our meeting in saying one word against those of other religions. If our Protestant faith and our simple American forms of religion are better, they are only better because they have more of love to Christ our Saviour, and we must prove their superiority by manifesting that love in a practical way and not by speaking harshly of those who differ from us. "We are now going to have the great pleasure of hear- ing from the Rev. Mr. Arrighi, a successful pastor of an Italian church. The Italian people we are watching now with intense interest. They are coming m great numbers. They are to be an important factor, not only in our city, but in our country. I know we shall all be glad to hear from Mr. Arrighif f • THE ITALIAN ELEMENT. By Rev. Antonio Arbiohi. If a truly serious and all-important question has ever presented ilself to the consideration of Amenc^^^^^^^^^ tians and Americans in general, it is the Christiamzmg and evangelizing of the great multitudes that annuaUy hnd upon these happy shores from the other side of the aL if among the many nations represented m Z miUU ui tTerefs one whicl above all others nee s to have the gospel preached, it is the one which I have llio honor to repreaont. ■ 4^ .„ Amur, ■riie Italians, of late years, h"'«.™'S"^ '»^'"" ica in large number.. They come jost a» they are , and vou know, my friend., that it we aro to Hg« &»■» »"'; Me »m«e they aro not .or, invitinR, they are not a iTto bo desired. Bat eome the, wdl ; and boar -:=ie^:^t:5^.r2 orn Italv. In this letter ho states this fact. bpcaUmg orn itaiy. Italians in this part :l lS&:' «« »« A— Villages .here VretheT L years ago I find «'-' ^^f j^^*'^ and if this state of affairs oontmues this part of IWy^ Z by will bo tra.spl.ntod in th. Amorjca* But what tVl noted is th. f«>t that the, * «.( rs*"-*' I 48 TIIK UELIdlOUrt CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY, TIIE ITALIAN ELEMENT. 49 Hero you liavo a statomoiit from ono wlio lives on tlie ground, from one who ouglit to tell you things just ex- actly as they are. So bo settled upon this fact, my friends, tliat the Italians are here to stay, and if you want them to be true Americans, if you want them to be useful to the country in which they live, they must be made over again, they must be remoulded. What an idea the majority of Italians that come to America have 'concerning a free form of government, concerning American laws, American ways, American institutions! The majority of them have an impression that a free form of government means liccntiouaness. Therefore it is not to be wondered at, my friends, if the Italians in America are so free with the knife. Why, the knife is more freely used by the Italians in the state of New York than in all Italy in the same corresponding time. In Italy they are kept down, they are oppressed, they arc tyrannized, if not by the Government, at least they are so by the priesthood. In that country every- where they see the gendarmes, armed from head to foot. They see these guardians of the law going about the street with a drawn sword, and tiiat means to the people that they must obey and respect the law of the land. They come to America, and what do they sec? A man with a blue coat, brass buttons, and a small club in his hand, the import of which they do not understand ; the strength of which they do not realize until they are knocked down. So it is not to be wondered if the Ital- * ians who emigrate to America do not behave themselves properly. It seems to mo that if the American Govern- ment, instead of spending money to send to the city of New York a committee like the Ford Committee to in^ vestigate and to. look into the abuses of immigrants, would spend that same amount of money to compel these I Italians at least to remain at Castle Garden for a few weeks or a few months at the expense of the Govorn- mont, to bo instructed iji American laws, in American institutions, that much of this existing evil would be done away with. I have stated that these Italians come to America to stay. By and by they will take part in the political af- fairs of the country. By and by they will use the power which you are so kind to give them as American citi- zens, and that power, my friends, will be either used for good or for evil; that depends upon how they are ed- ucated. The question is being felt. I believe it is now pulsating in the heart of this great people — who shall rule America, the real American or the Americanized? Into whose hands shall the reins of this Government fall — into the hnnds of the real American or into the hands of the imported American ? God forbid that this government shall ever fall into the hands of the im- ported Americans. (Apphtuse.) My friends, answer me a question : Who are the orig- inators of what v/o call anarchy? Who are the pro- moters Ol all the strikes which have given this people so much trouble, which have cost this nation so much mon- ey ? Who are those that are doing all in their power to destroy that glorious institution, the sanctity of our Sabbath ? Who are those that are to-day fighting like giants to destroy that noble, the most noble, institution in America, our free schools? I think I need not answer that question. So, my friends, you see the importance, the great ne- cessity that these people bo educated, bo instructed, not only in American laws and American institutions, but, above all, in our holy Christianity. For no man can be great, no man can bo noble, no man can be true nnless 60 THE RE1JOIOTJ8 CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY. ho has in tho heart the lovo of Christ, tho grace of God. My friciKiB, tiio graco of God in tho soul is the lever that makes man great. It makes him what ho should bo. Tlie graco of God in the heart is tho step- ping-stono to all greatness, to all that is glorious and grand. If tho Italian people that come to America are aliens to American insiitutions, they aro totally so concerning our holy Christianity. 1'hey come to America loaded down with prejudices against our Protestant religion. They como to America groping their way in gross dark- ness and fanaticism. They come to America— I am sorry to say this— hating and despising the very name of Protestantism, and when you hate and despise tho name of Protestanti-sm, then you despise America and American institutions. Hence, it is of great importance that these people be Christianized, be taught the religion which you and I, through the mercies f,i God, aro per- mitted to enjoy. I could refer to a great many facts to prove these state- ments, but I will not enter into details. J wish simply to say that the Italian people are better evangelized in America than in Italy, from the fact that America is tho center and power of true evangelical t'hristianity. Tho purity of our evangelical religion is exemplified in tho lives and conduct of those who enjoy it. Tiiere is no other country in tho world, there is no other nation in tho world, that shows such a real Christian piety as tho Amorican Christians. This is a strong argument in fa- vor of what I have said, that the Italians can bo better tivongelizcd hero than nt homo. They aro away from homo influences, and you know that that is a great power, either for good or for evil. But not only this. I prove this from the success that the Blessed Master has pleased THE ITALIAN ELEMENT. 51 to have given mo since I commenced work among this peo- ple. It will bo eipht years this coming Juno since I first commenced work and to preach the gospel amqng tho Ital- ians at tho 1* ive Points House of Industry. I have the use of that beautiful chapol, one of the most lovely in tho city. Now I have on the church roll 239 communicants. Out of these 2?>Q communicants 228 have been converted and liavo joined the church by their profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. My friends, I have tho honor— and I feel proud in saying this — I liavo tho honor to repre- sent the largest Italian evangelical church in tho whole world, as far as communicants are concerned, by conver- sion. There are Italian churches in Italy that have a larger nicml ersliip than mine, but not by conversion. I have a Sunday-school with 217 children on the roll. These aro being instructed in the religion of our Lord ai d Saviour Jesus Christ. Now, how many Italians arc there in tho city of New York? I have been very much amused at tho different statements that have been made by some of our religious papers. One, especially, stated that there were 70,000 Italians in New York City. Perhaps that paper did not look into the matter very seriously. I have looked into this matter very carefully, and I am prepared to say that in tho city of New York to-day there are between twenty and twenty-five thousand Italians. During the late po- litical campaign about GOOO Italians went on registration day and registered their names, and no doubt on election day presented themselves at the polls and voted. Now, those 25,000 Italians living in the city of Now York aro thus omployod: About 5500 aro harbors ; some of them havo shops of their own and some are employed as barbers. About 5000 aro tailors, 4000 shoemakers, and say another 10,000 embracing all kinds of industries. i 62 TIIB RELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY, Some are musicians, some are artists, some are fruit ven- ders, some are giocerymen, etc., etc. ; but the actual num- ber of Italians resident in Now York City docs not go beyond 25,000. Now, from what part of Italy do these Italians come? The majority of them come from southern Italy, from the provinces of Calabria, Cosenza, and Bonaventa, in the lower part of Italy. What do these Italians do when they come to America? That has all been explained. IIow do these Italians live when they come to America? I answer that.by saying, much better than they do in Italy. My friends, the Italians could not live in America on the same kind of food that they have in Italy. The climate of this land will not allow it. A great deiil has been said about the Italians putting down the wages of the work- ing classes ; they have been blamed ; they have been slan- dered; they have been abused, especially by the press, saying that these Italians come to America to put down tho wages of the workingmcn. It is a fact, my friends, that in Italy these Italian workingmen receive as Avages about thirty cents a day. That is the average pay given to a workingman in Italy. But bear in mind, a working, man in Italy with thirty cents a day is able to provide for tho support of his family and himself just in tho same proportion as a workingman in America who receives a dollar and a half. That is a fact which cannot lie de- nied. So the Italians that have come to America would work at tho same wages as tho American workingman. Who is to bo blamed, then, for putting down the wages of workingmen ? Shall I tell you ? Tho contractors, the foremen, the bosses are the ones that take advantage of the ignorance of these people and offer them less wages than they do to workingmen of other nationalities. My friends, when any one tells you that these Italians come TUE ITALIAN ELEMENT* 58 h !'( to America to put down the wages of the workingmen, say to them, "You better look at tlie contractor, the boss, or the foreman. They are so greedy, so selfish, that they will do everything to steal a dollar from these poor people." Now, how can these Italians be reached? How can they be evangelized ? IIow can they bo Christianized? My friends, the best way to bring these Italians to Christ is to go to them frankly and honestly, telling them who you arc, what you call upon them for. Don't use any seeming deception, for that will destroy all your influ- ence. Don't tell them, as mrny do, that there is no dif- ference between Catholics and Protestants. Then they will think that you have no fixed belief. But, above all, I beg you. I entreat you, don't allure these Italians to your churches and to your mission chapels with a prom- it-e of material help ; for this destroys the work of Christ. It is a practice, I believe, which sends many souls to per- dition. This idea that we must draw the people into our churches by the promise of material help is an injury to the cause of Christ. I know missionaries who go to vis- it these people. They don't tell them directly that they will give them material help, but they begin to speak about the poor in their congregation, "Oh, wo do so much for our poor people.'' And the Italians are not 80 stupid as not to take the hint ; and that is one reason why I have always been in opposition to house-to-house visitation, because it will lead the visitors to the tempta- tion to make promises of material help bo that the peo- ple, might come to church. And then, as far as the Italians are concerned, you know they are a very polite people. They do not want to be discourteous. They know that you come to see them with the intention to invite them to your churches, M THE BELiaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK OITT, THE ITALIAN ELEMENT. bS and thoy say, " Yce, wo will como ; we will be there next Sunday," when they have no intention of coming at all. And, of conrsc, this helps the people to be de- ceitful. Go to them, my friends, oh, go to them with a heart full of love. Go to thorn, being burdened, intensely so, for the conversion of souls. Don't point at them the finger of scorn when you see them go along the street and say, "There goes a rag-picker ; " " There goes an organ-grinder." Oh, my friends, this is not preaching the gospel to the Italians. But rather say, *' There goes a soul for which the Lord Jesus Christ gave his life, a soul that must be saved or eternally lost.'" If the papers of our city, instead of calling these Italians, as some have done, " bloodthirsty Italians," would rather p6int them to the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world, your mission for good would be accomplished. Do not forget what the great Apostle to the Gentiles said. Do you remember his language ? "So, as much us in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are at liome also." What did the Apostle Paul mean? Did he mean that he did not desire to preach the gospel to anybody else but to the Bomans ? Why did he name the Ilomans above all other nationalities ? Surely he could not have meant that he did not wish to preach the gospel to the Jews or the Greeks, for this would have been against the character and the history of the man. What did he mean, then ? My friends, he meant this: that he regarded it a glorious privilege, he regarded it the most glorious opportunity that the Almighty had given him, to preach the gospel to the Romans ; that he would rather preach the gospel to the Ilomans in chains than to sit upon the throno of the Gffisars. This is what the Apostle meant. Now, if yon have the religion of the Apostle Paul, if you have the spirit of tlio Apostle Paul, every one of you should regard it the greatest blessing, the greatest privi- lege that the Lord has given you to preach the gospel to the Ilomans. You need not go to Home. You have them right here at your doors. Providence has sent them in large numbers to this city. If you are ready, if you are willing, there is an opportunity for you to preach the gospel to the Romans. " If you cannot cross the ocean, And llie heathen lands explore, Yon will find the heathen near you ; You can help them at your door." (Applause.) Mr. Dodge: Wo are coming back from across the sea now and are going to talk for awhile of a class of our population of which really very little is known to us, I am ashamed to say. We know a great deal about our colored brethren at the South ; wo know very little about the largo number who form a part of our popu- lation here. We are now going to have the pleasure of hearing for a few moments from the Rev. Henry A. Monroe, pastor of the Methodist Church in Thirty-fifth Street. i ^'i H I ; THE COLORED ELEMENT. By Kbv. n. A. MoNROK. Listening to the splendid althougli sorrowful array of statistics from ^r. King last evening, I regretted that in no possible way could I give you an accurate estimate of the colored population of this city. As a race we have been so identiflcd with the white people, and in fact the dividing line between us twists its sinuous way through our business avocations, through our churches, our Sab. bath-schools, and even through our homes in such a way that It 18 hard to separate the colored population of New York City from the white. This is one of the peculiar results for which we are indebted to the institution of slavery. In fact, it has always been my conviction that if the pet institution of the South had only lasted two centuries and a half longer, it would have solved the colored problem, by blotting it out entirely. Listening to the eloquent statement of my foreign brethren who have preceded me, it was impossible for me not to feel as an American (and I am an American if God ever made one) a touch of sidness at the thought that the people whom I represent to you to-day, a people who have been actively identified with you on this con- tinent, and who have known no other home for two cen- turies and a half, who are as really American in their thought, their sentiments, their customs, and their re- ligion as the native white people, should be compelled to be represented to you as a separate population, if not a part of the foreign population, for our consideration. THE COLORED ELEMENT. 67 Yet, while we regret these things, to quote the words of a late candidate for high political honors, " It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us" this after- noon (laughter); and no one who lias any acquaintance with the colored population < f New York City will for- get that they do present a separate feature for our con- sideration. If any of us have had in our minds the idea that the colored population in New York City would continue to be eo small and insignificant in numbers that they could readily bo absorbed into, and provided for by the same churclics and' Sabbath-schools where the white popula- tion worship, that idea may as well be abandoned, when we consider that the very lowest estimate handed in to me from reliable authority places the colored population of New York City at not less than 30,000 ; in all prob- ability it is more than that. Quito a respectable number of colored Christians, for the most part northern born, unite with and worship in our white churches. A large number of colored chil- dren have been gathered into the white Sunday-schools, but the prevailing sentiment among the colored people points in the only direction that will keep religious life among them as a people. There can be no growth, no 1 force, no spreading power in religion among a people ' who have no active part in bearing the burdens or the responsibilities of church work ; and juet so long as tlicir color imd condition separate them in the slightest de- gree from other Americans, just so long will there be a necessity for colored churches and colored pastors for the Negro- Americans. The colored element in this city crystallizes around three centers, not from choice, but from necessity, in obedience to the mandate of that most autocratic of 68 THK RKLIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW TORK CITT. THE COLORED ELEMKNt. 59 human rulors, tho Now York landlord. The first and largest center of the colored population is that sec- tion of the city bounded by the North River, Greenwich Avenue, Washington Square, and South Fifth Avenue to Canal Street, and from thence back again to tho river. Some sections, such as parts of Thompson and Sullivan Streets, have frequent prominence in Police Court annals, but the whole district teems with an immense colored popirlation, some as good as the best and many as vile as tho worst. In this district wo have four churches, three Protes- tant and one Catholic. "While I believe that my eloquent foreign brethren have good reason, perhaps, for de- nouncing the Catholic Church, and while I have no sympathy with its forms of worship and its pretensions, yet as an evangelical colored pastor, looking upon the condition of my people in this city, I thank God for that spirit that prompted the Koman Catholic Church to send down into that densely crowded section of the city, its priests lo erect that beautiful church there and to do something towards bettering the condition of those col- ored people. (Applause.) I know it is not the kind of religion that I would like to take to them, but any place that points the thoughts and aspirations of my people heavenward, any shrine where the name of Jesus is pro- nounced, is better for them than the sea of shame and crime that, surges all around that section of the city. (Applause.) The next center of colored population is that section on the west side of Sixth Avenue, reaching from Four- teenth to Thirty-second Streets. In this section wo have two churches, with a seating capacity of 900, but the congregationa of two churches situated outside the bounda of this district, Mt. Olivet and St. Mark's, are upatns capacity of 3mHi. tueiu » rli.;. i.. .ddi'-. '.°in'" 't fr'ido o. Third s; :;.>:" r—; », »». e„torprui„g ..onon- Methodist Episcopal. j. ^ j The aggregate church membership is a ^«ry "" M Vnno The average attendance upon worship at tent except at night) is neai y remember wi. .itVi an averauo attendanM ot less than 1200. Th t" 'l oon^^'o"' t^eher., of n.»n. U, proon« I'lrtmL. .nd the povort, o. p«n,nU who. wth .U 60 THK RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. THE COLORED ELEMENT. 