The Peril and the Preservation of the Home / Being the William L. Bull Lectures for the Year 1903

At the very outset of my discussion of the peril and the preservation of the American home, I am confronted with an apparent contradiction that would seem to deny my premises, my contention that upon the preservation of the home depends the vitality of our Republic; that, if the home were gone, we should be fighting against overwhelming odds in the battle to maintain it and would as surely lose. But I think you will find that the contradiction is only apparent. I refer to the fact—let me state it right here and have the enemy all in front, I like it that way—that, whereas in my own great city I attribute to our unhappy housing conditions (those conditions which have given to New York the bad name of “the homeless city,”) most of the troubles that have made our municipal government a by-word in the past and raised doubts in the minds of some as to the fitness of our people, of any people, to govern themselves rightly; yet in this city of yours to which I have come to make the arraignment, the one among all our great communities that has the distinction of having preserved the home ideal most nearly, you are, as far as any one can make out, no better off than we. It has sometimes seemed that you were even worse off. You have your fight, as we have ours. But do not let it discourage you if, for the time being, you are outnumbered. The point is that there are more to help every time. Looking back now on the many battles in my city, I can see that every defeat we suffered was really a victory; it showed us how to do better next time. So is defeat always gain in the cause of right, if we would only see it. We grow to the stature of men under it. Is it not, when it comes to that, just a question whether you believe firmly enough in your own cause? Faith can move mountains of indifference, even here in Pennsylvania.

I said it seemed a contradiction, and yet only seemed so. It is because I am sure your sufferings have been in spite of your homes, not because of any lack of them. Standing the other day on a mountain-side in New Hampshire, with a matchless view stretching out before me, I said to my friend, the good rector and faithful pastor of the parish: “Here everybody must surely be good. How can they help it?”

He looked at me sadly and said, pointing to the scattered farms lying so peacefully in the landscape: “If you could go with me into those homes and see the things I see in too many of them you would quit your Mulberry Bend and transfer your battle with the slum to our hillsides.”

I think, if you will permit me to say it, that your great and splendid city has been I am almost tempted to say pauperized in its citizenship by great wealth and perilous prosperity; by a pampered prosperity that is not good for anybody in the long run. However, that is politics, which I shall not discuss. The President of the United States says that my opinion in that quarter is no good at all, and you are free to adopt his view. I will endorse his views—most of them—anywhere. I seek in mine an explanation of the civic apathy that has betrayed your town, as it has mine, into the grasp of a boss and of boss politics. It may be that I am mistaken. It may be that I put too much of the blame on the piggeries. I used to say that a man cannot be expected to live like a pig and vote like a man, and I had reference to the tenements, some of which surely deserve to be called by no other name. I was very sure of my ground until the industrial troubles of the last summer seemed to cut it partly from under me; for then I had people who were well-to-do, educated, and who ought to know better, right in my own town, come and upbraid me for always fighting the battle with the slum. “What is the use?” they said; “they won’t be content.” Since that time I have thought that perhaps there may be pigs in parlors, too. No, thank God, they will not be content. Let me say right here, so that we may understand one another, that the whole of my manhood’s life has been given and what remains of it will be given, please God, to fighting the things, all of them, that go to debase and degrade manhood and womanhood; so I understand a Christian’s duty.

In that I know I have not erred. If I have laid too much stress on the piggeries, it but proves that the peril of the home is not the only one that besets our Republic, and that we need be up and doing. But still I believe that the home is the mainstay; that it rather proves the home to be beset with perils not in the cities only. All the more am I convinced that around it only can the fight be waged successfully; and I have full faith that just because you have preserved the home better than have we, when the day of waking comes, you will throw off the nightmare that has plagued your dreams with such a jolt as will warn it off for good and all and tempt it to return no more. Of that I am sure. God speed you in the fight!

