is in the last analysis, all deniers to the contrary, the negro's truest and most necessary friend, and that they two together in the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ must work to each other's good and mutually bear and forbear for their happiness here and hereafter. He needs the help of education and free schools for his children and teachers and preachers who by word and deed will be the concrete pattern his children should follow. For the few who are to be the leaders of his race the negro needs the best equipment of modern education, always keeping in mind that the education that the negro leader or laborer needs must be well mixed with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the masses of negro young people Booker Washington's theory and practice of industrial education is right and timely, as all of us need to know that the latest word of secular education affirms that there goes with the training of eye and hand and foot inseparably the training of mind and heart. The negro needs a thousand missionaries of his own race, trained and consecrated home missionaries, to go especially into the great rural districts and teach and preach and train the millions of negroes. And I believe the time is at hand when a thousand more foreign negro missionaries-preachers, teachers and physicians—should go to the Dark Continent and win it for Christ and civilization. He needs, too, at home and abroad the transforming power upon negro children of the modren Sunday-school and the unpaid and devoted Sunday-school teacher. As soon and as fast as he can have them with the help of his white brother, he needs the Sunday-school organization, the convention and institute and teacher-training class, and whatever else of approved Sunday-school machinery that will take to his child the Sunday-school lesson and paper and the open Bible. After nearly twenty years of somewhat unsatisfactory experiment by the International Sunday-school Association, the negro needs more than ever the continued wisdom and loving coöperation of this great uplifting body of white workers.

And while the negro is needing so many things I call to mind also the needs of his white ally, North and South. The friend of the negro in the North needs to recognize as a Christian and business principle and method that his gifts and benefactions to the Southern negro will go further and pay larger dividends and make much more for the peace and mutual confidence of Southern blacks and whites if Northern philanthropy would work through the native Southern churches, helping them to help the brother in black. And the white men and women of the South need to turn the page of history backward fifty years and recall how in the dark days of the civil war when every white man or boy

who could carry a gun was at the front, the faithful negros, fathers and mothers of the present post-bellum generation, were toiling patiently by day in the corn and cotton fields making a living for their masters in camp; and by night they were keeping holy watch over the helpless wives and mothers and children of the soldiers of the Confederacy. Let others remember or forget, but may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if ever I be tempted to use either to abuse the negro race.

Be sure of one thing-that in the day of His final judgment God will judge Christian America according to the manner of her treatment of her negro wards. After the roll of heathen lands has been called and the foreign missionary has told how much we gave to China and India and Korea and Japan and all other lands of darkness, I think I can see a black man as leader and mouthpiece of his race come kneeling before the great white throne and saying:

"I was the black man, as you made me and my children and placed us in the Dark Continent, not knowing Thee or Thy word. Thither came the white man from America with his slave-ships, and I and my people were carried across the great sea to a land we knew not of, and kept in bondage for 300 years. Then came the red blood of war and my fetters were broken, with eight millions of helpless and ignorant people at my back. Therefore, O Lord God, before Thou dost pronounce judgment upon us as a race, let these Try servants the white men in whose hands Thou didst hold us so long stand forth and say what they have done-or left undone to make us ready for Thy judgment day."

THE AMERICAN PROBLEM

R. P. SHEPHERD, PH. D., ST. LOUIS, MO.

If you care to put into your note-books two words which may help you to visualize some of the conditions relating to the American problem, you may write the words individuality and personality. Individuality is what one is born with. It is what one has in isolation. It is what one would be if there were none other on the earth save that one. Personality is what one is in society. It is created and conditioned by education. The American problem on the side of the individual is identical with the world problem. But for many centuries the world, including the church, has misconceived the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christ came into this world not to save individuality but to save men by the education of individuality into the largest, most helpful and

truest personality. In the picturesque phrase of Frank Crane, "The medieval idea of the church was an island of saved saints in an ocean of sinners. The appeal to men was to come out from the ocean and get upon that island to be saved. The modern idea of the church is to go out and sweeten the ocean." There is nothing supremely manful to the appeal to come out from among them and be separate when those from whom you are separating are dying for your personality. To save individuals by bringing them to Christ is a simpler problem than to lay hold of the individual and bring him through Christ to his largest personality. The American problem, then, is most largely the problem of American society. There is a smack of divineness to the giving out of your life in the creation of your best personality, if in the laying down of your life others be saved. There was no need that the Captain of our salvation should have had His personality made perfect by the things He suffered, but there was need that He should, in leading many sons unto righteousness by the things He suffered, be made at once the purest, the most potent and winsome personality humanity will ever know. The human problem is the problem at the hands of Christ of Christian personality. The American problem is the problem of American society. The success of the individual in this life may be marked by the development of his individual power. The successful one in this human life of ours is the one whose life is most largely given to the development or the education of the lives of others. In our American society one institution stands unchallenged as the foundation on which all else must build, church and state, politics, industry and every form of social life. Friends, you represent not individuals here today but personalities, and as your word is scattered everywhere you see to it that the message of the living God is lost to no human ear. Remember! the most important thing of any man is not what he succeeds in accumulating but in that which he appreciates, beginning at home and ending in the heart of God. The American home is the first point of attack. Do we realize in some appallingly definite way that at no time in the history of the human race has the home been menaced by such a multitude of foes as it is today? In 1880 in America, we granted one divorce for every seventy marriages; last year we granted one divorce for every 10% marriages. In the state of Missouri we granted one divorce for every eight marriages. In Kansas City, Missouri, and in California we granted one divorce for every four marriages. And when we except our Roman Catholic population, who have almost no divorces, the gigantic proportions of the divorce problem as related to our American Protestantism are shown.