61 the pride of their race, will never send a child to church unless decently clad, account for this, in part. One reason sent in to mo had the flavor of the religious soup-house about it. ** We can't give the children in our colored schools such costly presents and such fine spreads as they give in other schools." I did not at first think of that as a reason lor the small attendance upon our own Sab- bath-schools ; but when I remember that it is seriously proposed to form a Sunday-school trust here in New York City to prevent repeating at Sunday-school excursions and picnics, I am not surprised that our colored children, too, are amenable to that touch of human nature which makes the whole world kin. (Lauphter.) As un offset to this dark side of the facts, we have five church lyceums established, with an average attendance of eleven hundred of the best young men and women of the race. These lyceums Jiave done much good for the colored youth of this city. With the limited means at their command they have done something to satisfy the craving of tlie young people for association and amuse- ment. The church property hold by colored people in this city is valued at 1017,500. And then there is an indebtedness of nearly $100,000, while less than $100,000 represents the amount of aid reported as having been contributed by white societies and individuals toward the aid of these places of worship. I mention this to counteract the idea that the colored people of this city have been recip- ients of your charity to an undue extent. The needs of the colored church work are. first and chiefly, means to provide for the large influx of south- ern people in our community. There are other needs that press upon us, but for the most part our churches among the northern-born colored people are taking care P .f f hnmaoWes This is something to which my attention If r Ila by nearly every f^^^J^f;;^-^ 1 T ♦Uorofnio devote more attention to tne onng i:^^'„nl,"of 1 colore, .iUation to your .ttcn- " WW, our oyc. flxo.1 upon Castle Oardon "« l'""" 'f^; the last national census, ihc la ges c here, they remain, and m ncarlj every cci Wends and relatives to ^in them ^^ ^^^_ r^rrorurraS^drrrrf^ Sre::.ser™ea„d.,rp^^^^^^^ 18 better Off m no pi ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ the white. Tiie lact " , churches, 62 THE REiaoiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. They belong to u race whose faith in God was true as the polar star during a long night of bondage ; who, in the hour of the nation's peril, never produced a traitor to the flag; and who, in the growing d..ubt of to-day tliat is threatening the Church with ruin, hold in their ranks neither Anarchists, infidels, nor tramps. Such a people, with their simple faith, their loyalty and their industry,, ought to bo saved from the influoncos that surround them hero. That simple southern faith, for the most part, does not scorn to stand very well the chilling touch of a northern atmosphere. lAIuny of them retain connection with the southern churches, and re- fuse to amiiato with our northorn churches. Those com- ing under the watch-rare of the pastors here are neccs- sarily exposed to the temptations of our city life, and as a consequence, the number of former members of Chris- tian churches who have drifted back into sinful ways is appalling. Others, again, not being rrached spei dily by church influences hero, are swept away by the glitter and glare of life in the great city,and become lost to (Jod and to His Church. Give^us one earnest city missionary to work solely among the colored people, without regard to their denominational lines ; increase the seating capacity of our colored chui;chcs, and we will be better able to give an account to God for this great responsibility that the past few years have thrown upon the colored churches of New York. " Are not the colored people able to take care of them- solves in the way of missionary work among their own people?" is the question that frequently meets mo. A number of popular delusions have been knocked in tho head since this convention assembled. Permit mo to de- molish one more. Our newspapers occasionally publish the most absurd statements in regard to the colored peo- • THE COLORED ELEMENT. 68- p1o of this city. It is true that a few individuals are in comfortable circumstances for people in their sphere of life. But we have not one who would rightly bo consid- ered wealthy. Our colored congregations present an appearance of comfortable circumstances that ia more app.irent than it is real. No creature on earth under- stands better how to make much out of little than a colored man. No one ever excels him in the art of putting the best foot forward, nor in hiding his very poverty under the cover of apparent comfort. When wo consider the attitude of the laboring man in this city toward tho colored man, we will wonder that he does so well, and not blame him for not doing more. The great part of the southern emigrants consists of unskilled labor. Whenever a colored mechanic makes the mistake of coming north, where ho can enjoy a free ballot and edu- cate his children decently, he finds speedily that his trrtdo cannot be pursued here under tho same circum- stances iis at home; and he must, whether he will or not, forced by necessity, descend to the lower and unprofita- ble grade of unskilled labor. Even here, new conditions await the colored man to-day from what existed here a few years ago. In obedience to the dictates of fashion, colored coachmen, waiters, and caterers are becoming relics of a past age, the colored barber is as extinct as tho dodo ; even with tho whitewash brush the colored laborer shares a divided empire ; while thegrhining face of tho *• heathen Chinee" peeps over the wash-tub at the colored laundress. (Applause.) When wo remember that tho colored tenant pays a higher rent than any other class pay for the same ac- commodations, that they must feed and clothe them- aelvies, with all the chances in the industrial field against 64 THE RELIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. thorn, it will be scon what a small margin it leaves them to contribute to any cliurch cause. One thing that, in common with others, should appeal to you: I can tell you of our need of an open door, during the nights of the week, for our young men and young women who throng the crowded city streets. They feel that during the week their only avenue of recreation is the thcati r, or some even more questionable form of aniusemeht. If the (icrman element needed a Young Men's Christian Association, if my Bohemian brother could appeal to you so earnestly and so forcibly as he did that you should give to the young people, who really constitute a smaller number of your population than we do, suoh an outlet or avenue for them on the nights of the week, then how much more should I appeal to you for help to open a similar place for the colored youth. At present, with our churches filled, we barely hold our own. Unless something is done speedily, the scale will turn against us, as it now threatens to do, and the drift will be away from the church. And when once aliened from God, the colored element, now Ameri- can in thought and religious in conviction, may clasp hands with the foes of government, morality, and relig- ion. God send us deliverance from such a fate as that ! Mr. Dodgk : As a conference we have not time, as I wish wo had, to follow up all the various other con- stituents of our population. We have heard enough, I am sure, to interest and to stir our hearts and to show us in what direction duty lies ; and wc are now going to have the very great pleasure, to which wo have all looked forward through the afternoon, of listening to our friend, tho Rev. Dr. Mac Arthur, of Calvary Baptist Church. v"? ^! OUR DUTY TO THE FOREIGN POPULATION. By Rev. R. S. MacArthur, D.D. Mr. Chairman and good friends, in common with all, I liave listened with tho deepest interest to tho re- marks which have been made by the gentlemen who have preceded me. My mind has been instructed, my heart has been warmed, and my enthusiam has been aroused. Wo forgot, while we were sitting listening to these gentlemen, to what nationality we belonged and of what Christian denominations we were members. We remem- bered only that "God hath made of ono blood all na- tions to dwell upon the face of tho earth." Wo remem- bered only that we have bdon cleansed in tho same precious fountain drawn from Immanuel's veins ; and every man who has been washed in tho blood of Jesus is my blood relation. (Applause.) I was reminded also of tho fact that distinctions be- tween various nationalities are largely passing away ; and this suggests the first lino of remark which I pi'oposo to make to you this afternoon. Tho subject is, Our Duty to tho Foreign Population ; and my first statement of that duty is that wo are to re- member that these foreigners are here and aro here to stay, for good or for ill. I have largo sympathy with foreigners, for I am an annexed foreigner myself, and I am hero and I propose to stay here. (Applause.) Why 66 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. should they not come here ? Why should we not welcome them when they do come, if they come desiring to be true citizens of tlio American republic and to be loyal subjects of the kingdom of God? When a man comes here with a red flag of communism in one hand and a dynamite bomb in the other, we will quarantine that man for the rest of his mortal life. (Applause.) For it must be known that there is no flag beneath the Ameri- can skies but the Stars and Stripes (applause), with the banner of Christ above it. (Applause.) Almost every other country is full, with the exception of Ilussia, and I have not heard of any very great rush of foreigners into that country. Ilussia has a population now of 109,000,000. Kussia now owns one sixth of all the land beneath God's stars, and one twenty-sixth of all the land and water on the globe. Hussia is very much in need of a population, but I do not expect that the countries that send so largely of their representatives to this country arc to turn the tide of population away from these American shores to the land of the Czar. Siberia is inconveniently suggestive, as are many other things inseparably associated with the Russian government, and that country is not likely to become very attractive to ambitious and enterprising emigrants. Why should they not come to America ? They cer- tainly will continue to come, and after they have reached these shores they are to remain upon these shores. This land is to-day the paradise of the world. This govern- ment was founded. not so much after the republics of Greece and Rome as after the model laid down in the Word of God, formulated by the servant of God, Moses, the leader and law-giver of the children of Israel. This land is to become, as the ages roll by, more and more the home of foreigners, the dream alike of those bom I !'i OUR DUTY TO THE FOHEION POPULATION, 67 upon its soil and those gazing to its flag from other na- tions. Those men have come, and have come to stay. That wo may as well accept now as later ; but I think we ought to insist upon it that when they have come they shall stay as Americans. (Applause.) It is our duty to teach them that. I am weary of hearing the politicians talk about the German vote, and the Irisih vote, and the Italian vote. It is the American vote. (Applause.) They ought to leave all their old feuds on the other side of the Atlantic, and all their flags. I did not vote for Mayor Hewitt, but I gave Mayor Hewitt honor because no flag was to fly from our public buildings but our own. (Great and prolonged applause.) We ought to have done with the 12th of July as Orangemen's Walk-Day, and with several other days that represent the other line of thinking. Let them stay on the other side of the Atlantic, where they belong. (Applause.) I think, then, so far from being gloomy to-day be- cause in the providence of God and in the inevitable drift of populations these men come here, we ought to accept this as our providential opportunity to train them in American thought and life and to convert them to the Lord Jesus Christ. Why should we send mis- ' sionaries to Rome, and not preach the gospel to Rome in New York ? If our holy religion will not endure the comparison and the conflict with forms of faith from other lands, then how can we expect to convert these men when they are there in their own land, and we have simply sent a missionary to them from across the Atlan- tic ? We ought to welcome these opportnnities. The time has come for the Christian Church to say to the politicians, " Gentlemen, stand back " (applause), and for us to come to the front, and, with the welcome of re- w 68 THE RELIQIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. publicanism in one hand and tho Bible in the other, let us welcome them to American soil. (Great applause.) This I rccopfnize, I repeat, as a providential opportu- nity to lead those men into larger tlionght and life as Americans, and to load them into tho Church of Jesus Christ as believers in his blessed gospel. This leads mo to tho second thought, of which I shall speak this afternoon. Our duty is to evangelize them, to preach to them tho gospel of the blessed God. Tho wonderful thing about tho religion of Christ is that it is intended for, adapted to, and needed by evciy nation, in every land, at all times, throughout tlie world. There never was a religion like Christianity in that respect. Tho religions of heathenism were local, ethnic, at most, national; they never dreamed of universality; the very idea that they might have become universal would have robbed them, in the opinion of their most earnest advo- cates, of a certain sweet cxclnsivcncss which belonged to these religions, as the religion of "our sect," or "our people," "our nationality." Tho religion of Christ in- tends to convert this world, and, as sure as Christ sits upon tho throne, it will do it. That is tho divine des- tiny. That is the determinate purpose of Almighty God. The kingdoms of this world shall become tho kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ. Tho pierced hand of tho Son of God is upon the helm of this uni- verse, and ho is controlling it for tho salvation of men, and for tho glory of his own great name. Now, no religion invented by (ireek philosophers or Roman thinkers ever had thai thought; it was never sug- gested by tho dreamy thinkers of the Orient. The Lord Jesus Christ was the first founder of a religion that was intended for the whole race, in all climes, and in all countries. To-day I put the crown upon my Lord's ; OUn DUTY TO TUB FOREION POPULATION. 09 brow as the foremost thinker of the world; for he had a thought that never suggested itself to the brain of any thinker in any land at any time, when ho conceived of a religion needed by and adapted to the wants of all classes and conditions of men. Now, accepting that as true, wo move on to empha- size the thought of which I am now speaking — our duty to evangelize these nationalities. Men sometimes lose faith in tho religion of Christ as the divino instrumen* tality for accomplisliing those great purposes. But let us go back to tho time of its founder. Tho world was worse in Christ's day than it is now. The world is not growing worse, Away with your pessimism I The world is growing bettor. It never was so bright and beautiful as it is now. We are swinging into tho sunshine of God; we are catching the tones of mingled hallelujahs and seeing the splendor of millennial glory. What was Christ's remedy in his own day ? " Preach the gospel." Evangelize men. That was his remedy, lie started the Apostles out on their mission, and away over tlie rocky hills of Palestine, away over the hills of Judea and Samaria they went. Away over the gleaming ylilgcan, making its islands stepping-stones for their feet, went the sacramental host of God's elect; the cross their weapon, and with it they battered down the hoary su- perstitions; they laid them low, and tho cross was up- lifted as tho sign of conquest in tho past and of complete triumph in tho time to come. They wont to Home. What was Home l Mistress of the world; one hundred millions lying bleeding at the feet of mighty Rome. Rome stamped her foot, and na- tions felt the shock; Rome thundered, and armies rose, as Sir Walter Scott tells us that the Scotchmen rose from the heather when the bugle-blast was blown. ■70 THE REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YOIIK CITY. That was Rome— slavery triumphant, impurity deified; that was Rome. And what was the divine method? Evangelize them. What was Greece? Greece put the crown upon the brow of culture, and then culture speaks on Mars' Hill, and culture writes on an altar this sentence: "To The Unknown God." And what shall the gospel do for Greece? What -is the divine method? Evangelize them. Are we wiser than Christ? Away with your Christ- less philanthropists ! (Applause.) Away with your in- fidel humanitarians ! (Applause.) Are we to convert the world with Robert Elsmeres ? I am glad there are one or two pulpits in which the words have never yet been pronounced. We are growing weary of the name. It is very well to preach on that book when you get through with the Word of God, but it will take us a good while yet before we can leave that behind. I tell you, the hope of this lost world lies in the gos- pel of Jesus Christ. That is the solution of the labor problem. Put the love of Christ into the heart of em- ployer and into the heart of the employed, and there shall be no strikes. That is the solution of every diffi- culty that has over suggested itself to the mind or to the heart of the earnest, anxious seekers after God. I have no hope in any form of saving men, except as that hope gets its inspiration from Christ's cross and takes its au- thority from Christ's lips. The dream of the tuneful Macaulay shall be realized only when the love of Christ is in ovory heart. Then it shall come to pass that if Paul finds a slave in Bomo and that slave is converted, he will send him back to Philemon, but he will not send him back as a slave to a master, but will send him back as a brother to a brother in Christ Jesus. That is ■,.] OUU DUTY TO THE FOUEION POPULATION, 71 the hope of the world — human brotherhood in divine brotherhood, and the fatherhood of God over us all. (Applause.) Now, I must not detain you, and therefore I will speak of the last thought. I want, in this evangelizing process, to bring the evangelized into close relations with our churches and our existing methods of work. Per- haps I may prove to be a little radical at this point. I do not have so much hope in mission churches and chap- els as I find many are disposed to entertain. I could name to you a church in this city, never crowded, whose prayer-meetings are seldom full, perhaps seldom half full, and yet there is a mission church off a few blocks from this comparatively empty church home, as much as to say to the servants, "You eat in the kitchen, but we are to take our divine food here in the home church." You must not draw a sharp distinction between the rich and poor. The noblest church ought to bo for the low- liest people. They need it most. (Applause.) 'J'hey will profit by it most. When a pastor went to a man some time ago to ask him for $20,000 for building a church, he said, " No, it is too grand; it is too fine, I don't want to contribute." And the pastor said, "My dear sir, if all the people we expect to worship in that church were as rich as you, we would never build so fine a church. You don't need a fine chiirch. You have your beautiful home. We can never match your fresco; we can never match your upholstery; but we expect hundreds and thousands of poor people to worship in that church, and they need to come out from their homes twice on the Lord's Day and come into the up> lifting surroundings of this church home." The pastor got the (20,000 before he left, and some more after- wards. ta THE RELiaiOnS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. Now, I think tliis. tliut wc ought to bring the foreign popuhvtion to our home churches in a very much larger degree than we do. (Ajipluuse.) Why sliould we have this distinction in religious life, except so far as it is ab- solutely necessary, which I have so heartily opposed, and your opposition to which you have so heartily expressed in political life? I don't want to have Italian churches, and fJoiman churfthcs, and Bohemian churches, any more than the absolute necessities of the case require. The parents must have the gospel preached in the language in which they were born. Tho children are growing up Americans. They arc in our schools during tho week, and they ought to be in our home schools on tho Lord's Day, and in our home churches. (Applause.) I have tender feeling at this point. English was not the vernacular of my father and mother, and I know that in their deepest thoughts, even to the very latest days of their lives, they were not able to express them- selves in English regarding their profoundcst religious emotions. They had to speak the language of Scotland in order to express their deepest thoughts. One of the earliest memories of my boyhood is that my mother would get her Gaelic Bible when she got stuck on the rough places of the English version, and then it all be- came plain ; and one of the tendorest thoughts of my fatlier is that when lie was dying, after giving messages all about him to his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, in English, when he came to speak the tenderest words of his lieart to my mother, lie called her by pet names that he used when they were children in Scotland, in the language which thoy spoke in in- fancy. I speuk feelingly. But do you think that his children were to come up in that way ? Why, no. I know many German children in this city wlio do not OUR DUTY TO THE FOREIGN POPULATION. 78 I'l want it understood that they are German. If you picaso, they are Americans. They want to go to American schools and to American Sunday-schools, and just as far as possible they ought to be brought into close relations with us. Now. if you will pardon the personal reference for a moment, because I can better explain my idia than in any other way ; otherwise I would not make tliis per- sonal allusion- -we have in the church in which 1 have tho honor to be pastor, four languages spokin every Lords Day. We liave the Armenian tongue— represen- tatives of Pontus, Oalatia. Phrygia, Slaccdonia— lands honored by the touch of apostolic feet, consecrated by apostolic tears, and sanctified by apostolic prayers. We have the Chinamen, full of glee, full of joy— part of the service in pigeon-English, which means business-English. That is the meaning of the word "pigeon ;" it is the Chinaman's way of trying to say " business." A part of the service we have in Chinese. Then we have, begin- ning with last Sunday, another department ; that is the Italian ; and we had eight in that Italian class last Sun- day, the very first Sunday that wc met ; and I gave the hand of fellowship last Sunday morning at the commu- nion to the first representative of sunny Italy that it has ever been my pleasure to welcome into my church, and there are seven more soon to follow. Now, that may not bo a solution, but see the advan- tages of it. It saves money. Wo don't have to build a chapel. What are all these great churches closed six days m the week for? (Applause.) Yonder is a church that cost a million of dollars. I have no objection to that. Take the interest on a million of dollars, and remember that tho church is open for two services a week, and see what rent they pay for the use of that church an hoar 74 THE KKLIOIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY. and a half in tlie morning, and an hour and a lialf in the evening on Sunday. Why should not that church be open six days in the week, more or less, as tlie case may be? Wc don't economize our opportunities. Wo don't use our facilities as wo might, as God would have us use them. There ought to be something going on in these churches every day in the week. We ought to bring the poor from thciV homes in the poorer quarters in the city and put them into our finest churches. Let them hear the best music and the best preaching, and give them the best of everything we have under God. (Great ap- plause.) There is another utterly erroneous idea that all the poor mission people are in what is called lower New York. It is an utter mistake. The population in New York, as our Italian brother shows us, lies in parallel lines. My church is in Fifty-seventh Street. Right under its shadow, on either side, I can touch tenement populations as much in need of the gospel as any population, with the exception possibly of a portion of the east side, in the city of New York. Now bring them to the home center ; let them feel the throb of the church life. Do you say that they won't come? Do you say that they won't go to your fine churches ? That depends upon you. (Applause.) They will go if there is a warm hand and a loving heart to welcome them when they come. (Applause.) 