I shall not in this place have to enter into a protracted argument to prove that the home is the pivot of all and why it is so. We know that it is so, that it has been so in all ages; that the home-loving peoples have been the strong peoples in all time, those that have left a lasting impression on the world. Stable government is but the protection the law throws around the home, and the law itself is the outgrowth of the effort to preserve it. The Romans, whose heirs we are in most matters pertaining to the larger community life, and whose law our courts are expounding yet, set their altars and their firesides together,—pro aris et pro foces; and their holiest oaths were by their household gods. I have always thought that in that lay the secret of their strength, and that in the separation of the fireside and the altar lies the great peril of our day. When for the fireside we got a hole in the floor and a hot air register, we lost not only the lodestone that drew the scattered members of the family to a common focus, but with it went too often the old and holy sense of home: “I and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Rome perished when most of her people became propertyless—homeless. Whenever I think of it there comes to my mind a significant passage in the testimony of the secretary of the Prison Association in my city before a legislative committee appointed to investigate the draft riots of 1863. The mob, he said, came, as did eighty per cent. of the crime in the metropolis, from the element in the population “whose homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.” The household god of the slum tenement is too apt to be the boss with his corruption of the neighbor ideal into utter selfishness. On that road lies destruction.

In France, many years ago, a voice was raised in warning: “Kill the home and you destroy family, manhood, patriotism.” The warning was vain, and the home-loving Germans won easily over the people in whose language there is not even a word to describe What we express in the word “home.”

How much of the strength of the old New England home went into the making of our Republic you know as well as I. It is that thought which makes me pause when I remember that in their day one in twenty-five of the people lived in cities, whereas now the showing is one in three, with all of the influences of the city seeming to push against the chief prop of the State, the home. Is it not the chief prop? Imagine a nation of homeless men, a nation deserving the epithet, “the homeless people”; what would it have to preserve, what to fight for? And however given to peace we all may be, in the last analysis the test of a nation’s fitness to live is that it will fight for its life. No! wipe out the home and the whole structure totters and falls. Even if it hang together yet a while, it is not worth preserving, not worth fighting for.

If we had any doubt about it, we have had some information upon the subject given us in recent years, in my state and in yours. It was here in your city that the Children’s Aid Society demonstrated, in a way that did us all good through and through, that the old plan of bringing up children in squads, which had been tried until it sickened them and us, was bad, and that placing them out in families made all the difference in the world. We knew it before, but we needed to be told it in just that way. We had the experience over again in New York; they had it in Boston; they have had it everywhere. But very lately we have had a piece of testimony to that effect that ought to settle the matter. It was an old scandal in our city that practically all the babies in the Foundling Hospital died there; none lived to grow up. I say scandal, not in the sense that any one was to blame. They tried hard enough. Men are not monsters to see a defenseless baby die without trying to help it. In the worst Tammany days, we had herds of Jersey cows on Randall’s Island, kept expressly for those waifs. Everything was done that pity and experience could suggest, but nothing availed. The babies died, and there was no help for it. Until four years ago, when a joint committee of the State Charities’ Aid Association and the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, took them off the hands of the city authorities and put them in homes. The first year after that the mortality among them fell to a little over fifty per cent., the second year it was just beyond thirty per cent. and the fourth, which was last year, it had fallen to ten and seven-tenths per cent., a figure quite below the mortality among all the children under two years of age in the whole city. And the experience in Brooklyn was just the same.

What did it mean? It meant this, and nothing less, that these children had come at last to their rights; that every baby is entitled to one pair of mother’s arms around its neck; that its God-given right is a home,—a home; and that, when man robs it of that right, it will not stay. And small blame to it! It shows that even foundling babies have good sense. They stayed, these, in such numbers—their death rate fell below the ordinary death rate of all the children of their age—because they were picked homes they were put into. It meant, friends, that God puts a little child in a home because He wants it to grow up with that as its most precious heritage, its spark of heaven that ever beckons it to its true home beyond. It means that you cannot herd human beings in battalions and expect them to develop the qualities of individuality, of character, that make citizenship upon which to build the Republic that shall be the hope of to-morrow as well as the shelter of to-day. We tried that with the “communities” that wiped out the family and substituted the barrack for the home. But happily they wiped out themselves. No, brethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood, citizenship grow there. We forget it to our peril. For American citizenship in the long run, will be, must be, what the American home is.

