friendship exists between us. It is true and sincere. He would share his property or his last meal with me, I have no doubt. But this man is not a Christian in the sense that Christ meant it. He will not confess Christ, nor unite himself to any church. I want to win that man. We will say he is a carpenter, or a cabinetmaker. He lives a different life from mine. He may have difficulties, troubles, discouragements peculiar to his work, which make the Christian life seem unreal or even impossible. Very well. I will learn that man's trade, or at least as much of it as it is pos sible for me to know. It is not necessary for me to say anything to him about it. It is better that I don't. But the very attempt to realize for myself the actual conditions of his daily existence makes it more possible for me to reach him and win him with the new spiritual life. Why not? How shall I enter into this man's philosophy of existence (and be assured he has one, and a very decided one, too) unless I enter, in part, into the atmosphere in which, perchance, his philosophy and his disbelief had their beginning? Suppose this friend of mine is a clerk in a store. I cannot very well leave my work as a minister and go into a store and clerk, in order to put myself literally into his place; but I can acquaint myself with his surroundings, in a great many ways, if I have the willingness to go into the store and learn the conditions of his life. The experiment in each case is personal, and belongs to that department of a minister's activity of which the least he says about it the better. The philosophy, however, which underlies it is, I am fairly convinced, based upon a right principle and a correct view of the powers and demands of the ministry. No other activity known to men calls for such knowledge of all sorts and conditions of men. No other calling demands so much interest in the human. It is preeminently the man-building business of the world. And whatever honestly and truly promotes one's efficiency in that business is not only legitimate, but highly desirable and worth trying.

I have of late been much impressed by one of George Macdonald's shrewd sayings:

"To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse; the only way to make good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote. The time for speaking comes rarely; the time for being never departs."

One may present in the ministry the appearance of struggle, and unrest, and anxiety, and he may make too hard work of trying to win men, forgetting the latent and reserve power of the

truth as it always exists among the preacher's materials. There is also the danger that experiments may lead to iconoclasm of things that are and ought to be eternally the same. It is one thing to wipe the dust off a masterpiece, so that it can be seen better, and another thing to take chisel or brush in hand to make it look more modern. There is also, in the trying of experiments, the risk of being misunderstood, the danger of irritating a church into a growing sense of uneasiness concerning the next move, and on the part of the minister a dissatisfaction with old things simply because they are old.

This must be said concerning any new methods in general. Methods are largely personal. What one man makes successful another may make a failure. Yet a copy is sometimes better than an original. An experiment in the ministry or anywhere else ought to have the individual personal element in it, with this thought to steady the whole work, — experiments are means to ends. They are not the work; they are only new tools, or old tools sharpened to do the work. The best things in the ministry are the old things. With this idea a fixed quantity, I do not see any danger in trying very many experiments. The ministry has not developed itself as other professions have done. It has been too much on one line. I cannot help believing that the new creature in Christ Jesus is the whole man expanded in all possible ways, and winning other men to the same life which the Master said He came to bring to the world "more abundantly." Charles M. Sheldon. CENTRAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, TOPEKA, Kansas.

A NEW CHAIR.

THE increasing prominence of social science is making its study an indispensable part of the curriculum of our higher institutions of learning. The modern church has taken but little interest in this department of knowledge, till she has lost a leadership she ought to-day to possess. It is, however, one of the hopeful signs of the present that all those questions which spring out of man's relations to his fellows are demanding consideration on the part especially of our theological students. The outcome of Christ's new commandment is now being recognized by those who are responsible for the training of such as are proposing to follow in

the footsteps of Christ's disciples. The late encyclical of the Pope clearly shows what he thinks the church has to do with the so-called labor question. "No practical solution of it," he states in this remarkable deliverance, "will ever be found without the assistance of religion and the church. Every minister of holy religion must throw into the conflict all the energy of his mind and all the strength of his endurance." The real significance of the encyclical consists in the fact that it asserts that the social question is preeminently one with which the church must deal. This is a great step in advance for the Church of Rome, and other churches, not to be outdone, will have to take as pronounced a position. In the colleges for the training of the Roman priesthood, practical sociology will hereafter supplant to some extent the study of speculative theology. Every Catholic priest will henceforth be expected to bring the teachings of the Holy Father, as declared in this encyclical, to bear upon the social problems in his own parish. This new field of applied ethics is one which all teachers of religion must now perforce enter. They will find that the material wants of men must be considered, for the appeal of the hour is to help mankind into a better social order. There are vast complications connected with the observance of that which Christ pronounced the second great commandment. With so much now written on social questions, with the doctrinaires and demagogues who are assuming to instruct the industrial world, it is high time that in our divinity schools such careful and systematic instruction be given as will prepare the future ministers of the churches to deal intelligently with these grave themes. As service becomes more distinctively the recog nized function of those in our pulpits, more and more will be felt the need of better understanding how to help men. This is the burning question of this generation. It is applied Christianity the world is hungry for, and it is this sort of Christianity we want emphasized in the schools whence are to come the religious teachers of the times. The domain of knowledge undoubtedly widens, and it is difficult to introduce new studies into an already over-full course without an extension of its time. So post-graduate courses have been arranged to meet this embarrassment, but social science cannot safely be relegated to such extra courses.