'J'here is an immense deal of the gospel in a hand-shake, and sometimes a \t^onderful absence of the gospel in a hand shake. Oh, for the constraining love of Christ, that forgets whether a man is black or white, red or yellow, rich or poor— that only knows that he is a man for whom Christ died, and that puts a deeper meaning into the words than Burns ever knew when he said : *'A man's a man for a' that." (Applause.) ;,; /; 1 OUR DOTY TO THE FOREIGN POPULATION. T5 I feel deeply interested in this subject, and I want just to leave that one impression with you, that without the expenditure of great amounts of money, without the use of additional instrumentalities, we should simply use the instrumentalities that we have. When Mr. Moody answered the question how to reach the unchurched, he said, •' Go for them." Christ said: "Cornel" We say: "Yea, Lord, we come." His finger touches our hearts, and our finger touches the hem of his garment, and then Christ says : " Go ; " and then our very shadow, like the shadow of the Apostle Paul, shall have help for weaiy, struggling souls. (Applause.) w THE SEUaiODS CONDITION OF NEW TOBK CITT.- REMAEKS OF MR. VAN NORDEN. TT ETening Session. Warner Van Nordcn, Esq., presiding. The meeting was opened with devotional exercises conducted by 'the Kev. Dr. Ilulbert, after which Mr. Van Norden spoke as follows : REMARKS OF MR. VAN NORDEN. Friends and fellow-Christians, this is one of a series of meetings, two of which have already been held, to consider the duty of the Church regarding the vast population of non-church-goers which surrounds us. In the previous meetings we have noted some of the evils attendant upon the wonderful growth of mod- ern cities. That, added to the vast number of im- migrants wlio here seek a home, great numbers of people prefer a short and feverish existence in the city to the open air and tlie freer, but slower life of the country. 'I'hat a majority of our urban populations constitute an uneducated, irreligious, and in many cases a vicious mass, and that, as one has said, these modern cities are doing for civilization what the woods of northern Europe and tlio deserts of Asia did for Rome — breeding hordes of Goths and Vandals, who, unless we care for them, will rise up some day to overthrow our empire. And not only are there these people to whom I have alluded, but large numbers of what wo call the middle classes ; of artisans, mechanics, and others, most of whom are well disposed, who arc industrious and good citizens, but for whom there is no adequate church provision. We have seen in these meetings that the world has iso far failed to find a remedy for these things ; that in an- cient times they tried to amuse the people, and in modem times they have tried to employ them, but all to no pur- pose. Greece, in her Golden Age, was never lower in morality than she was when slio had reached the highest pinnacle in art and philosophy ; and that has been the history of the world to the present time. Art alone will not elevate men. The world provides no adequate reme- dy, and there is no remedy except in the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. We shall listen to-night to those who represent different parts of the Christian army, the great churches or denominations, who will tell us what the Church is doing and what the Church proposes to do to meet and to overcome the gigantic evils which we know cxiet among us— evils that not only are a barrier to the progress of religion and morality, but a menace to the nation itself. Wo shall now have the very great pleasure of listening to a roprcsentativo of the Baptist Church, the Rev. Rich- ard Hartley,, who will speak to us on the City Missions of his church. BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. Address of Hey. RicnARD Hartley. The Baptist. City Mission is now nineteen years old. The purpose o .ts organization M'as that it should be a denom.nat.onal eye constantly on tlie lookout for oppor- turn les for aggressive work among the masses of this great city; and a denominational arm that should reach beyond the limits of individual church work The society is composed of representatives from all the Baptist churches and Sunday-schools in New York to the'dV ^''' '^'"'''''' """"^ .Sunday-schools adjacent During the nineteen years of the existence of our so. ciety Its life has beeji marked by a steady and healthy g-owth, and never was it more vigorous and aggressive than It IS to-day. Applying the money test to its work, we find that in the first year of its history about six thousand dollars was raised for city mission work; dur- mg the last year over forty thousand dollars was raised. In these sums the amount raised at the mission stations IS not included. Were this done, as is done in the re- ports of other societies, the above-named amounts would be easily doubled. As a result of the money thus ex- pended, sixteen new churches have been organized, some of which are to-day self-supporting. Notable among these 18 the Mount Olivet Churcli with nearlya thousand members— the strongest colored church in the city. Our work has been confined principally to the Ameri- BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. 79 '- ; can, German, Swedish, Chinese, and colored portions of our population. Our fields of labor are distributed quite evenly over the whole city, the one farthest soutli being the Mariners' Temple near Chatham Square, the farthest north being on 187th Street. The churches and missions now receiving aid from us number twenty-two. More difiicult than the organization of churches has been the work of providing houses of worship. This is probably one of the greatest barriers against the increase of churches in our city. To this work our society has been giving special attention of late. It is a gratifying fact that within two months of the present time four new Baptist houses of worship will be thrown open. This is the result in each case, wholly or in part, of aid given by the Baptist City Mission. In addition to the work being done through this socie- ty, several Baptist churches are prosecuting vigorously mission enterprises of their own, besides contributing liberally to the general work. Among these may be mentioned Calvary Baptist Church (Dr. MacArthur, pas- tor), with its two missions; the Tabernacle Baptist Church (Dr. Porter, pastor), with two missions ; and the Berean Baptist Church, with its manifold mission enterprises under one roof. Other churches have one mission sta- tion. But it is not my purpose to-night to confine myself to a bare statement of facts, or a recital of figures. To the average mind figures fail to convey correct or lasting impressions. But while I am not going to deal with figures, 1 am going to deal somewhat with theories. There are thoo« ries underlying all facts, and I think we shall probably det-ive quite as much benefit from a study of the theories 'dr principles on which we are working, as we will from 80 THK KKI.KJIOUa CONDITION OF NKW YORK CITY. an array of the facts which arc the result of these theo- ries. We have to meet the saino ililliculty that the rest of you liavo to meet, in dctorniining where wo can best ex- pond our money ; that is, on what part of tho ishind. From the north they are crying for help, and from tho south they aro crying for liclp. Tho north is saving, " Follow us." and tho south is saying, " Stay with us.'' And between the crowd tluit is going and the crowd that is staying, it is a very hard thing to toll which crowd to go with, or whero to spend your money. liut no, as I have already told you, are trying to distribute it quite evenly. And yet, I am thankful to say. in the face of all that is said concerning the destitution of this city, re- ligiously, below Fourteenth Street, that we are spend- ing more money for purely missionary purposes below Fourteenth Street tlian we are in all tho rest of the city of New York. And futhermore,tlie money expeiulod below Fourteenth Street is producing the best results. The churches in what are called tho most populous sections of this great city are the sections tbat are giving back to us the very best results for tl)c money expended. (Applause.) Tho average additions to the liaptist churches in tho city of New York, last year, was six per cent. The average ad- dition to tho mission churches was thirteen per cent. Tho average addition to the threo mission churches in tho most populous sections of New York was twenty per cent. (Applause.) Thcro are threo churches which stretch liko a cordon along tho southern boundary of our work. We abandoned two of them, and closed them up. Wo wrote " Ichabod '* upon their walls. But there was a. timo when tho de- nomination said, " Progress means retrogression. To go BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. 81 forward, we must go backward." And we went back- ward and opened up those old houses. We kindled anew the beacon-fires of the gospel of Jesus Christ ; and in one of those churches it has been tho privilege of the pastor, during the throe years since it was opened again, to baptize nearly a hundred souls into the Church of Jesus Christ. I say this to-night, brethren, because I want you to know that we, as Baptists, do not propose to abandon tht( lower part of New York as long as there are men and women there that need the gospel of Jesus Clirist. (Applause.) We do not reap as they did in other days ; the houses are not crowded. There are not the largo and influential congregations there that there were in other days ; but I am reminded every time I think of those old fields, of what I saw in California a few years ago. Where the fever of 1849 had burned the most fierce- ly, 1 saw great sections of country ap])arontly desolated and lobbed of all that was worth taking ; but there was a great deal of wealth there still ; and there were those patient (Jhiiuimon, who were going over tho ground that had been gone over by the American miners, and those who knew best said that the patient toil of those men, year after year, was making them rich. There was still gold there, not in the great nuggets, butcnough to pay for the ])ationt, earnest toil that was expended. And so it is on these fields. We do not gather men in by tho hundreds or by the scores as they did in otlier days, but down there are God's elect, scattered all through that section of our city ; and as long as they are there, God's people must be there, and the house of God must be there, and the minister of Jesus Christ must be there. (Applause.) Another thing that we have found out is, that it pays 82 THE EELIQIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. to organize a Christian church wherever you do God's work. It has paid us as Baptists. I suppose we differ a little in our ideas on this matter from our brethren in other denominations. It has been our policy, and I hope it may continue to bo so, that if there were but a handful of God's people, and wo wore going to work in a certain location to add to this number and to save the others, to organize that handful into a church, and make that place a center to which they give the host that they have to give, and from which they get food and strength for their own religious lives. If you want to develop and strengthen men, give them something to do ; put uiion them responsibility ; make them feel that they are not a set of spiritual convalescents, but that they have joined the army of God, and that they are a detachment of the great forces of Jesus Christ, respon- sible for a certain amount of work being done. Yes, but you say, "Where can we get men who will lead them intelligently? Where can we get men to officer the churches ? " Start the church without offlcora if you will. When the church of which I am pastor was organized we had no men out of which to make deacons, and it may shock some of you good people who believe in everything being done in a certain way, but we lived a whole year without deacons, and thrived, too And when we needed the deacons, 1 will tell you how we got the first one. There was a doctor down in that part of the city, a man of wide inllucnce, and of noted infidel .nropensiticB. a man who preached against Jesus Christ and God and the Bible. Well, God graciously laid his hand on that man and brought him into the church, ftnd ho was converted and bapti/^od, and la the chair- man of our board of deacons. Where did we get the others? Why, we waited a lit- DAPTI8T CITY MISSIONS. 88 tie longer, and another man, as good as the first, was converted and baptized, and I am thankful to say to- night that I baptized my whole board of deacons, and would not exchange them for any board of deacons in New York. Mr. Spurgcon said, " If you resist the devil he will fly from you, but if you resist a deacon he will fly at you." But that is not the kind of deacons I am speaking about. They are men that can bo counted on always for anytliiiig that they think is right — veritable Aarons and Ilurs, holding u|> the hands of the pastor, stepping immediately into the arena of Ciiristian activi- ty with an intelligence and consecration which we are protte to think can come only from many years of train- ing. And there are plenty of them down there. *• The woods are full of them" — good men, strong men, who need to be brought into the Church of Jesus Christ, and then they will be as captured guns turned upon the enemy. Probably many of you have heard that story of a green Indiana recruit, who, when he went into the ser- vice, did not know anything about the rules of warfare ;. he only knew that there was a terrible fight going on,, and he was going to do the best he could. One day tho order came for his regiment to charge on a certain fort. The regiment charged, but before the men had got half way up, the colonel, seeing that it was going to bo too hot for them, that the regiment was going to be cut to pieces and the guns were not going to be captured, or- dered a retreat. The Indiana recruit was leading ; ho did not know what the bugle meant ; and, unmindful that his regiment was in retreat, he dashed on up the hill, leaped over the parapet and laid hold of a rebel by the collar. The enemy were so surprised that they did not know what to do, but stood and watched the mnn 84 THE BEUGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. 85 drag their comrade down the hill and take him into the Union ranks. The colonel said to liim, "Where did you get this fellow?" "Why," said the man, "I got him up there, and there are lots of them up there if you will go after them ." So I say, tliere are lots of them down there if you will go after tliem ; that is what they are waiting for. One of the perplexing features of mission work is the demand wo have to meet for temporal help. Our society has dealt with this question in a very simple way. Since I have bien Secretary we have not 8i)ent any money in supplying temporal need. Nor would I do otherwise if I could. At first I was sorry that there was not money to satisfy every man, woman, and chihl that came tolling a pitiful story. 1 dug into my own pocket until there wasn't anything more to dig for. What was at first a matter of necessity has become a mat- ter of principle. 1 bclievo there is danger of disguising the real point at issue. 1 think that men need to be taught that a guilty soul is worse than an empty stomach; that it is a worse thing to be outside of the kingdom of God than not to have a roof over your head ; that it is a worse thing not to be clothed with the robe of (Christ's righteousness than it is to wear a ragged coat, in good- ness of heart we defeat the very purposes of God. I be- lieve that God meant that in this life wilful vieeand persist- ent sin should teaj) its harvest, an.i 1 am fearful that as churches we are, as I have already said, disguising the real issue. Medical missions, and llower missions, and soup kitchens, and such things, in the wake of tho Church of Christ, are all right ; but pushijig them ahead and mak- ing them a bait, or an introduction to the human heart, I believe does not meet with divine sanction. (Ap- p auso.) If we are to work along these lines, had we not better change tho form of the cross, cover it with money-bags labeled "Charity"? Had we not better put a mortar and pestle on top of i', that the world may rightly read our purpose to win men in some wity; if not by the cross, by some adjuncts ? I believe that the Church of Christ is losing ground because we do not hold men steadfastly to the true issues — belief or unbelief on the Lord Jesus Christ. That most success- ful of modern missionaries, J. Hudson Taylor, who has done a work that has made his name known through- out Ihe world, says, " It is all nonsons' to say that the gospel of Jesus Christ needs a medical mission to intro- duce it." That man, who last year asked God for fifty thousand dollars in largo sums, and received it in eleven subscriptions— that man, from his experience, says, in substance : Th • religion of Jesus Christ must stand on its own basis, and must go, if it goes at all, un- introduced and unheralded and unespoused and unaided by anything else. I am not speaking for my denomination, but as an in- dividual, and do not mean to utter one word against tho sweet charity that marks the action and life of so many of our good people in this groat city. There is no city in all tho world where Christian charity is so lavish. But I do want to-night to put myself on record on this point, that I believe that as ministers of Christ and as churches of Christ we are making a mistake in thinking that anything can be even a temporary substitute for the gospel of Clirist. Temporal relief is, at the best, but a palliative that does not affect the final destiny of the soul. Let us hold to what Christ said: " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." We have no more right to depend upon a medical misBion to win people in the city of New York than had Jonah to start a medical 86 THK REUGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. mission in Nineveh. No more right liave we to come with these things seeking an introduction to the human heart, than had John tlio Haptist to go into Jeru- salem and tell people that he had asanittiriumouton the banks of tlie Jordan, to which all might go and have a good time wliile he preached the gospel to them. The gospel needs no bait. I have found this, that there is not anything that Jias such a strange fascination over the human soul, that exercises so much the mind of a man, as to make that man feel that you are in downright dead earnest about that part of him concerning which he knows so little. I believe, every time, that he who holds to that is the man who is going to win in the long run. Now just this thought more. We have also found, and we also believe, I think, with great unanimity as a denomination, that city mission work requires good men, and that the wisest investment of money, in the great work of saving men in this city, is in strong preachers, men who have been proved elsewhere. We have not time for experiments. I emphasize this thought because there is an idea afloat that any kind of a man will do for a city missionary. ller»' is the boy who wants to be a preacher and needs practical training. ''Send him down among the poor,'* says somu one, •' and let him try his hand there." Or it may be the good brother who has worn the harness many years and begins to show signs of failing strength! He is not as fresh in thought as h^ used to be. Some one suggests that he will make a good city missionary. It is wrong. Said the first and greatest preacher of the gospel, as he stood in the syna- gogue at Nazareth : " The spirit of the Lord is upon me because ho liatli anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor." All honor to the young men who are willing to BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. 87 surrender themselves to the often hard and self-denying labors of a minister of Jesus Christ. All honor to the old men who have borne the burden and heat of the day. But city missioivary work calls for riper experience than the young man possesses, and greater strength than that of the old man. Where the forces of evil arc massed in solid phalanx ; where the tides of iniquity run swift and deep ; where the human heart is covered with incrustations of evil unknown in other conditions of society, there let us put our best men, men of keen intellect and warm hearts; men from whose lips the gospel is attractive as well as powerful. Whoever we send to this people will be to many of them the only interprct-^rs of Christianity. Their utterances will be axiomatic. If they preach error, whether igno- rantly or willfully, it will be received by those who have no standard by which to test its truthfulness. If these men are cold and selfish, Christianity will be judged cold and selfish. If they are weak, Christianity will be judged weak. I was much interested recently in visiting the oper- ating-room of the Western Union Telegraph Office. What interested me most was the trifling piece of mechanism upon which the success of the whole scheme for the transmission of thought depended. By a slight adjustment, the *' circuit " could be broken or completed. In other words, yonder in some part of Europe is a man who has an important message for a man in New York. Provision has been made by which they can communi- Citte with each other. Wires bring the message to the sea. The great cable takes the thought and swiftly passes it from continent to continent The message is already in the operating-room on this side. But all that 88 THE REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. has gone before will prove a failure if the circuit be not complete. And 80 I reason in this way : " The Lord Jesus Christ died for men, and the cross of Christ has been uplifted, and tho fountain has been opened, and gorily men and women are giving their money ; wise men form these societies, and plan for them ; and yet all this may come to naught, because tho man at the mission breaks tho cifcuit." We want good men. Wo want the best men. And when the question came up, not long ago, in our society, "Whom shall we send to Mariner's Temple?" why, wo could have gotten men to go there for five hundred dollars, and plenty of them for six, seven, and eight hundred. But I said, and I thank God that others said, " Let us pay two thousand, if need be ; if need bo, more ; only let us get a man down there that will represent our society ; and in so doing let us cease to play at mission work among the poor, and make them feel that if there is brain and heart and experience anywhere on God's earth, we will get it and lay it on the altar in behalf of the salvation of their souls.'' (Applause.) Just this closing illustration. I remember that, when a student in Philadelphia a few years ago, I roomed with a medical student. He came in one day and threw up his hat, saying, "I've got it, I've got it." "Got what?" I asked. "Why, I've got a case." "What kind of a case have you got ? " And then he told me that somewhere down in an adjacent street there was a pocfl* colored woman, so forsaken and so sick and so des- titute of all other help, that she had come down to being placed at his disposal for treatment. That was the way they did there. The medical students bad to have practice in some way. i-\ BAPTIST CITY MISSIONS. 