And this home, how does it look to me? The ideal, always in my mind, is that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up there. So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the surest road. But that ideal is unattainable in our cities. We must find another there. And I ask, as the minimum standard, less than which I will not take, isolation enough in the teeming crowds to secure the privacy without which individuality cannot grow and character is fearfully handicapped. I ask light and air, at least as plentiful and as good as they have it in the great cattle barns I have seen in my own old home, where their cows are their most precious possession, because through them the people make their living. I ask an environment in which a man may think himself a respectable citizen, an environment that has no suggestion of the pigsty. You have no business to try to persuade an American citizen that that is his place. It is treason against the republic. I ask, above all, the mother who makes the home; I want the mother. Without her, home is but an empty name.

What, then, of the barrack that destroys privacy, whose crowds make life loathsome, whose restricted and narrow quarters compel the use of the family room only for eating and sleeping; not the latter even when the summer heats come and the people, to live, must sleep on the roof or out on the fire-escape? What of those things which send the children to the street, there to grow such character as they can; that smother in them even the instinct for the open, for the fields and the woods that is like the last open window for the soul; rob them of those resources of mind and heart that make them respond quickly to the robin’s and the daisy’s appeal and make them at home in God’s nature; that give them the gutter for a playground, and the saloon, as they grow, for their natural meeting-place,—their only one, indeed; for it is only just beginning to dawn upon us that in neglecting that function of the public school, we have been guilty of a fearful and wicked waste.

What of these; and what of the need—the need of making the rent—that sends the mother to the factory, leaving perhaps the little ones behind, locked in as the only alternative of the street? Locked in and left to the chance, the awful chance, of a fire in that tenement with the children helpless to get out and no one knowing of their plight. I say it with a shudder, for I have had to record as a reporter too many—oh! God! too many by far—of these things which wring the heart of a man. What of the grinding need that sends the mother to the shop and so knocks the big and the strong prop from under the home?

Or, perhaps, the children go along. Then there is no home; for I do not call the cheerless room to which they return for their evening meal, tired and worn and spiritless, to sleep but not to play—I do not call that home.

We know the curse of child labor. We know it to our sorrow and loss. Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending downward; that, however we figure it, the result is always the same: where men alone work, they earn the support of the family; where men and women work, they together earn the support, with nothing to spare; and where men, women and children work, they do that and no more; so that nothing is gained and everything is lost. Child-life and citizenship are lost; for the children of to-day are the men of to-morrow. We know it to our cost, and you have the lesson before you, though you do not seem to have learned it. When you do, you will find the cost appalling.

What else was the meaning of the testimony given before the Coal Strike Commission, that moved its members to tears and anger by turns? And why in the twelfth census has Pennsylvania fallen from the sixteenth to the twentieth place on the list of states that send their children to school? It is true that there has been no absolute retrogression, for while in 1890 there were over two per cent. of your children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who could neither read nor write, in 1900 the illiterates numbered barely over one in a hundred. But that one is one too many, and why is he there? Because, according to the showing of the factory inspectors—and the factory inspectors are always optimists—there were thirty-five thousand of your children at work, who should have been in school, not counting the breaker-boys in your mines. As to them, the coal operators owned up to thirty thousand being in the mines who never should have been there.

So we are not alone in our sins against childhood. New York is first among the great industrial states, Pennsylvania is second, and this is the showing we make as toward the citizenship of to-morrow: New York fourteenth, Pennsylvania twentieth. Even South Dakota and Wyoming are ahead of Pennsylvania, and Utah a long way ahead of New York. Industrial States! The industrial supremacy that is bought at the expense of childhood’s rights tends directly to man’s enslavement. It is too dearly bought. Sins against childhood are sins against the home, are cheating the world of its to-morrow. And you salve your consciences in vain with the thought that those illiterate ones are the children of foreigners. You let them in, to be your Americans of the day that is coming;—you sent for them, your critics say, to underbid the labor that sought a higher wage because they wanted American homes,—and it is your business to see to it that they, or their children, at all events, fit into the state of which you have made them part. Or woe to that state!