The heart of the American problem as related to the home lies in the paganized marriage relation which constitutes the home. We have ceased to regard marriage as a tie entered into for the sanctification of individuals, wife by husband, husband by wife, and parents by children; we have made it a business contract. We grow hysterical as we contemplate the polygamy of the Mormon who goes four abreast, but that is not a whit less reprehensible than the tandem polygamy which is legalized by our customs.

Our business customs constitute a large part of the American problem. Socialism is an angry foe of modern industrial organization. What they claim to be inhuman I claim to be ungodly. We shall never solve our problems of organization or of labor so long as the bitterest facts of class consciousness are the points of appeal and of approach.

We grow hysterical as we contemplate American politics. Politics is rotten in America only because the business behind it is rotten. It is the corruption in the heart of the business world that debauches councilmen and legislators and makes American politics the laughing-stock of the whole world. Only by education shall we cleanse our politics, and by that method it is a long drawn campaign. In the last state campaign in California the issue was clear cut and well defined, whether there should be corporate control of the state or the state control corporations, and Governor Johnson is the answer.

The supreme product of American life is the American child. If we would solve the American problem we must solve the problem of the American man and the American woman. If we would solve the problem of our womanhood and our manhood we must begin where God begins. He makes not womanhood full-blown and grown but womanhood grows and develops as personality abounds. Manhood begins in helpless infancy. If we would solve the American problem we must begin the processes of education where God begins His work. When we shall have caught the vision we pastors will see that the cradle roll is the most important department of our church; and we will cease to spend so much time polishing sermons for the delectation of those whom we cannot help if we preach our best and cannot hurt very much if we preach our worst, and we will pay attention to the helpless infant so that that child, touched by the personality that stands in the center of human history, shall go out bearing emblazoned in heart and in life the holiest name that man can bear, Christian, a citizen of earth and of heaven.

STRIKING ILLUSTRATIONS OF EFFECTIVE HOME MISSIONS

AMONG BOHEMIANS.

REV. C. H. B. LEWIS, LINCOLN, NEB.

We had to find somemonths the parsonage

In the minds of many people the word "Bohemian" stands for that which is very easy in moral and spiritual life. But we have learned to love the Bohemians for their sturdy quality. Some things they do in the open which American people do on the quiet. They are thrifty, ambitious to learn, artistic, musical and proud of their ancestry. Oppressed by the nominal Christianity of their own country, they become here atheists and infidels. It was into such a Bohemian community as a raw theological student that I came seven years ago. We found the religious conditions most disheartening. The Sunday-school officers and teachers danced, played cards and attended theatres. There was virtually no other social life. We had to learn at one time in our life not to rant with negative ideas of what they should not do. thing which they could do, and in about three was the social center of the entire town. The Bohemian people like clean and wholesome fun. We gave it to them. We were told, "You cannot have a class of men, the thing cannot be done." But we got an organized class of young men in that town of over 25. It seemed to be impossible to get the boys, but through the organization of classes, and that class of men first, it was easy to get the boys, and it was not unusual for us to have more men and boys in that Sunday-school than girls and women. We did it first by giving them the things in which they were interested. It was by finding a point of contact. It required hard work. We helped the boys, and trained them in athletics. We aimed to get them yoked up with Bible study. We aimed to have a point of contact until those young people cared for these things of their own accord. I remember one young man thirty-five years of age who was never in Sunday-school in his life until he was touched by that class, and today he is an officer in the church. It meant full-orbed Christianity in the lives of men and women. I find this a characteristic of the Bohemian people, when once they love you you can do what you please with them. The Bohemian must be loved into the kingdom.

MULBERRY MOUNTAIN.

REV. W. FRED LONG, JACKSON, MISS.

If the work of missions is touching the other fellow, then the organized Sunday-school work with its system of conventions deserves a prominent place as one of the missionary agencies.