89 Now again I say, I want to enter my protest. The boys must be trained in some way, but don't let us train them at tho expense of the souls of those people. I re- member hearing, not long ago (it is a kind of crude il- lustration), of a father and a boy who were training two young bull- dogs. One of the dogs got very fierce and took hold of the old gentleman. The old gentleman be- gan to hollo with pain. Tho son danced around in glee, crying out, " Bear it, father, bear it. It will be tho mak- ing of the dog." The old gentleman didn't see it in that light. So I suppose our friends would say about send- ing these young men as missionaries to the poor ; it will be the making of the preacher. I have thus tried to outline some of the prominent feat- ures of our policy. The may be summed up as follows : 1. We shall not abandon down-town fields. 2. Our work is done chiefly through organized churches. 3. We spend little, if any, money as a society in proriding temporal relief. 4. We expect to accomplish our work through the preaching of the gospel by the best men available. THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. By AncHDEACON Alexander Mackay-Smith. It is extremely difficult to state accurately just how many Episcopal churches, proper, there are in New York City ; for a careful examination shows that sev- eral of the so-called churches (by which is generally meant the main edifice of a self-supporting parish) are largely maintained from outside sources, and are there- fore properly missions, while several of the missions are in all important respects, except in name and in a partial support from without, parishes. But if wo in- clude Trinity Church, proper, and Trinity Cliapel, as parishes (leaving the other chapels supported by that corporation to bo regarded as missions, inasmucli as ^thoy gratuitously minister mainly to the poor), wo have sixty-one organizations that may fairly bo called par- ishes. The Archdeaconry of New York (which is composed of all the clergy of the city, as well as delegates from every parish) has within the past year divided New York into sixty-seven districts, giving the neighborhood about every church, as well as about a few of the mis- sions, to the people worshiping there as their peculiar field of work, relief, and care. From this point of view there are, therefore, sixty-seven parishes, but, as I have said, several non-self-supporting chapels are included in this enumeration. So regularly are the churches scattered, that it has thus been found easy to assign THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 01 every part of the city to some church, and thus to send every applicant who comes to any of the church in- stitutions or authorities for relief or advice, to a clergy- man who will feel a sense of personal responsibility in the matter. Colored maps of the archdeaconry have been distributed to the rectors and to all who need them, and thus it is hoped in future to obviate a fruitful source of confusion and misunderstanding. Of these sixty-one parishes, thirty-six employ the sys- tem of pow-rental. But in twenty-five the pews are entirely free. Even under the pew-rental system, many of the churches are free, except at the Sunday morning service, while three of the thirty-six employ the rental system only in a measure. But under the free-pew sys- tem, where nothing is expected from any worshiper, except what he may freely giv«, these twenty-five free churches may each fairly claim to be doing mis- sion work. Why the poor do not flock to them more eagerly, will be discussed later on. But a wide acquaint- ance among our city clergy has convinced me that few, if any, are the cases in which the rectors of all churches would not welcome with delight the filling up of »11 the vacant spaces from door to chancel with a moneyless, if only a quiet, multitude. The annual auction system, with all its abhorrent features, is never employed by us at all. I have taken special pains to find out what may bo the extent of the direct mission work among the poor done by these Episcopal parishes at the present time. In this report I omit Trinity parish altogether, since it will have a place by itself. Ten parishes report fifteen regularly established mis- sions (many of them churches with parish buildings), all in the poorer parts of ^e city, with eighteen olergj 92 THE REI.IOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CTTY. THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 93 attached, and costing $71,570 per annum to support. Aggregate statistics are as follows: Communicants, ^^83; average attendance, a.m.. 2099; p.m., 2G23- Sun day-schools, 20; enrolled scholars, 7163; average attend- ance, 5212; teachers, 4S8. Of the remaining parishes, at least six have con^rega- tions made up almost entirely of poor people, and may be called missions. Twelve others give their poor work a recognized and important place in the parish work, in some cases making it the first consideration, hut not carrying on separate missions outside. The remaining thirty-one parishes, although all engaged in charitable works, do not emphasize or especially provide for mis- sion services, or spiritual work among the poor. I am careful to give an under, rather than an over estimate in these figures. Trinity parish gives the following statistics : It has four large chapels (which are really churches). At these there are eleven clergymc. actively engaged in mission work. The chapels minister almost entirely among those who could not support a parish financially. They report 3103 communicants, 2945 Sunday-school scholars on the rolls, with 219 teachers. If we add in one-half the communicants and Sunday-school scholars of Trinity Church and Trinity Chapel (which I believe to be a low estimate), wo have mission statistics for the parish of 4450 communicants. 3435 Sunday-school scholars, and 264 teacliers. Moreover, in connection with every chapel or church is an industrial school and a daily parish school, as well as innumerable guilds, spcietiesj and associations. There is also a large mission house in Fult"n Street, and a hospital; while to aid struggling parishes throughout the city, doing mission work, about $46,000 per annum is given. This, however, is not all the direct mission work of our church. It is recognized by the parishes, or more properly in this connection, by the archdeaconry, that there is an immense field in this city in which the spir- itual as well as material needs of the destitute classes can be met only by all uniting their strength in some common agency. For the time being the old New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society has been adopted by the archdeaconry to act in this capacity. It is recognized, however, that eventually tliis arrange- ment must be altered, and under the newer, moro vigor- ous, and grander views of mission fields and mission duties which are now taking possession of the church, the old society will be lost in the larger movement, larger responsibility, and larger enthusiasm of the arch- deaconry. When that day comes, instead of a mere so- ciety making its appeal here and there in the parishes, 4 and reporiing annually to a few trustees, we shall see all the parishes behind a common mission movement, feel- ing each a responsibility for supporting it, and gather- ing in all their strength twice a year, to hear what they themselves have been doing, through their agents, in the common field of work. At present, however, this ideal has not been, as I have said, fully attained. Yet much has been done. Now vigor and larger moans have been put into the old Epis- copal City Mission Society, now in its fifty-eighth year, and it is working along tlie linos indicated by the arch- deaconry. Fourteen missionaries are laboring under its supervision. It recognizes as needful for the complete- ness of its field a throe-fold division of work. . First, the public institutions. Twenty-nine of these are regularly visited. Several have a resident chaplain. Almost all have services held in them once a week, or 94 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. oftener, and daily ministrations to the inmates. In many the labors of the missionaries are eupplomontcd by bands of volunteer workers from parishes, or by the labors of societies of Christian men and women. On BlackweH'B Island n noble church, reading-room, and offices are nearly completed for the benefit of the inmates of the Almshouse and Female Asylum. The cross of Christ will soon .visibly dominate that home of want and crime, where most its truth and love are needed. At Bellevue Hospital, a beautiful building, to contain a reading-room and chapel, is a so in process of construc- tion. I may also add that every year now tlie rectors of about one half of all our parishes preach the gospel in several of the public institutions, sucli as the Tombs, the hospitals, and the various buildings on Blackwell's Island, as they may be sent by the archdeacon of the city. Much good is done in this way. The second division of the work is that of relief. This finds its center at St. Barnabas House, in Jlulberry Street, where a half score of helpful agencies make their home, and temporary help is given, to the extent last year of about 17,000 lodgings, and nearly 80,000 meals. The third division is that of aggressive, as distin- guished from indirect mission work. There is an Italian mission, worshiping at San Salvatore Church, in Mul- berry Street, and a Spanish mission, but neither of these can as yet be considered strong. A French colporteur is also supported. Then there is an English-speaking mission at St., Ambrose, a down-town church in Thomp- son Street, taken possession of when just at the point of death by us, and destined, as we hope, to be the center of an active and useful work. Mission work is also done, in some measure, at one other place, the St. Barnabas Chapel, in Mulberry Street. This is the extent of our THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 95 present mission work in this society, It is not what it should be, nor what it will be, please God, in a few years. We ought to have at least four flourishing, aggres- sive missions. At present we spend on all these objects about M5,000 per annum. The Protestant Episcopal Mission to Seamen is an- other agency that does good mission work. It supports three chapels along the water front, with pastors inccs- Bivutly engaged in visiting at seamen's lodging-houses, and looking after their spiritual interests. One of these chapels, that of the Holy Comforter, is a model of what such a building should bo in its beauty and adaptation to the wants of seamen. Special attention is given to supplying sailors with religious reading on their voy- ages. The services in these chapels are fairly well at- tended, but as most of the congregations are in port but a few weeks during the year, it is difficult to estimate with any certainty the exact results of the work. Those who are more conversant with it, however, among our Christian laymen are most positive as to the great good accomplished. In this connection must he mentioned, also, the work of the Port Chaplain and his associates, who labor among the immigrants at Castle Garden, and meet them helpfully at every point. Another missionary work which should be mentioned is that carried on by the Church Temperance Society. This society has a mission at Annex Hall, near the Bowery, where, by means of week-ttight as well as Sun- day meetings, it carries on a continual crusade against intemperance, under the banner of Christ, and with the proclamation of His gospel as the first aid to reformation in the fallen. I may speak here with propriety of two assooiationt OG THE UKLIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. THE EPISCOPAF^ CITY MISSIONS. vt wliicli are influencing for good our city mission life. Both find thoir mcmbcrsliip among tho young. One is the St. Andrew's Brotherhood. It has fiftoen chapters in Now York, with a membership of about four hundred young men, each pledged, among other vows, to try and bring another young man to cliurch on Sunday. This brotherhood is interesting itself in tho problem of infus- ing now life jnto feebler down-town parishes. It has sent its members to tho aid of one of them already, and luis poured a current of fresh blood into its services, its Sunday-8ch(jol, and all its societies. The possibilities of such an effort arc extremely important and interesting. The otiicr association is that of tho (J iris' Friendly Society. This is on olTort to guard and guide tho moral and spiritual life of young girls, and to make them feel that in the Church they have a true home. In Now York there are seventeen branches of this society, with an active membership of 1G82. Both these societies are more than local. They are spreading through all our dioceses, and asyetliave hardly more than begun thoir career of usefulness. Turning to the largo colored population of our city, I , am not able to report that the Kpiscopal Church is do- ing its duty in this direction, or has even made more than a beginning. We have but one parish, with about 450 communicants. It is a just source of reproach to us that wo are so torpid in such work. We need a new bap- < tism of grace to show us our respon8il)ilities in tliis direc- tion. Tliere are also, I believe, but three or four organized efforts being made among us to reach and reclaim tho really lowest, most abandoned, or most ignorant elements in our city life, tho " woman of the street," the " tramp," the " tough," tlie " bar-room loafor." One of these is the " Midnight Mission," working among women. A second is the " House of Mercy," laboring among the same class. They are strictly missions, and have together this past year taken 1G6 from a vicious life, received them into a Christian homo, and rescued most of them from the most awful of all fates. A third is the "St. George's Avenue A Mission*' to men, which collects its congregations from tho bar-rooms and gutters, or goes out at night, tluough its workers, to bring back to its services the groups of '• hoodlums," or idle young men, holding thoir "devil's congresses" on I he corners of the street. This work has to strug- gle against enormous discouragements. Tho "Galilee" mission of Calvary C'hurch does, I believe, a similar work. The new mission of Grace Church is to work along the same lines. There are distinct conversions from year to year, and tho greatest drawback is in the fact that tho congregations dispersing have no refuge to shelter them, save the "bar-room," the "dive,"' or tho sheltered cor- ner from whence they had been gathered. Several agencies in use in our parishes toward a more successful work among the poor cannot be passed over in silence. At least seventeen of them have a parish build- ing in connection with the church, for working purposes. In several of these buildings provision is made for men's clubs, with a reading-room, a gymnasium, baths, even a 8n;ioking-room. It has been argued with great apparent force that to make the church attractive to tho working- man, it must become to him the week-day center of all innocent amusements, bear a message to him fnll of physical as well as religious comfort, and compete suc- ccssfully with the saloon in point of good fellowship and tho pleasant things of life. To mention such a theory is to sympathize with it. Bat let us face the diffioalties 98 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. which at once confront this plfin, boldly. They ftro enor- mous, and whether they can bo succcssfnlly overcome remains to be seen. Yet few will deny that the cliurch- es have been derelict in this respect, and that whether they can now carry^out the theory to its fair complete- ness or not, it is better to fail than never to make the ef- fort. I speak of difficulties. Ijot me explain. The ex- perience wo haye thus far had with clubs, gymnasiums, and popular entertainments, has seemed to show that while immensely patronized for a time, aiul regarded for a few months as the solution of the problem, they have a generally uniform history of gradually waning strength, lessening enthusiasm, and finally spasmodic and discour- aged efforts to fill empty rooms, and persuade a few to use costly, but idle apparatus. Novelty and success are apt to fly together. The American workingman differs from the English. Ho is less tractable, harder to lead, and prefers to seek his own amusement where he will. He dislikes to have things provided for him. Moreover (and here I touch the second difficulty), even were the workingman of an easier nature to deal with, it is only here and there, as yet, that a clergyman can be found who combines the devout, intellectual, and scholarly character necessary to helpfully fill the pulpit of an earn- est parish, with those other qualities needful to carry on clubs successfully, make the rich and poor blend pleas- antly, solve the social difficulties, inspire enthusiasm to aid uninteresting people, and, in short, create in the church and parish building a busy center to the amuse menta duties, interests, and social enjoyments of a thou- sand people, who differ in education, tastes, and habits. Here and there one finds such characters, men spiritual, vet very social; scholarly, yet interested in the ignorant ; bultivatod, yet seeing the good behind vulgarity, and THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. m with that supreme gift of all, the power to keep up year after year, for the benefit of plain people, a genuine en- thusiasm in entertainments, gatherings, societies, and lit- tle questions of petty detail, which seem to the cultivated man childish, and have to struggle in his nature with a naturally deadly lack of interest. Yes, there are such men, but do they exist in sufficient numbers to supply the majority of the 100,000 churches in America? Certain- ly this question has not yet been answered hopefully. To find multitudes of such men will be one of the problems of the next thirty years. Were it a matter of pioty alono, or of social gifts and intorost in business details alone, the solution would not be difficult, but if the pastor of the future must unite all these rare qualities we shall have to change entirely our present ideas about theological ed- ucation. Perhaps, however, the result will be some- thing like this— that learning in time to shun either ex- treme, we shall be able to produce pastors who are more " men of the world " (in the good sense) than formerly^ but who will not necessarily need to know everything, about keeping a hotel. But I must turn to a different line of thought. We* come here, I take it, not to glorify our respective church- es, but to show how they might improve. Common, I suppose, to all our various Christian communions, are certain difficulties and dark problems. First of all, that we of the clergy are not better, stronger, wiser than we are. We need always to keep that difficulty full in view. Then that we live in the most self-conscious of all ages and countries, where the largest population of half-edu- cated persons makes the largest population, also, first of pretentious people, touchy to deal with in matters of au- thority ; second, of opinionated people, who think they know more than they really do ; thirdly, of secretly dis- 100 THE RKLiaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. satisfied and restless people, often not a bit grateful that they are better off than the corrosponding class anywhere else in the world, but resentful if their neighbor is bettor off than they. Resting on this foumlation come the pe- culiar difficulties incident to New York life. We have no homogeneous population. Here, eighty of every hun- dred are foreign-born, or of foreign parentage. Compare this with London, where but two out of every one hun- dred were born outside of Great Britain. We groan in religious dyspepsia under great undigested masses < f raw foreign matter. Lastly, we ail suffer from the common misfortune that the one day in seven in which the world's uproar and clamor diea sufficiently for the tranquil voice of tho Gospel to bid men listen to God speaking, has been lost to us largely. The Sunday newspaper has come. Like the sword of Bronnus, it is thrown each Sunday in- to the evenly balanced scales of ten thousand souls hesi- tating whether to hear God or m;ui. Worst of all. I fear it has come to stay, and there is not a suggestion of the liigher moral or spiritual life of man in it. Laden with these common liurdcns, tho Episcopal Church has several in New York which scorn to us, at least, special in degree, if not in kind. 1. Unusual wcaltli. It brings its unfailing evils with it, as in other churches, but more lamentably felt per- liaps in ours. No way has yet been found by us. save in one or two instances, of making the rich and poor blend harmoniously. Tlie well-to-do persist in thinking gen- •erally either that they are too full of other duties to cul- tivate the poor, or that there is little they can do, or, still again, that this " little " is to be filled by a cheque. I say this with all due and grateful remembrance of many devoted women, and some devoted men, who form THK EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 101 bright exceptions to the rule. On the other hand, the poor have themselves largely to blame. They get all kinds of false ambitions and standards from the press, and apply them to religious matters. Whereas to-day most well to-do church-goers appear at service quietly dressed, the poor persist in thinking, or saying, that they are looked down upon, if less than fashionably clad. This is not true — it is absolutely false. But their great- est error lies deeper than this. I have been myself a city missionary, and I know what I say when I assert that very many of uneducated American workingmen and their wives have an unexpressed grudge against the Church, because she cannot compel those whose social station they look up to to do more than treat them cour- teously and Christianly. 