The gospel of Christ has to do with practical things, like temperance, crime, charity, rights of wage-earners, child labor, duties to the unfortunate and dependent classes, housing of the poor, Sabbath toil, etc. It is the ethical side of the gospel, that can

no longer be safely neglected. Christ knew far better than his disciples what a world they were called to labor in, and the extraordinary equipment required for doing it. He certainly laid emphatic stress upon the philanthropic spirit, the educational impulse, the humanitarian sentiment. The wail of the widow, the cry of the orphan, even the self-created misery of the reckless and rude, called forth from Him both conduct and aid which were attractive and helpful. He is in these respects especially an example for his followers. With the mass of men, religious life is a practical necessity; they need to get hold, therefore, of its helpside. It is back to Christ we now need to go. The air rings with the proof that social problems are supreme. Sociology, as it is called, is the paramount practical science, and it is, withal, an intensely spiritual science. It is in pith and substance as old as the selfish cry of the slayer of Abel, "Am I my brother's keeper? It was the learned Rothe who once said: "I do not for one moment doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ has far deeper interest nowadays in the development of our political condition than in our so-called church movements and questions of the day. He knows well which has the more important issues behind it." Christ's method is too often spoken of as exclusively inward, but that is an unwarrantable conclusion. As to bulk, he did more in his ministry for the outward welfare of men than the inward. He met their physical needs with his beneficence, gave healing to their bodies, freed them from maladies of the mind, and discharged really the duties of a social missionary.

Man in his hitherto sharply defined and selfish individualism is being superseded by mankind in coöperative communion and mutual beneficence. The yearning of the age finds voice in the poet's prayer,

"O God, give us no more giants,
Elevate the race."

The field of the church's fiercest conflicts and greatest triumphs will henceforth not be in that of dogmatic polemics, but in the domain of social problems. Can it evangelize its own cities, going down into the cellars and up into the garrets of its own heathen at home? is the crucial question. It must, therefore, be borne in mind that all our social problems are spiritual at heart. Do they not concern "shattered ambitions and broken hearts; defeated energies and maimed lives; wasted efforts and blighted hopes; starving children and crushed old age; agonized women learning at death's door how they should have lived, and men educated in

theft as if it were an accomplishment, and trained in vice as the readiest means of living; bitter despairs, breeding weakness, wickedness, and keen miseries that make darkness more welcome than light, and the grave the only gospel of rest?" Truly all these are things of the spirit. These are the concerns which drive us to the very sanctuary of souls, to the throne of the Holy Ghost, and to the welcome consolations of the compassionate Christ. The long story of civilization is but the record of the way in which societies of men have met and mastered, or been met and mastered by their social problems. It is therefore a matter of some moment to know if our theological seminaries, especially, are in touch with this social side of the gospel, and are aiming to prepare their graduates to grapple with the social problems of our humanity. A noted English preacher has said "that the bitterest ingredient in the cup of French misery is, that her social progress has been mainly effected by men opposed to her churches and her religion." It will be a sad day for American churches when this hand-to-hand grapple with the woes and wants of the people is taken up by those outside of its membership. The only safe place for the church is in the van of every battle with iniquity, leading in every effort that promises to prevent the waste of manhood, and to contribute to national well-being and to the salvation of the souls of men. Economic impotence and despair are what the church must escape, and to this end the social mission of Christianity must anew be studied and carried out.

Our plea in this paper is a particular one, namely, that to cope with the needs of the world of to-day, to make the gospel of Christ felt as a social and economic force, we need a new chair in all our seminaries, which, perhaps, might be called the chair of Social Science. Instruction in this department I would have cover all the questions already alluded to. "What is wanted," says Mr. Ely, "is not dilettanteism with respect to those duties we owe our fellows, but hard study pursued with devotion for years." Courses of lectures on this subject have been maintained in Andover, Yale, and Hartford, and possibly other seminaries, but they have lacked the system and fullness they would have were they from one of the recognized professors in the faculties of these institutions, having an assigned time adequate for the ends in view, and so arranged as to cover the three years of the seminary course. Less than this would not comport with the importance of this proposed department, nor the instruction that the students should receive. We have been so accustomed to exalt the