'I'hey feel that such people, if they are Christians, should cultivate intimate and equal relationships with them, make and return visits, invite them to their tables, and recognize no particular ine- quality. Now the Church can do many hard things, diminish prejudices, denounce false distinctions, set men to work for God and their neighbor, but she cannot compel any man to choose his friends at her call, or cultivate socially a person who does not interest him. It may so happen that a workingman may be a brighter, more intelligent man than his rich neighbor. It often is so. Or his wife may be far more agreeable than Dives' wife; but you cannot convince Dives and his wife of that. If you could, it would do no good. And, in point of fact, if the workingman and his wife are bright, agreeable, and gifted, they then have sense enough not to care for the recognition of Dives and his wife. It is of another kind of workingman that I am speaking — yet one of a vast multitude in this conn- 103 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY. THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 108 try, who try to believe that they have everything to make them equal to all others except money. They take no interest in the churches; they say there is no Christian equality in them. I do not know the remedy for this evil except patient teaching and sanctified com- mon-sense, " sanctifigumption," as the old negro called It. It is not so apparent as some, for it is negative rather than positive in our church life-i.e., you have to seek it not in the Church, but outside among many who, but for this misunderstanding of the Church's duties and aims, we might fairly claim as ours. 2. Our next problem is that of rendering our services more attractive. We don't need more churches, we need more people to fill the ones we have. Although we number between 30,000 and 40,000 communicants in this city (or an average of over 500 to each parish church), yet the habitual attendance is not as large as this fact would seem to indicate. We ought to have shorter, livelier services, and more of them. I find, e.g., in talking with men in various classes of the community, whose loyalty to the Church itself is strong . and un- wavering, that there is a general consensus of opinion as to the undesirable length of the Sunday morning service. Our clergy are freer from the vice of preaching long "sermons than are those of some other Christian bodies, and it is fair to add that they nre much more careful than formerly not to add service to service, with no inter- mission or chance to retire. But in the musical revival of the last few years they have not, perhaps, been apt to note that the tendency to introduce '• processionals." ** anthems," * preludes." complicated "amens," "re- cessionals " and solemn pauses, has counterbalanced this improvem«nt. Our average morning service is one and ■■•■ '1 r; r\ I'., '■' a half hours, often longer, and nearly two hours in some of the largest churches No morning service, in my judgment, and I believe that most of laity think as I do, should ever exceed one hour and twenty minutes, under any ordinary circumstancffs. Certainly a mission service should not. Among business men there is a growing impatience with the clergy in this respect. The majority of them are not intensely musical. They enjoy good music, but not prolonged music, and a brief, hearty service that is over before tht-ir interest has begun to flag. When the services get too long they do not ordi- narily complain — they quietly stay away. We shall call back thousands into our churches when we recognize more clearly than we do at present that to double our congre- gations, through more varied and briefer services, ii really to double our churches. 3. Another difficulty is that the minister is left almost single-handed, as far as the men are concerned, to fight the battle of the parish against evil. There is a great lack of any deep sense of responsibility among many of our laity. Among most there is an almost absolute indifference to what the parish is doing during the week. They have their interests, the minister has his— that is the view of eight pew-holders out of ten. Wo are trying to break this up. If the Church does not kill it, it will kill the Church. The development of the lay element in our churches is the greatest work of to- day. It is the most colossal among all our difficulties, this shirking of labor. It needs a plainer, more direct handling in the pulpit than it has yet met. 4. This brings me to the last difficulty I shall mention, in the Episcopal Church. There are certain kinds of work that we have in the past been lamentably deficient 104 THE KELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. in. The penetration of the parish into the lowest forma of city life, the familiarity with tenement-house evils, the going into the slums, the nursing of the sick among the destitute poor, the gathering in of the waifs and strays from alley-ways — here we have failed. I5ut I be- lieve that in taking a lesson from the Roman Catholics, after a fashion, and in the creation of deaconesses, we have found a, probable remedy. Women Avho have a vo- cation can be called to tiisks for which others are too weak. Women clad in a decent garb that proclaims that vocation, can pass where others would meet only repulse and insult. Women who livo apart from the world can give a singleness of purpose to their work which causes them seldom to weary. I believe in two facts about this kind of work, I am thankful to say : First, that wo have hardly begun to dream of the vast results it may accomplish; and, again, that it is perfectly feasible to keep it free from superstition or extravagances of faith. I venture to add another thought in closing. If the churches do not help humanity in New York, and pene- trate the poor and churchless with uplifting spirit-.ial truths, and* comforting deeds, and kindly sympathies, no other agency does or will. Infidel lecturers taunt the churches with neglecting the sorrows of the poor. I come to you to-day from the prisons and jails, the hospi- tals and asylums of this great city, and I declare to you that in them, comforting the unfortunate, and minister- ing to their wants, I never see that infidel lecturer, whoever he may be. He is at home preparing a lecture on the selfishness of Christianity. He fills the poor with despairing fury through his doctrines, but so far as personal exertion goes, he and his followers prefer their own comfortable arm-chairs. But in these corridora of i'. h THE EPISCOPAL CITY MISSIONS. 105 pain I do find Christian men and women going from one cell, or one couch, to another. Waiting the solu- tion of many difficult problems, which only children and demagogues find it easy to answer, they meanwhile put their hands to any task they may. 'J'hey may not under- stand the relations between labor and capital, but they know all about the relations between love and labor. I sympathize with that view of life. Christ's message has not been a failure ; it has been the most magnificent success the world has over kiiown. It is no argument against it that it docs not answer off-hand every difficulty which appears in every city and every age. it is rather (as a world-wide imd all-time religion must be) a prin- ciple, a spirit, giving insight and energy, and which in the end, working everywhere through local conditions, solves and will solve every problem. Any other kind of religion would either throw the world backward, like Mohammedatiism, by giving out-worn answers to. new- worn problems, or aim to make this world at a single bound perfect, like God's other world up yonder, a re- sult disturbing all his divine plans, so far as we can read them, for the furtherance of true moral and spiritual growth through struggling character and gradual prog- ress. So here in New York I would not have what I say construed to mean that we are worse religiously than thirty years ago. I believe that, leaving out of account those huge masses of the lowest element thrust in upon us from foreign lands, talking strange languages, and finding us as yet unprovided with the proper tools to shape and mould them — omitting those, we are better off religiously than in our fathers' time. Yet the future has greater, more difficult tasks than the past We need more union — more shbulder-to-shoulder work. We need a new baptism, a new awakening. Christ will conquer, p 106 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. yet there is still many a bitter defeat before us. But with that conviction, we can do our duty calmly : " For while the tired waves vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, thro' creek and inlet making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main." 'I • ; THE URGENT NECESSITY OF LAY CO-OPER- ATION IN CHRISTIAN WORK. By Everett P. Wheeler, Esq. Friends and Brethren, it gives me great pleasure to appear before you to-night and to say to you a few words on this most important of all subjects. Yet when I recall the words that we have all heard, when I remember the descriptions that have been presented to you of the importance of the work and of its urgent necessity, it seems to me I hardly need to say anything. It is not possible that the clergy should do all this work. It is not possible that the wants of this great city, with its suffering and its sin, should be reached by their exertions alone, and the question that is presented to you and me is, simply, whether we shall do our part or whether it shall be left undone. Now it is not for want of power in the Church of Christ that this work is not yet accomplished. The task that lies before us is far less difficult thnn the task that lay before the twelve who gathered in that upper room in Jerusalem. Certainly, to all human sight, when the traitor had gone out and those few plam, unlettered men were gathered there with their Master, the task that they had to undertake, and that they did undertake faithfully and zealously, was an impossible one. There they were, alone in all the world, and in a heathen world, a world that had not had eighteen centuries of Christian teaching, and yet they faced the danger and the diffi' 7.*- 108 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. cnlty, and they and those wlio followed thorn have ac- eomplished what we sco to-day. But, my friends, it seems to mo that the one thing that hinders us is the one great evil that our Lord found in the Jewish church of his day ; and it is an evil which was not peculiar to that race or that time. It is natural to the heart of man. It is the disposition that the best of us have to look upon any organized church with which wo are connected as a thing important in itself, a thing of which we are members, in which wo have already achieved a great deal. From this it is not a long step to conclude that we have achieved enough. Now I do not underrate the power aiid value, or the importance of organized Christian effort. I do not un- derrate the value or the necessity of the union of that cfTort into an organized church, and I do not underrate — no man praises more highly than I do— the noble apos- tolic elTorts of the many mon who have devoted them- selves to the work of the ministry, and whom we find wherever good is to bu done, wherever evil is to be met ; in every noble cause we find them foremost. No man honors them more highly than 1 do, and it is because I honor their efforts, and l)ecause I am persuaded that alone they are inadequate to the task of bringing the selfish and the greedy and the cruel to become generous and loving and humane ; because I feel that without our help and our work as men and women who also are Chris- tian brethren, the task can never be accomplished. Let us not deceive ourselves with thinking that be- cause there is a church edifice that is light d, that has music and that is pleasant for us to attend, whoso prayers we enjoy and whoso services are precious to us— ^lot us not think that any part or all of this is of itself more than a means to quicken our energy, or more than a meana URGENT NECESSITY OF LAY CO-OPERATION. 109 S to lead us to look upon things just as they really are ; that is to say, the fact that Qod has made us and all this mass of people about us who seem and are so remote to most of us — has made them all of one blood with our- selves, and has chosen to call himself the Father of us aad to style the lowest, the humblest, the meanest of them all as brothers of ourselves. Wo must really feel this, and be persuaded that it is really true and not a mere beautiful expression. A great pagan dramatist saw the beauty of it and put it into charming verse ; but 1 don't find from history that it influenced the people who sat in the amphitheater and applauded it. If to us it is more than it was to him, more than a phrase, if to us it is a reality, and we in all the walks of our life, in our business and our pleasure, in our religion and in every part of our social and politi- cal activity, realize that whatever benefits and advan- tages God has given us, whatever social position we have, whatever intellectual attainments we have aspired to, whatever education has done for us, whatever, above all, Christ has done for us, is a trust — a trust not for our own ease or comfort, not that we may sit down and en- joy as something alreiidy attained, and in the attain- ment of which we have achieved all that is to be expect- ed of us, but as an active trust, then are we Christians indeed ; then shall we realize that it is a trust which calls upon us, first of all, to try and find out how these great masses of. people about us feel, how they live, to learn something about them, to understand what it is they want and what it is they iisk from us. The more I go among them and talk with them, the more I am persuaded that the one thing which stirs dissatis- faction in their minds is not a desire for charity, bat a desire for what they think is just. I am satisfied that no THE RELiaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YOKK CITY, f URGENT NECESSITY OF LAY CO-OPERATION, 111 tho thought is in their minds and hearts that the exist* ing social conditions of this city and of this country, and of all cities and of all countries, are not Christian, are not brotherly, but that tlioy are cruel and sollish and grasping. Certainly, to some extent they are Nobody can dejiy that. To all of us, to the best of us, there comes the temptation — it comes every day — to have our own way and to please ourselves. And then there comes what I think is the most insidious temptation of all our modern life — the disposition to profit by other people's sins, to accept tho fruit of what other people do which we would not do ourselves. And let me tell you, in morals as well as in law, the receiver is as bad as the thief. I am persuaded that wo need to lay this more to heart in all our business relations and in all our social rela- tions. Wo must come right down to the plain truths of the Gospel, which certainly were not meant as metaphys- ical abstmctions, but as realities, as living principles of action. We must read our Bibles in the light of to-day, and put the words of those diiys into the words of these. Wo are told that there is " neither Greek nor Jew, nei- ther circumcision nor uncircumcision; neither barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." if we read these words only in the letter, and confine ourselves to their consideration only as a historical statement of what Christianity meant to accomplish, we stick in the bark, and never reach tho heart of the tree. But these words, when we apply them to our modern conditions of life, mean something very real. They mean that, in an enlarged and Chris- tian benevolence and charity, we are to consider the wel- fare of the Bohemian and the Pole and the Chinaman and the negro ; wo are to think of them as fellow-beings whom, cobt, as they are, upon our shores from one cir- !1 i cunistanco or another, it is our duty to love. If we are wiser than they and better off than they, and better than thoy, so much the more reason why we should love them, and why we should share with them this heritage of wisdom and goodness that the great God in his infinite bounty has given to us. Why ho should have chosen us rather than them ; why in his goodness it should have come about that they arj the poor and wretched and tho ignorant and we have received so much from him, who is there hero that is bold enough to say ? But we have it. It is the heritage of the ages ; it is not simply the fruit of what we have done, or what our fathers or ancestors before us have done ; it is the fruit of the piety and the prayers of all the holy men who followed in Christ's footsteps. If God has chosen in his bounty and good- ness to bestow it upon us, he did it not for our sakes alone, but that we might go out in his spirit and his power to help wheresoever any one of us sees an evil. And who is there of us that does not see it day by day? And we must try to remedy it, not in the spirit of haste or impatience, but in the spirit of quiet, calm, steadfast resolution ; in a word, in the divine spirit. We need to be as patient ourselves with these ignorant and weak people as God is patient with us. We need to be as calm and as steadfast in our work for them and as determined to succeed as he is calm and steadfast in all his dealings with us. My friends, when the Church of Christ is full of this spirit, and when we, as members of it, are full of this spirit, the work will certainly be accom- plished. We speak of power. This age is full of wonder at what has been accomplished by modern science. Man has learned to dominate tho powers of nature, and within the last centiiry he has accomplished what, at its begin* 112 TUB REUGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YOUK OITY. ning, waa literally and absolutoly impossible. He has learned to do it stop by stop. Those wonderful forces of nature that man has learned in this way to grasp in his hands and to use for his purposes — light, heat, steam, electricity — all these are actual verities that wo use and see the might of. But the spiritual forces that God gives to his children, the spiritual force that has been in the heart of his children from the beginning and that hsis accomplished 'all that Christianity has accomplished — that is just as real a force as any of these. It is a myr- iad times more powerful. And however great the work may seem to us. if we are filled with that power and penetrated with it. we shall not find the task too hard to accomplish. This spiritual force must be put to work wisely. It needs to be put to work whore it will tell, but it is not for mo here to-night to go into details on that subject. Others that are far more familiar with those details have spoken to you, and will speak to you again. But let me illustrate what I mean in this regard by one little fact. Take a lump of coal that you could put through the circumference of a silver dollar, and burn it in the open air. It all dissipates in vapor. It is like the good resolutions and good purposes of a great many people to whom the prayer and the hymn and the ser- mon are the voices of him that hath a pleasant instru- , ment, and who never think of any roncerted action from it. But you put that little lump of coal into the furnace of a compound engine and put that in the hold of the Britannic or the Umbria, and it will drive a ton of freight a miltf across the waters of the Atlantic. And it is by the aggregation of little lumps of cool like that, applied in that way, in the most efficient manner that man hiis yet been able to discover, that these wonderful OnOENT NECE8KITY OF LAY CO-OrEKATION. 113 f '■■ ;.?. n voyages, which to our fathers were absolute impossibili- ties, have been accomplished. Now let me give you another illustration. I havescen the process by which one of the most untractablcof sub- siances, which had defied, almost, the powers of chemical anal^'sis, was resolved and melted and formed into the lightestand the strongest of metals by the instrumentality pf an electric current flownig through u resisting con- ductor. The heat and the force tliat were generated to produce that result were developed from that very re- sistance. >So shall it bo with Us in our contest with the powers of evil, the iucrtness and stupidity of ignorance, if our zeal wax the hotter, the more stubborn the oppo- sition it encounters. Let us entreat the Giver of all goodness and the Source of all power, who stored centu- ries ago tlio forces in those coal mines, that man is now availing himself of to day — let us entreat from that same Fource of strength and purity, that the power that was in his Son and that has been in all his followers, may be warm and strong and true and steadfast in our hearts ; that wo may not sit down inactively in the face of all this world of sudering, selfishness, and sin and injustice that wcseo before us ; but that we, each of us, as we have power and ability aiul opportunity (and none of them are lack- ing), may do his part and her part in the great work. And if we set about that vigorously and earnestly, if from this meeting and other like meetings there flows, as I am persuaded tliere will, such a spirit of resolute force and endeavor, wo shall live to sec the city of New York a different place from this, a place where justice and un selfishncBg and love shall to a largo extent displace and drive out and make impossible the, evils that wo sec about us, which distress us as citizens, fl.nd which ought to make us grioro most profoundly as Christians and lead 114 THE REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. US to tho determination that so far as in us lies thoy shall be abolished. Rev. Dr. Strono : It is with great regret that we are compelled to aunounco that tho physician of the Hon. Chauncoy JI. Depew forbids his leaving his room at present, llo has not sufllciently recovered from his recent accident. His very deep interest in this conven- tion, and his ^mpathy with its objects, are sufficiently indicated by the fact that ho signed the call for this meeting, and also very gladly gave us his name for the programme. Mr. R. Fulton Cutting has consented to speak in his place. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1888. Afternoon Session. 0. li. Knevals, Esq., presiding. Mr. Knevals introduced the Kev. Dr. Martin, of the Reformed Church, who said : — " Away back in tho old slavery days, Frederick Doug- lass, tho famous negro orator, was addressing a great assembly in the old Tabernacle. His tone was wholly despondent. He had taken his text, as it would seem, out of the Book of Lamentations ; but by and by old Sojourner Truth, who was a son of God, if there ever was one, arose in a place yonder, in the center of the as- sembly, and, interrupting him, said, ' Frederick, is God dead?' "Sometimes, men and women, Christian workers of New York, when wo contemplate the problems we are- set to solve, and look over the field that we are called io conquer, our heart misgives us ; and in such circum- stances we may fall back upon the assurance of God's life and of God's scepter. God is not dead. In the days gone by, Ammon and Moab invaded Judah, and the good Jehoshaphat, recognizing the utter inability of him- self and his people to meet the onset, lifted voice and heart to Jehovah and cried, '0 Lord God, we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; but our eyes are upon Thee.' What happened? God intervened. The Ammonites and the Moabites were ground to pieces, and Judah was delivered. " So, Christian workers, if yon and I will fall back lie THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. upon God, will lay hold upon him with the hand of a liv- ing faith, one of us. in this work that wo arc called to do on Manhattan Island, shall chase a thousand, and two of us shall put ten thousand to llight." Dr. Jlartin then offered prayer. Mil. Kkkvals : In calling this meeting to order, allow mo to remind you that wo have been considering the gen- eral religious stftte of the city, above and below Four- teenth Street, wc have been considering the various elements which go to make up the population of this great city, and we began last evening to consider the work that each denomination in this city is doing. Wo will continue this afternoon. The addresses will all bo with a view of endeavoring to show in tho most com- prehensive way possible what the various mission boards of this city arc doin- for tho poor and neglected among us. Last evening, tho Rev. Dr. Crawford, Secretary of the Methodist City J^Iission and Tract Society, was pro- vented from speaking to us. and wo will now have tho pleasure of listening to a short address by him upon Methodist City Missions. !-■ THE METHODIST CITY MISSIONS. By Hjov. M. D. C. Ckawford. I think this may properly be called a city missionary institute. If those to whom I speak and who have been hero previously have been as much edified as I have, I am sure they will feel very thankful for tho opportunity. I now only regret that I caimot bring a larger and richer contribution to tho general stock of information which has been furnished, and will be furnished, but I will do all I can within tho limits of the topic which is assigned me, and within the limits of the time. In presenting the mission work of the Methodist Epis- copal Church in the city of New York, it is proper that I should recognize and refer to tho oldest organization with that object in view ever formed within our church in our city. It is tho Ladies' Home Missionary Society. It was organized in 1844. During tho first year of its history it was instrumental in planting and nursing into 8elf-.>-upport three churches. In 1850 the good women who controlled tho organization had their attention called providentially to tho Five Toints of this city, which was then tho most degraded and dangerous local- ity in this metropolis. It was tho understood resort and shelter and home of thieves, prostitutes, and drunkards, and highwaymen, and murderers. Those who have known that locality only within tho last thirty years have no con- ception of what it was fifty years ago, or even forty years ago. I do not think ibore is a locality now on this island 118 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. 80 bad as that locality was when these Christian women commenced their work there; and they gave themselves to it with a devotion and a zeal and a firmness of pur- pose that I have never known excelled in any church labor. The results were very gratifyingr. They have never been tabulated; in the nature of the case they cannot be, and should not be. There is no earthly rec- ord of the work, they have done. There is a record, I am sure, above. But this I know: there are many respecta- ble Christian familios in this community and in other communities, in church relations, whoso fathers and mothers when they wore children were rescued by these angels of mercy from the deepest depravity and a swift- coming, eternal destruction, and they were gathered into the fold of the great Shepherd. The work goes on there. There is a very interesting Sunday-school there of five hundred children, made up of six or seven nationalities. Two hundred of them are children of Italians, nearly all of them born in Italy; there are seventy-five children of Polish Jews; and they are nearly all foreigners. There was a Bible-class of women there last Suiulay numbering one hundred, and they were mostly foroii^uers. The regular church ser- vices have been maintained there in all these years, and in every year the Gospel has won trophies among those who inhabit that region. One can scarcely recognize the neighborhood ; and I confess every time I go there it is to moan object-lesson. I say if the labors of Chris- tian people, the iniluence of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, could change this neighborhood to what it is, there is no neighborhood on Manlmttan Island where God's people may not feel confident that the Gospel will work reformation and renovation. (Applause. ) I, of course, do not claim for these ladies that they THE METHODIST CrTY MISSIONS. 119 have been the only instruments employed there. Other religious organizations have worked there, and other missions have been planted there, but they were the pioneers. 1 ought also, perhaps, to say that the five German churches of our denomination in this city are con- nected with a German Conference, to which a propor- tion of missionary money is given from our general mis- sionary society, and they are doing a most important work. The German missions of our church in this coun- try have been indeed a great God-send. Converted, they are among the best people we have. None could be bettor and none more orderly. The same is true of the Scandinavian church that we have in this city. Now, aside from this, all the missionary work that is done in this city by the Methodist Episcopal Church is un- der the patronage and control of the society I represent, the New York City Church Extension and Missionary Society. It is a long name for a short life, but that is the name of it. It was organized in 1SG5. It will perhaps surprise some to whom 1 speak this afternoon when I say that in all the one hundred years in which Methodism has existed in this city, no church of our denomination ever formed and sustained a successful mission. Colonies have gone out from our churches and formed now churches, In several instances Sunday-Bcliools have been organized outside of the church school. In one in- stance, and I think in only one, a pastor was appointed ex- prcssly to develop a Sunday-school into a church ; but before the church was organized the enterprise was abandoned. So that when this Society was formed it found a tew poor struggling Sunday-schools to administer on, with no money in the treasury and no properties of any 120 TnE nELtaious condition of new youk cttt. kind. In tlio tweuty-thrcc years since its organization it has established and helped to bring to self-support a number of churches that have been deeded to boards of trustees. It still holds possession of and controls over twenty churches and chapels that are estimated to bo worth anywhere from three quarters of a million to one million of dollars. They have a membership of over three thousand. If we add the membership of the churches fhat the So.iety has planted and that have booomo independent, it makes a membership of nearly five thousand : or, to put it in other words, the membership of the churches established by this society represents about the whole growth of Jrethodisni in this city in twenty-three years ! However little the work may seem, then, to tho general public, it has been of great consequence to our denomination. This Society has had for a very prominent object, as tho suggestion I have made will show. Avhat we term church extension— the planting of new churches that wo expect to be self supporting. I am very sorry to say that I cannot report any great i)rogreKs in this direction for the last two years. The truth is, these years mark a period of great disaster to our denomiiiation, and es- pecial disaster to this society. Several of our most prom- inent and generous laymen, men who gave not only money, but countenance and influence, to every well- planned enterprise, have been taken from us. Among them was one who rose a'love tho rest — a leader, a man of largo brain and larger heart — when ho led many followed — Mr. John IJ. Cornell, who Avas for sixteen years President of this society and who devoted himself to its interests, though a busy man and a business man, with a faithful devotion that could not bo excelled if ho had been a hired agent and had no other employment !^ THE METHODIST CITY MISSIONS. 121 IIo gathered money with great facility. He scattered it with a liberal hand. He gave away in the last twenty- five years of his life more than a million of dollars. Fully one third of it was given toward the erection of Metli- odist Episcopal churches in this city. I would to God he had a successor. I believe God will raise up those who will make Methodism now and hero what it has been in the past, historically, a fair representative of tho most aggressive form of Christianity. Methodism is ag- gressive, or it is nothing. It is evangelical, or it will die. It was born in a revival, and it can only be kept alive by revival. There are a great msiny enterprises — I say a great many, — quite a number — that are now only ideal. I won't pause hero to state Avhat they are. They are only waiting for some generous heart to materialize and make them real. I believe tho work will be done. I speak this not because I think I have any overween- ing anxiety about the honor of my denomination, but be- cause I recogni/.e the truth that Methodists have a real, though an undefined and an undivided interest in tho great work of saving tho city, aiul 1 am very anxious that the Methodist Episcopal Church should do her full share. We look outside and we express anxiety about the adverse influences ; and I sympathize in it. The tide of immigration, tlie bad elements that are thrown into our midst, the influence of llomanism. and the indiffer- ence of a great many who would no doubt feel that they were slandered if they were not called very good people ; I admit tho force of all this, but I am very well pcr- BuaJed that inside the Church is a greater difficulty and greater obstacles. I do not know much of other churchcB, but I am firmly convinced that tho Methodist Episcopal Church in this city has more latent power than sjie has over oxliibited. I mean, that she could 123 THE RELIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. double hor gifts, and double bcr labors, and double her Avorks, and thereby double her numbers. Of this I have no doubt at all. 'J'ho truth is, it appears to me, that all the churches in this city should feel that the time has come for a for- ward movement aiul for a great improvement in methods. I think 1 reverence the fathers and have respect for law and order — cluvrch law and order I now mean— and for everything that is good, but I am convinced that the time has come when methods must bo changed. A merchant not loug ago said to me, "Oh, how times are changed ! When I commenced business I said to my clerks, 'These goods are well bought, and now they are half sold ; ' and I felt that when 1 stocked my store with attractive goods at reasonable jirices, the people would come and buy them. But now," said he, "I hpvo drummers all over the land, and I have drummers in Europe hunting up customers, inviting them to come and buy the goods." I don't know that this has anything to do with church affairs, but one thing I do know: the churches of our de- nomination that a while ago were thronged and crowded are now half empty. 1 do know that whereas the people were drawn to the church to hear the Gospel, now they don't come. It matters not how eloquently the (lospel is preached, it matters not how attractive the church is made. They don't come. I was profoundly interested last evening in the very able paper read by Archdeacon Smith, in which he dis- cussed the unwillingness of the poor and the unchurched to come into the church. I think he said, truthfully, that they were to blame. I have no doubt of it. I cor- dially assented to every word. But then I thought at tho same time, it is not the question who is to blamo ; the question is, how to save these people. The question ) THE METHODIST CITY MISSIONS. 128 is, not what they ought to do, but what can we do to persuade them to do what they ought; to do. It was one of England's great commanders who on the eve of a great battle said to his men, "England expects every man to do his duty ;" and a wag is said to have re- marked, "Then England is very foolish, for however England might desire that every man should do his duty. England ought not tobe such a fool as to think that every man will do his duty." We cannot expect people to do their duty, mid it is not a question of duty in this regard, it seems to me. It is the question, liow we can save these people who are not willing to be saved ; how we can bring them into the churches when they are not willing to go, I know what they deserve — to bo let alone. Hut perhaps some of those who were brought up in Christian homes and nursed under Christian influ-' ences recollect how somebody persuaded them. I recol- lect how I was persuaded Avhcn I was a little boy. I didn't want them to talk to me, but they persuaded and persuaded until they persuaded me to bo a Christian. And I ap[)rchend I speak to a great many who were persuaded in this very way. If they had not persuaded you and spoken to you again and again, you would never have become a Christian. So, 1 think, we must deal with these people. I was also very much impressed and strengthened in my ovtn convictions by the remarks that have been made here about tho importtmco of keeping churches open. I passed a grand church not long ago, that I had not seen for years, though I had occasionally been in it in former years, and I saw over its door the notice, conspicuous among other notices, " Tins Church is Open. Come in and Rest." It looked so inviting that I opened the door and went in. I found a number of other people there. I 124 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY. I wonder whether all our churches ought not to bo bo labclctl. I wonder whether there ought not to bo, wherever it is possible, Bomc one who can point those who come, at any hour of the day or any hour of the evening, to the Lamb of God that takcth away the sins of the world. Now, I have no doubt that there is a largo contin- gent that would not come. I think wo have got to go out for them, from house to house, from room to room, from street to street. I tliink wo have got to find them wherever we can find them, and talk with tliem wherever wc have opportunity. My time is Hying so rapidly that I want here to notice, before I sit down, a now agency which is alTorded by tho authority of our last (ienoral Conference, and tho initi- j ative is taken by the Society I represent in establislnng | in this city a house of deaconesses. In the order of ^ our church, now. a deaconess is one who is to minister to ■ the poor, and visit the sick, and pray with the dying, and care for the orphan, and comfort the sorrowing, and save tho sinning. She is to give herself up exclusively to that ^ work, abandoning all other occupati<.n8. Uefoio she is | entitled to a certificate, she must have passed an ap- ^ prcnticeship, if yon please, of two years, which it is sup- j, poso CHRISTIANITY AS THE GREAT UPLIFTINO POWER. 153 and abbeys, rose up through that kingdom, and they laid the foundation of the greatness that distinguishes the England of to-day. They recognized a power that other men could not, because, as I said, they were nation-build- ers, and as they laid stone on stone of the cathedral tower, they were building for themselves a state which should last for ages. The power in the Christianity of Constantine's era and that of the Norman conquest is the same power that is in the Church to-day, a power that we recognize in personal life, that we see in personal ministry, and that we believe to be still vigorous in our churches. But we are trying to force it to exercise itself solely through the narrow machinery of denominational pur- poses. We are trying to keep the great stream within the straitened channels of ecclesiastical organization, and until we burst these bonds, until we harness our steeds together to the one great chariot, using still our own machinery, our own engineers, our own forces, but pull- ing together toward the great end, we shall never realize that which which might be accomplished by the Church as an undivided force. (Applause. ) But we are met very often to-day with the argument that Christianity has lost its power, that it has been so changed by secularization, self-seeking, and world- liness that its great Founder could not trace in its lineaments the features of his creature. Is it so? Let us ask what was the testimony of Christ himself? You remember that when they came asking him that momentous question, "Art thou he that should come, or look W9 for another?'' waiting for the answer that should declare his power and manifest his attributes as the expected Messiah, he did not bid them ask the virgin mother how he was born of the Holy Ghost at 164 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. Bethlehem of Judea; he did not remind them that he was of the house of David; that he had been called out of Egypt, according to the prophecies. He gave them, as I take it, no immediate reply, but turned to the suf- fering multitudes and ministered to their nocds, and then said, " Go and tell John the things that ye do eeo and hear. The sick arc healed, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind ijecoive their sight, and to the poor the Gospel is preached." Is not that the answer that the Church is measurably ollering to-day ? Not sunicieutly, sometimes almost insignificantly, but still the answer. Let me try and explain my meaning to you, in a more perfect sense. •Suppose 1 meet one of these critics, who deny Christi- anity's inheritance of Apostolic power, up by the Cen- tral Park, and vfo walk together down Fifth Avenue. Wo have hardly traversed four blocks before we come to a spacious structure, surrounded by flower-beds and shade-trees— St. Luke's Hospital; and I turn to him and say, " The sick are healed." We go further down, to Forty-second Street and Fourth Avenue, and fronting us on one corner is the ^lanhattan Eye and Ear Hospi- tal; and again I turn to iiim and say, "The blind see, the deaf hear. " Still further down in the line of vision on that street, there is the splendid structure for ministering to the structurally crippled; and once more I say to bim, "The lame walk." Thpn I must take him farther> alas, very much farther, and with more diligent seeking, to find those mission churcheg in which to the poor the gospel is preached. But there are some of them. I can show him a few well fitted for the work they have to do, adapted t0 meet the necessities of the people and to CHRISTtANITY AS THE GREAT UPLIFTINO POWBB, 165 ! minister to their wants, and so, however faintly, yet sen- sibly echo the Saviour's words. That is the answer that Christ gave. The same power is working in us that was in him, and the time has come for a gigantic effort to be made to let loose his power upon the world, through the open doors of united effort. Every tourist in Italy, when he goes to the beautiful city of Milan, though he has been there many times be- fore, seeks at once the llefectory of the Church of Santa Maria dolla Grazie, that he may look upon that majestic fresco of the Last Supper, the triumph of the painter's art, the masterpiece of Leonardo da Vinci. Exposure and the dust of centuries have dimmed its once brilliant coloring, accident and early neglect have blurred its out- lines, but the never-to-be-forgotten face of the Christ is grandly distinguishable still. We look upon it and we know that the same face is visible among us here. We know it in our cxperieucei we see it in our Church. The answer is going out, loud and deep, the Christ is in us if wo would but see him, if we would but let him work within us the work of lore which his power can accomplish. Energy and faith, enthusiasm and common-sense, charity and prayer, and God, will move the world. (Applause.) 166 .THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. Evening Session. Morris K. Jesup, Esq., presiding. Devotional exercises were conducted by Rev. Dr. Trainor, after wliich Mr. Jesup said : ** You have had put before you in the most interesting way and glowing terms facts relative to the Christian work in this great city, and what the city needs. We are here to-night for the purpose of gathering up the seed that has been sown, and seeing if we cannot put it in some shape that will bear fruit. You will be ad- dressed to-niglit, as you will see by the programme, on the Necessity of United Christian Work, by the Rev. Dr. Josiah Strong, who, above all men in this city, is proba- bly the best equipped to tell you what this necessity is, and how best to overcome the difficulties that are in our way. We will then have an address by the Rev. Dr. Frank Russell, on House-to-House Visitation. That is the flesh and blood work that Dr. Schauffler so vividly put before us yesterday afternoon. And then the clos- ing address is to be by Bishop Andrews, on the Latent Power of the New York Churches. " I have the plea8urcR)f introducing to the audience the Rev. Josiah Strong, D.D." THE NECESSITY OF UNITED CHRISTIAN ACTION. Rev. Josiah Strong, D.D. Fellow-Christians, if any ought to dare to know the truth, it is we optimistic Americans. We believe so thoroughly in the future that wo do not fear to look the present fully in the face. A man who has faith in God, and any appreciation of his own responsibility, wants to know the facts, and all the facts, that bear upon liis duty. And it is in this spirit that this conference has been seeking a knowledge of facts during these several ses- sions. The man who has faith in God will not be daunted or discouraged by the blackest facts. A dis- couraged Christian ! A man discouraged who has ac- cess to Almighty resources I Why, it is a sight for angels to wonder at 1 Men who appreciate their respon- sibility desire a knowledge of facts, that they may shape their actions so as to fulfill their obligation^. Far be it from us to depreciate in any way the work that is being done by tlio Christian Church. Our pro- gramme indicates that the committee which drew it be- lieved Christianity to be the groat uplifting power in the world, and surely the Church of Christ is the groat em- bodiment of that power. The Church is doing a vast work, but surely no one will deny for a moment that that work might be vastly 158 THE KKLIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. greater. If all of tlio possible and latent power of the Church were actual and active power, if every Christian man and woman were in dead earnest, surely the Church might do vastly more than she is doing, 'rhorofore it is the duty of the Church to do vastly more than she is do- ing ; and until the Church reaches the limit of ability it will always bo appropriate to present truths calculated to provoke her to good work. Hence the presentation of these facts in this confer- ence. Some of them have been startling and painful. It appears that in 1880 there was in this city one Prot- ^ estant church for every three thousand souls— not so largo a supply as existed at that time in most of our great cities. Suppose, then, we take that figure as our stand- ard. Since 1880 our population has increased about fifty thousand souls every year ; that is, in eight years a city has been added to New York as large as Baltimore, a city of four hundred thousand souls. Now, to pre- servo our standard of church supply, simply to keep pace with the growth of population, not to make any ad- vance upon it, we should have added to our evangeliz- ing forces one hundred aiul thirty-three churches and missions, or about seventeen each year. But those forces have not been increased by seventeen during the whole period of eight years. They have not been in- creased by one church or mission during those eight years. As a matter of fact, while four hundred thou- sand souls have been added to our population, we have *^ actually fewer churches and missions in this city to-day than wo had eight years ago. This fact interests me less as a fact than as a symp- tom ; as a symptom it is indicative. It needs to be interpreted. I am not making a plea for the organization of more churches. As has been said and shown here on THE NECESSITY OF UNITED CHRISTIAN ACTION, 169 7 this platform during the last three days, many of our churches to-day are not half full, and few of them are fully utilized. I am not making a plea for more churches as a present need. But the church is the visi- ble representative of the religious life of the city, and is it reasonable to suppose, my friends, that that life is growing, while its visible representative is decaying? When we remember that m 1840 there was one Prot- estant church in this city for every two thousand in- habitants, and in 1880, one for three thousand inhabi- tants, and in 1887, one for four thousand inhabitants, we have established a tendency ; and tendencies are pro- phetic. You can project your line out into the future, and if that tendency remains unchanged you can tell where it will land us. • One of the leading papers of the city said last even- ing that the failure of the churches to keep pace with the growth of population indicated that the forces of barbarism are gaining upon us. Now, there are just three possible alternatives before us, one of which not may, but must be. Either this tendency will continue until our great cities (for New York is not exceptional) are heathenized, or this mighty growth of population will be arrested so that the churches may overtake it. or our churches will awake and arouse themselves to accept their responsibilities and enter the great door of oppor- tunity. Look at that first alternative. Why, my brethren, to accept that alternative is to despair of our civilization, to despair of our country, to despair of the Kingdom. To entertain it for a moment is disloyalty to Christ, to whom all power in heaven and earth has been given. And to base any hope on the second alternative, that of an ar- rested growth of our cities, is to forget the mighty forces 160 TUB BELiaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. of modern civilization. The causes of the growth of cities are complex, but chief among thorn is the steam- engine, and until you can reverse the movement of this round earth and turn us back into the age of water* pow- er and horse-power, the city is to continue to grow. It is characteristic of nineteenth century civilization. Wo can accept, then, only the third alternative. The first must not bo, the second cannot be, the third, there- fore, shall be. (Applause.) And, my brethren, there are signs that the Church of God is awakening. This conference is such a sign. There was another sucli conference held a week ago in Philadelphia ; another one, a few days before that, in Baltimore. There is the sound of a " going in the tops of the mulberry trees." And just here, my friends, do I find a powerful argu- ment for co-operation, for united activity. In the cem- etery of Trinity Church there are more bodies than there are men jostling each other on the adjoining v^alks of Broadway. There is no jostling in that ceme- tery ; there is no friction there ; there is no need that one recognize the existence of aiiotlicr. But suppose that on that broad walk men forgot for one second that there are others about them, let each man imagine that he alone lias the right of way, and in one instant you will liave a dozen collisions. There will be confusion, loss of temper, loss of time, and loss of power. Now, I venture to say that some churches are living together in peace because thcij are dead—'d you will per- \ mft the bull. (Applause.) Stir them with a new pur- ' pose; give to them the urgency of a new life, and let them neglect for one moment to recognize the existence of each other ; let them imagine that they alone have the right of way ; let them refuse to come to a mutual THE NECESSITY OF UNITED CHRISTIAN ACTION. 161 understanding, and to enter into co-operation, and there will bo collision, and confusion, loss of temper, loss of time, and loss of power. If, tlion, the facts to which we have referred demand increased activity, increased activity necessitates united activity. I would like to enlarge upon this point, but the time is too short, as there are other speakers to fol- low. Whatever may be true in the commercial or industrial world — and we hear very much of the necessity of co- operation there— the time has come for an ecclesiastical economy which shall substitute co-operation for compe- tition. We must have among the churches co-operation, united action, if wo are to have increased action. This is necessary, further, in order best to utilize our forces. Without mutual understanding, without co- operation, there will exist congestion. Suppose every church in this city and in the land "belonged to one de- nomination. Would there be any such distribution of power as now exists? And if that would not be the wisest distribution of power for one denon)ination, it is not the wisest distribution of forces for the Kingdom. If we are to make such distribution of our forces, there must bo co-operation among churches and denomina- tions. This question is vastly broader than our own horizon. It is intimately connected with our relations to the great West. Let me touch that for a moment. Suppose (and I submit the supposition is not a violent one) that the territory of Dakota ia to bo sufficiently settled by the close of this century to require one church and one pas- tor for every twenty-five square miles. Suppose the Con- gregational denomination should attempt to supply that need ; you would have to rob of its pastor every Con- 168 THE REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CTTY. gregational church in the United States outside of that territory ; you would have to take every Congregational college president and collogo professor, and teacher and editor and insurance agent ; you would have to take every Congregational clergyman on the whole list of the denomination, old and young, sick and well, and put them all into that one territory of Dakota, and then you would have to draw on ,thc Prosbyterian denomination for six- teen hundred men in order to supply that one territory. Suppose the rrcsbytcrian Church North should at- tempt to do a similar work for Texas ; you would have to move into that state every clergyman of that denomi- nation, and then there would be 4700 townships left destitute. My brethren, there is a mighty work to be done in that great West of ours, aiul it is to be done speedily if we are to give a Christian stamp to that great Empire of the West, which is to determine the character, and hence the destiny, of the nation. It is not a violent supposition to say, that by the close of this century every other township west of the Mississippi will require, in order to give that Christian stamp, one clergyman and one church. But that calls upon us for 40,000 men. Can the churches of the East supply them ? Not unless we make the wisest possible distribution of forces. As- suredly not, so long as we have grouped together in lit- tle communities two, three, five churches, where one can do the work as well, and hence better. My brethren, it is absolutely necessary, if we are to supply the waste places of our great cities, if we are to A Christianize the heathen of the great frontier, that 'our denominations- and churches come to a mutual un- derstanding, enter into intelligent co-operation, knc^v something of united action. THE NECESSITY OP UNITED CUniSTUN ACTION. 163 And not only must we have such co-operation in order to utilize existing forces to the best advantage, we must have it in order to develop the latent power of the Church. In a high organism every organ or member increases the effectiveness of every other. Your one pair of eyes makes your one pair of hands worth more than a dozen pairs of hands would bo without eyes. Your one thumb makes your four fingers worth more than a score of fin- gers without a thumb. Every member, I say, multi- plies the efficiency of all other members in an organism ; and hence organization discredits the multiplication table. A regiment of soldiers does not represent the fighting power of one man multiplied by a thousand. There is a cumulative power in it. Why is it that ton thousand soldiers can put to fiight a mob of a hundred thousand men ? It is not because the soldier is physi- cally stronger than the civilian, or braver, but it is be- cause of drill. Drill means co-operation ; it means united action, and that means cumulative power. " Ono' shall chase a thousand, and two put " — not two thou- sand, but " ten thousand to flight." What we need i? not a great Christian mob, but a mighty Christian army, that shall move forward as one man and strike as one arm. (Applause.) When the snow-flakes fall one by one, they touch you as lightly as falling feathers. But mass tliem in the avalanche, and its terrific power shakes the mountain and sweeps everything before it. My brethren, we need to-day a massed Christianity to meet the evils of the times. (Applause.) And I am persuaded that these evils have a providential significance ; that God has in- tended them as an external pressure to bring his people nearer together. 164 THE RELiaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. You remember that for generations the Hellenic tribes, with their petty jealousies, weakened one another by inter-tribal wars ; but when the Persian appeared upon their borders with liis mighty army, he proved to be the smith who, with the hammer of Avar, welded those sep- arate tribes, glowing in the fires of patriotism, into a powerful nation, and Greece was one. May it not be that this external pressure which is upon the Church of Christ to-day, may it not be that these perils shall serve to bring Christian men into closer relationship until they strike hands, until there is such a oneness, and such a manifestation of the spiritual oneness of the Church of Christ as that Church has never shown? (Applause.) One more word, and I must close. United action will not simply confer greater power ; it will increase acquaintance, fellowship, mutual confidence, Christian love. (Applunse.) When I get near enough to a man to see in him the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, whether ho be white or black, red or yellow, I must needs love him. ^Yl)atever bo the name by which he is called, whether Prot'.stant or Catholic, even though ho refuses to fellowship me, I must lovo him in spite of ■^ himself. (Applause.) But, my brethren, these Christian denominations have not come near enough to each other to see distinctly that image of the common blaster. Let them join in co- operative work. Let them draw near enough together for united action, and with shoulder to shoulder they will feel each other's liearts beating in loyalty to the one Master, and then, recognizing in each other Christ's im- ago, they will grow in confidence and grow in love. And if we ever realize this side of heaven an external unity of the body of Christ, it will come, my brethren, THE NECESSITY OF UNITED CHRISTIAN ACTION. 165 pot through discussion, which is divisive, but through co-operation, through united action.' (Applause.) The Chairmak : You will now bo addressed on tho subject of House-to-House Visitation, by tho Kov. Frank Russell, D.D., tho Field Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance. HOUSE-TO-HOUSE VISITATION. By Rev. Frank Russell, D.D. My Christian Friends, a kindly Christian conference is certainly a good thing. House-to-house visitation is a kindly Christian conference. That kind of house-to- house visitation of which I desire to speak at this time is a kindly Christian conference in every household in the community — the Christian people and the Chris- tian churches meeting every household for a kindly Christian conference. That is the whole errand. That certainly is simplicity itself. And yet there must needs be some system about it. Where are the forces to come from? Our Christian churches. Well, from which denomination? From all of them. There is no one denomination that can mark out any section of the city and say, " This is my field ; " because that field for that particular church is only that proportion of the population in that field which by tradi- tion, by circumstance, by taste, by training, would natu- rally belong tothat one denomination ; and in the terri- tory about that particular church there will bo a great many households that by tradition, by taste, by prefer- ences, or other circumstances, legitimately belong some- where else. And what has been the matter with us is, that we have been crossing each other's lines over and over again, one colonel with his regiment of Christian forces going out and covering all the field, another by his side covering the same field ; and in the process, HOUSE-TO-HOUSE VISITATION. 167 while wo have been crossing each other's tracks, half the households have fallen back without any visitation at all, bereft of the kindly Christian conference for which we plead. How then shall we get the forces ? Why, draft them from our churches. Suppose each pastor should select for his staff ofiicers one able layman for every hundred of his parish. And then, for the rank and file in the actual visiting w ork, suppose he selects ten of his mem- bership for each one of the supervisors or staff ofiBccrs — ten for every one hundred of his parish. A last frac- tion of more than fifty should count as a hundred. That force, on the average count, would bo suITicicnt in our ordinary communities to reach every household. " But Christian people are so busy." They are busy in building up the infiucnce of our denominational ma- chinery, at which, I think, there is no complaint to bo made. I thank God to-night that Christendom is as strong as it is, because, under divine guidance, there have been built up so strong denominational machineries in the evangelical churches of the world. But,we have been busy thus inside our denominational lines. Christian people are now much better drilled than they think they are, to go outside of denominational lines and go into the fields to visit. Counting these, then, the forces, the pastors as the commanders, st^ff officers ono to one hundred, rank and file ten to one hundred, how shall they be distributed in the field ? Well, the field must be districted. We must come to an ultimate unit of territory before the thing can be made feasible. If the territory, then, be large, sup- posing it is blocked into an average, so far as good limits can make it, of one thousand families each, or of five 168 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YOUK CITY. hundred families cacli, and either ten, or five, respective- ly, of these supervisors, representing different denomina- tions, with each a corps of ten workers, should be put into tliat block. If the territory bo not very large, not over twenty or twenty-five thousand population, then suppose wo omit that sectional division of the block to a thousand or to five hundred families, and make our divisions into districts of an average of a hundred families each. Then let that be subdivided into little fields of ten families each, as the unit of tlio territory to which one visitor shall be asked to go once a month. No time ? You can do it in half an afternoon, if it is necessary. "Visit every family?'' Yes. "Well, what is the use of visiting every family, when wo sliall find that likely there will be several families in that field of ten households who will be church members?" Well, partly because you cannot classify the people to whom you are to carry the Gospel. You leave out all the church people and then say to the unchurched that you are going to give them a chance, and they will not take it ; and you and I would not if we were in their places. You might as well parcel out one portion of the church and say, " We church members will not sit there any more, but when the unchurched and the poor and these outside people shall come in, we will seat them there." Let me know when they come in. They will not come, because you have classified them and come to them as a class to bo patronized. Besides that, there are a great many people who are Bpiritdally poor, but who are in some connection with the Christian churches, and a visit would not hurt them. Again, the visitor will find in these Christian families otliers engaged in the same sort of business, and will compare not^s very profitably with them. Besides that, HOUSE-TO-HOUSE VISITATION. 169 the good Christian families will always give the visitor a God-speed. Now what are the feutures connected with this simple machinery, so far as it is machinery, that involves a Christian conference with every household ? I feel, my friends, that Christian people are to blame if there be a household in the community where they live that is not approached, not once, but continuously, with Christian conferences. I think, when our grandchildren are preaching, that their cheeks will tingle with shame in the communities where they preach, if such households can be found as can say, "Well, I have been living in this community one, two, three, four, or five years, and you are the first person that has crossed my threshold on a Christian errand." One of these features is. that a large number of lay people aro engaged in the work ; and ministers have ex- pressed their crying and profound need of this for years, and express it more and more as they discuss these ques- tions that have come before this Conference. Secondly, there is an interblending of the denomina- tions in the activities of this visiting. No one of these supervisors has a corps that all belong to one church. They belong to several churches. No district has a visit- ing force that belongs to any one church. The visitors arc, each corps of them, intcrsprinkled as to their mem- bership. That relieves denominational presentation to any family. It relieves the visitor from being con- fined to the limits of a denomination. She has but one errand. She goes " In His Name," and she asks with regard to their church complexion, their religions character, what church they would choose to attend. They may not know what church the visitor attends. 170 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW TOBK CITY. They may decide to go to an altogether different church. Let us Bee how it works. The Christian visitor goes into the unchristian family, and after a very little con- versation the family is led to a choice. "Which church would you attend if you went anywhere to church ? " " Why, wo should go to such a church, because we were reared in it," or " because we intend going there if anywhere." You 'have brought the family to a decis- ion ; and when anybody is brought to a decision in re- gard to a matter to be done, it is partly done. You have made pretty good headway already. That fact is re- ported, with the name and the street and the number, to the minister of the church thus chosen by the family. 'There you have another leverage, because that minister now goes to call upon that family and to take care of them. Ho will sec that some of his membership begin an acquaintance with tlicm. The cniric is made, the dpor is open. The classification is made in the outset. As soon us the household visitation is begun in the com- munity, the classification is made and the work is large- ly turned over to the denominations. You have two leverages, the choice and the church, under that family to secure them to the place of their own selection in a natural and simple and legitimate way. The tinu) is past when we shall waste any labor in un- dertaking to twist one family into some other relations. A good Presbyterian is worth a great deal more than a poor Baptist, and a good Haptist is worth a great deal more tiian a poor Presbyterian. But you have another hold upon tho family. The month has expired. Again the visitor goes forth for that simple Christian conference, and the acquaintance furthers the encouragement in the same direction. These lever- HOUSE-TO-HOUSE VISITATION, 171 ages do their work— the beginnings of church life are started. In one month's report in the city of Buffalo, three hundred and eighty-seven families were thus started into the beginnings of church life ; not into active member- ship, but children in the Sunday-school, tho promise made to the pastor thut ho may count them as members of his flock, etc. In the city of Rochester, in the same month, one church received forty-four families, and over sixty other per- sons that were not classified as families— boarders and clerks and transient people, etc. In the little town of Montclair, not far from here, I was invited some time ago to attend their first monthly report, and they gave a classified list of an aggregate of six hundred and fourteen names and addresses of young men and young women who were disconnected from any evangelical churches, and one of tho pastors in that group said, " My brethren, would you have guessed a hundred such persons in our little community of less than five thousand population ? The fact that wo have them is worth twenty times as much as all these confer- ences that led tho way to such lists and classifications have cost us." As another feature, we rely upon personal contact. And that means a great deal. The unchurched masses will not come into our churches until we begin to become acquainted with them. I have said a great many times how Avo can get tho masses into tho churches* I know how, and I know when. It will bo when we get the churches into the masses, and it will not be till then. (Applause.) The angel in the Apocalyptic vision was seen flying with tho roll of the everlasting Gospel, to take it to them 172 THE HELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK CITY. that were tarrying upon the earth. The masses were not seen flying after tlio roll ; the roll was going to them. Wo are discussing whether the pulpit is a failure nnd whether the church is a failure, and then we have peo- ple saying to us that it is positively an easier thing to carry the gospel for a kindly Christian conference into the families where our missionaries have gone in Chi- na, Japan, and Africa, than it is in Kcw York. Wo lack acquaintance, and we will not reach, I think, very effectively the masses until wo have this Icavon that goes out quietly., gently as the dow upon the mown grass. The commercial world have found out how this works; that it is profitable to send people out to seek individual conferences with persons over the sample of goods which they want to soil; and the land is full of them, in every direction, because it is found profitable to have personal conferences with people. H there bo any difference, the most precious things and the most affecting things that the Master ever spake on earth were when ho had only one in tlie congregation— Nicodemus— and tho woman at tho well. When there is heart-to-heart speech, it need not be altogether, at first, on matters of religion. This mother that comes from the churches and visits tho mother of tho family that has no connec- tion with the evangelical churches, will very likely talk about forty things that tho pastor or the missionary would not think of, but she gains a grasp on that fam- ily that makes it easy for her after awhile to turn their thought and interest heavenward and churchward. In one community of twenty-three or four thousand population, tho nineteenth monthly report of this con- Btant visitation started into tho beginnings of church lifo thirty-eight families. Why did they not com© be- fore ? Because it took that amount of acquaintance to nOUSE-TO-HOUSB VISITATION. 178 mature their thought and their purpose until they should come. A great many say, ** Why, tho visitor has no time for all this." But where tho plan has been in operation tho pastors report that there are more voluntary calls and visits made by the visitors to the houses of their appor- tioned field than tho monthly schedule would call for, through sheer interest that has grown up from personal sympathy. Tho sick one is found there; the cripple is found there. In one case a woman reports tliat she found in one of the iiouseholds a child twelve years old, injured in spine and hip, who would never walk again; the mother, a member of one of the evangelical churches, in another town, from which she had moved within a few years ; and that child told tho visitor, after a little ac- quaintance, that he did not know any other meaning to V tho words " Joius Christ " excepting as ho remembered K\ that it was a term that tho boys used to swear with on . , the streets. Then she added, in the presence of her pastor, " I have had more of the presence of tho Holy Spirit with me in teaching that little Christian heathen the way of life through Jesus Christ than I ever had in listening to all tho sermons ever preached to me." There are thousands of most tender and touching ex- periences that come up from these conferences in house- holds, and tho rcfiex influence of tho work upon the membership of the churches is no inconsiderable part of the matter; pastors writing that tho complexion and spiritual condition and zeal of their wliole churches are changed by it; and one pastor saying, "Come to the platform of my prayer-meeting and look into tho faces of my people, and I think from tlio very glow upon them you could pick out the sixty-four visitors that were drafted from my ohurch and are in the active Bervice.'' 17^ THE RELiaiOUS CONDITION. OF NEW YORK CITY. Thoro is no stereotyped method about it, particularly. First, pastors usually meet together in groups with the advice of their official boards in their churches; usually study their own problems; usually plan their own attack; usually carry on the work. The unchurched part of the community with their prejudices will melt away while Christian conferences are being held on the part of Christian families with families that are unchristian — a vast number separating from us when Sabbath morning comes, who were thronging with us in streets and marts all through the other days of the week. This separation is sad and dangerous and awakens our interest and our prayers. And our purpose is to overcome it by a kindly Christian conference in every house. (Ap- plause.) Tub Chairman : We will now listen to the closing address of the conference, upon The Latent Power of the New York Churches — a glorious theme ; and I, for one, believe that if this city is to be brought to Christ, it is to be through the Church of the living God. I have great pleasure in introducing to the audience Bishop Edward G. Andrews, of this city, of the Method- ist Episcopal Church. THE LATENT POWER OF THE NEW YORK CHURCHES. By Bishop Edward G. Andrews, D.D. It has been stated from this platform that, approxi- mately, the communicants of the Protestant churches of this city number one hundred thousand. The question of this part of the evening is, What latent power may there be in these one hundred thousand professed Chris- tians ? I had hoped, when I accepted the invitation to speak, that I should share the responsibility of this discussion with a gentleman whose long residence and ample oppor- tunity for familiar acquaintance with New York City and its churches, and whose ability and standing, would have enabled him to speak both definitely and with authority. But, after all, who could tell what latent power there is in this Church of the Lord Christ in this city ? Will somebody tell what latent fire and flame there is, consoli- dated throughout the long ages gone by, in the coal-fields of the Alloghanios ; tell what groat steamers shall feel the mighty throb of that power and be pushed through all waters to all shores ; tell what hum of machinery shall be hoard in all lands ; tell what cheer and comfort shall be found in so many homes ? Will somebody tell what of force there is, yet latent so far as we are con- cerned, in that subtle thing we call electricity, some- 170 THK KELIOIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITV. thing of which we know am\ some part of which wo uti- lize ; and when you have failed to do that, consent tliat we must all fail to tell what a hundred thousand men, women, and youth, in right relations to the gospel of Christ, and using and being used by its supernatural forces, shall effect toward the transformation of char- acter and of society hero ? It 8ur[)asso8 our power. Wo have lieard of what little bands of resolute, high- minded, heroic men have done at dilTertnt times and through protracted campaigns. Those familiar with the history of India, for instance, know how often a little handful of English soldiers, with their hereditary valor, with their high purpose, with their fine leadership, have withstood whole hosts of their adversiiries and on succes- Bivo fields routed them. And will somebody tell what a hundred thousand men and women in New York City, in whom dwells the spirit of the Divine Master and who are using the agencies which he gives to them, shall ac- complish toward the salvation of people in this city and the reconstruction of society here ? 1 cannot. Wo suppose the conditions, let us note clearly. Wo suppose what may be true, namely, that these hundred thousand people shall really get personally where they ought to be. We do not ask that there shall be any change in mental caliber or furnishing. Wo do not ask that there shall be any changes in their social positions. They shall occupy all places, from the highest to the lowest, doing all sorts of service and all sorts of work. Multitudes of them shall be by the conditions of their life precluded from very enlarged activity, or constant activity, in the matter of Christian effort. All that may bo true. All that wo ask is that they shall como where they ought to bo under the gospel of Christ— whore God requires that they shall come. In the first place, that THE LATENT POWER OF THE NEW YORK CHURCHES. 17T each one of them shall have the open vision of eternal and divine things, that wo call faith. Then, that each one of thorn, moved by this vision, shall gladly and un- reservedly put himself, all that he is, and all that he has, under the blessed and perfect government of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then, thirdly, that thus coming in consecration to Christ he shall somehow, through the prayer of a penitent faith, be brought into that personal relation of trust in the Lord Christ which establishes perfect union, even as the branch is united to the vine ; 60 that from the infinite fullness of Christ's personal spiritual perfections there shall (low down into each one of these hundred thousand believing and attached souls a continuous energy of goodness, by which tho man shall bo completely delivered from all low aims and low tastes, and tho power of evil, and shall enter into all graces, and be furnished with all aptitudes of spirit for contact with his fellow-men. So, in a word, that each one, thus rightly related to Christ as ho may be, shall have a con- tinuous humility and obedience ; a joyous rest of soul in the truth of Christ, great loyalty to him, a burning desire to accomplish something for his glory ; a tender pity for human souls enthralled by sin and going to. ruin, and a conscious walking in eternily. All that is supposed to bo the right condition of every Christian man and every Christian woman, and short of that no such professed Christianity may stop and bo blameless. Thus conditioned as to his own charactor, let us re- member, when we are trying to ascertain what can be done by these hundred thousand people, that they are to work, not simply with ordinary implements, but they are given supernatural forces. First, tho force of a supernatural Sa- viour whom they may declare ; tho high doctrine of one who has come to this earth of ours to be Brother to all 178 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. men, even to the lowliest, and to minister comfort and guidance and everlasting salvation. So that the doc- trine which they proclaim is manna to hungry souls, and it is water to thirsty lips, and it is rest to the weary ones, and it is deliverance to the enslaved, and it is hope to the sorrowful and despairing. Oh, how true it is, that if a man goes in the right spirit to spoak to others of their salvation, and then is permitted to lift up before them the Lord Jesus Christ, then often is it realized that thiit Jesus draws even the most alienated hearts to him ! And then we arc to remoniber, further, that it is not only in a Christ that those hundred thousand people arc to have a sort of supernatural power upon the minds for which they work, but that they themselves are under the spe- cial provisions of the New Testament economy ; they are vehicles, channels of a divine spiritual force, inde- . finable, not separable in thought altogether from ordi- nary human activities ; that a Christian man is privi- leged, through the simple and contiuuous prayer of faith,' to receive into himself such a spiritual force that somehow or other his word will often and actually be more than a human word ; ho shall be like an electric battery, charged, and ready to send forth energy unex- pected upon those who approach it. Thus by the pres- ence of the great Saviour and the indwelling and force- ful word of ti.o Holy Spirit tlicse hundred thousand people arc made competent, are they not, to largest achievements? (Applause.) And jvs sure as we live, brethren, there is a force lat- ent now in these four hundred churches, and one hun- dred thousand communicants. Alas ! how latent, hid- den from human eyes, appearing only, as it wore, by gleams, where there ought to bo the full, steady out- . going of light and power. THE LATENT POVITEU OF THE NEW YORK CHURCHES. 170 Now, if you want to ask a little more definitely, what is this latent jwwer, where is it found, I can see at once three answers that come easily to mind. First, on the conditions named— and pardon me if I seem somehow to exhort and preach to-night — upon the conditions named, and wo cannot any of us afford to come short of those conditions, there is to bo a wonder- ful development of the power of simple Cliristian living. If all these hundred thoasand people were just simply right, under the grace of God, that itself would consti- tute a revelation of power of which we have now perhaps very little comprehension. (Applause.) That simple Christian living is the argument of argu- ments. It is the eloquence which is above all other eloquence, inoffensive, attractive, and effective. It is like the light, warm, and cheering, that falls upon the bud, and lo, it opens to all the beauty of the skies it» own beauty. It lias the sort of effect that the heat has, which, falling quietly and without sound upon the ice- berg, dissolves it all, and it disappears ! First, therefore, and foremost among the latent pow- ers of these hundred thousand Christians of New York City is this, the power of a continuous, spotless, elevated Christian life. (Applause.) Oh, if wo could bo but true, as wo should be upon the conditions suggested, if our homes wore ail full of sweetness, and patience, and fidelity, and self-sacrifice, and consideration for old and young, for masters and servants ; if among these hun- dred thousand Christians all the men that are engaged in business were only marked men of integrity on the mart and in the exchange ; if every employer was mani- festly careful for all the interests of all those whom he employed ; if tliore wore a manifest undervaluing of this world, and a proper valuing of the things that belong to 180 THE HEUGIOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. righteousness and to eternity ; if there were supremacy over the lusts of the body ; if there were manifest on countenance and in voice, as there ought to bo, the joy and peace of the Lord Jesus Christ, do you not thinlc that somehow or other, without other protracted argu- ment, multitudes of these fourteen hundred thousand people in this city, who are not supposed to bo mem- bers of Christian chyrchcs, would be drawn somehow to admire the Christ who worked such gracious changes in us, and that Cod would give us somehow ability to reach them by distinct efforts if wo should undertake it? Would not that be true? (Applause.) Oh, when it is manifest that so many Christians are only Christians in part— I w ill not say in name ; when there is such an eager pursuit after wealth ; when there is manifest such continual personal indulgence in luxu- ries and in all sorts of enervating pleasures and amuse- ments ; when there is such a strife, difficult and pain- ful in the last degree, in social circles ; when our homes are so full of sentiments and opinions, expressed freely in all parts of our family life, which are not the thoucrhts and sentimei.ts of God in regard to nghteous- ne8S°and the true values tint belong to human life; when all this is true, is it not wonderful that we have not somehow utterly ruined the cause of Christ and made him to be crucified afresh, whom we profess to love and serve? But I must not dwell upon this. I believe this plain, straightforward, Christian honesty and living, living m the spirit, is of all things the supremo necessity of the churches of New York City (applause); that it is the necessary basis of all effective argument from the pul- pit • that it is the indispensable condition of all effective peri)nal effort ; and that from this only can come the THE LATENT POn-ER OF THE NEW YORK CHURCHES. 181 true use of all material by which the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ may be built up. Secondly, I take it that under such conditions as have J been named, personal effort, now so little known among us, \ypuld be no longer latent, but would be a power of transcendent importance in the building up of the king- dom of our Lord and Saviour here. I suppose it is very natural that the Church should attempt to do its relig- ious work by proxy, and I suppose that is the tendency wliich belongs to an organized Cliristianity, undoubt- edly, that it shall have, or tend to have, a hierarchy and priesthood by whom all religious work sliall be trans- acted. It will be a new reformation, the proper enlargement and completion of the Lutheran Reformation, wlieu somehow or other it shall come to be uiiflerstood that all the Lord's people are prophets ! (Applause.) When, not out of a mere sense of dutj', not because they feel they must do it, but out of a great sense of the good which Christ offers, and the natural desire of loving liearts to give that good to others, all the young men and the young women of the world, and the older men and women, all these shall use this wondrous gift of speech to persuade others to be reconciled to the Lord Jesus Christ. My dear brethren, the fault of the churches to- day is this, that we are doing but very little of personal labor for the kingdom of Christ. If I could take yon who are here present as representatives of the churches, I could perhaps go among you and ask questions that would condemn many of us ; as, " When did you last speak to a man faithfully and plainly in regard to his ^.soul's interest? When did you tell the last one that somehow or other that Jesus whom many revile, and multitudes distrnst, has come to yon, the chief among 183 THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OP NEW YORK aTY. ten thousand and the one altogether precious, infusing a sweetness and an elevation and a hope into your life, which no one can describe ? When did you plead with some poor sinner to return to Christ, and when did you rebuke sin faithfully and lovingly?" Oh, is it not a shame that Christian churches generally are so de- fective in this personal fidelity? But now suppose, again, that the conditions spoken of did really exist, how naturally and effectively would all sorts of Christian work bo done I I suppose that then every one woulil say to his brother, "Know the Lord," frequently and persua- sively ; but then how many, even of the laity, would find themselves called to a larger and broader service? IIow many would bo called, for instance, to care, as they do not care, for the great charities of Christianity ? How many Avould give themselves to faithful, self-sacrificing labor to make the education of this great city as far as possible subserve truth and righteousness? And how many would, not as partisans, but in a spirit of utter- most loyalty to the Kingdom of kingdoms and the Lord of lords, give themselves to the clearing of our politics, as far as possible, of the corruption that so molests and threatens us on every hand ? IIow many women, set free, by God's providence, from the entanglements of ordinary life, would be found ready to dedicate themselves, as there ought to be dedication, to the work of the deaconess; how many of these, eminent by the beauty of their original character, it may be, as well as by^grace, would thus undertake to do the work of Christ? ' . , . Dear brethren and friends, if we leave this work to the ministers, it will bo undone. It is for us individual- ly, for the hundred thousand evangelical Christiana of this city of New York, to undertake the work of which TnE LATENT POWER OF THE NEW YORK CHURCHES. 183 I speak, and with friendly grasp of the hand, with ten- der, sympathizing contact, to lead men to Christ, after '^. the manner of Ilarlan Pago. We shall fill our empty churches, and, perhaps, within a short time, may trans- form the whole face of this Now York society. Why, if you think of it for a moment, if each one of these hundred thousand Christians should lead one per- son to Christ during the next year, we would have two hundred thousand ! IIow rapidly the numbers would multiply thereafter. Suppose wo make a much smaller estimate than that. Suppose that during the next year these hundred thousand Christians should lead simply one in four of their number to Christ. There would bo one hundred and twenty-five thousand at the close of one year ; and then, at the close of another year, one hundred and fifty-six thousand ; and so we should go on, overtaking the growth of our population, and causing our city to bo a city of the Lord God. (Applause.) One other latent power would no longer be latent, up- on the conditions which I have suggested : and that is, the power of wealth. Wealth is power. It is portable power, as some one has said. It is the representative of i all labor and of all service. He that possesses it may multiply himself, and even surpass himself in many directions. lie may not have genius, but ho may set genius at work. lie may bo without learning or skill, and yet skill and learning may both wait upon his will, lie may touch all parts of the world, though still here in Now York City, doing work everywhere through the wealth which God gives him. Wealth is no vulgar thing. It is only the use of it that is often vulgar. A grand thing it is, this power to accumulate resources that can be unfolded and made useful and powerful, far and wide. And so money represents 'all schools, and it m THR REUaiOUS CONDITION OF NEW YORK CITY. represents all cliurches, and it rcpresonts all missions, and it represents the press, and it represents bread to hungry people, and clothing to naked people, and medi- cine and care to those that are sick, and knowledge to those that are ignorant. This power of wealth, who shall adequately describe it ? Touching the wealth of New York City and of the church membership of New York City, 1 cannot spenk definitely, It must bo immense. They tell us that the wealth of this whole land is some fifty billions of dollars, and that it increases at the rate of six million dollars every working day of the year. And this New York City, this center of commerce and of finance and of man- ufacture, must share in this wealth even beyond its pro- portion of population. And then this Iwuidful of Chris- tian people of M'hom wc speak, must possess their full proportion. If we take note of their equipage and of their home and of their expenditure, or if we know their rating on the Exchange, wo must so think. Afany of ■ them arc men of great we tlth. And the question is, has this wealth served the kingdom of Christ as it ought to have done ? Try it by any test. Try it by the list of the subscri- bers to these city missions, which are before you. Look over those lists. What a small proportion of all the wealthy men of the churches make any subscription, ex- cept merely nominal ones, to these urgent efforts for the salvation of the unsaved masses of this city. What a small proportion of men in these difl"erent churches do the great work of the churches, the giving to home mis- sions, foreign missions, city missions. Try it by that test ; and is tlie wealth of the Church rightly used ? Try it by another test, viz., the comparison of giftord was, and he continued so. There was no money in the Church ; and the Church has never grown with ^ . „ -^ ^^T^-.- ^ -' " I' iri .1 i mil << 5f ■^"i^""^ '^ <^-% * ^ ™-V '"v * < I. J •*v <^ , .v. '•- ■ -'-• '•'■':.:': >.,-.- '<..-■-■< ; .,-.:-,V .-*■,-..- i-"v- ■ -■■s ,-..s" /," V--' •■,'■'- ''.^J^'■'•■^^■^'. ■■ ■?,■<• -f'V"'-/'^ :""■"- ^, r- . >r/r-,f^^ ,r„c: *-n -1 "l ^. , y'i