You need not marvel that in the commonwealth that forgets its duty to the home even to that extent, you have a heavy contract on your hands to redeem its greatest city. It is the same conscience that is asleep there. It is all of a piece. Every once in awhile I hear some one growl against foreign missions because the money and the strength put into them are needed at home. I did it myself when I did not know better, God forgive me. I know better now; and I will tell you how I found out. I became interested in a strong religious awakening in my own old city of Copenhagen, and I set about investigating it. It was then that I learned what others have learned before me, and what was the fact there, that for every dollar you give away to convert the heathen abroad, God gives you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home. So, as you set about crushing out selfishness, greed and evil in the state, you step on the snake’s head at home,—in your own city.

You do not need the city tenement as a monument of civic folly in wrecking the home. There are other ways of doing it, and none surer or quicker than by forcing the children to labor when they should be at play. The city crowds have no monopoly of the slum, though they have the lion’s share of it. It thrives wherever ignorance and helpless poverty are, and child labor is the shortest road to both.

The city tenements are the crowded highway. Listen to this description of them in my own city:

“The tenement districts of New York are places in which thousands of people are living in the smallest space in which it is possible for human beings to exist—crowded together in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, in many of which the sunlight never enters, and in most of which fresh air is unknown. They are centres of disease, poverty, vice and crime, where it is a marvel—not that children grow up to be thieves, drunkards and prostitutes, but that so many should ever grow up to be decent and self-respecting. All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and womanhood in New York’s crowded tenement quarters make for unrighteousness. They also make for disease. There is hardly a tenement house in which there has not been at least one case of pulmonary tuberculosis within the last five years, and in some houses there have been as great a number as twenty-two different cases of this terrible disease. From the tenements there comes a stream of sick, helpless people to our hospitals and dispensaries—from them also comes a host of paupers and charity seekers. The most terrible of all the features of tenement-house life in New York, however, is the indiscriminate herding of all kinds of people in close contact; the fact that, mingled with the drunken, the dissolute, the improvident, the diseased, dwell the great mass of the respectable workingmen of the city with their families.”

I am not quoting newspaper condemnation. The newspapers have not always been found on that side of the line. I am not quoting from my own writings, these many years, on this subject. The paragraph is from the official report of the Tenement House Commission of 1900, of which I was not a member; nor is it alone in its condemnation. “They,” said the Tenement House Committee of 1894, speaking of the tenements, “interfere with the separateness and sacredness of the home, and ... conduce to the corruption of the young.” There you have it in a nutshell. They destroy the home and corrupt youth! But think of it! “All the conditions make for unrighteousness”—in a city of soon four million souls, half of whom come under that ban! And all the cities in the land copying after and tending the same way,—with yours, thank God! bringing up the rear. Keep Philadelphia there, brethren, as you value your civic life. With the tenement added to the rest you will never work out from under it. Keep it out, under whatever name it comes, whether as a French flat, an apartment house, or what not. It all means the destruction of the home ideal. Flats are but showy tenements. There is not one of them with a chimney big enough to let in Santa Claus, and you might as well give up at once as to have him excluded. There are few enough of them that, were the watchful eye of the sanitary policeman taken off them for six months, would not turn out as bad as the worst. And he has got one eye on the district leader now. Keep out the tenement; it is the enemy of the commonwealth. And ever hold in high honor the men who fight that fight for you, whether they be Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, or lay brethren laboring for the good of their kind. They fight for your very life.

I shall have much to say about these tenements hereafter. I will try to show in pictures that will help you to the understanding of it, how they injure the social fabric. Here I wish to remind you that that injury is yours as well as ours. An injury to one is the concern of all in a democracy like ours. You cannot have citizenship tainted at one end of the line and expect to keep it untainted at the other end. It works mischief both ways. Ignorance hurts the state in the man who groans under it, and in the man who enslaved his mind, who permitted and was responsible for the outrage. It is of no use to shut our eyes to it. The slum is a cancer that has long roots reaching the avenue as well as the alley. The consciousness, however vague, of having betrayed his brother, breeds hardness of heart in the betrayer, for which alms-giving does not atone.

Watch and you will find that, when the slum vote is most in evidence, careless wealth goes shooting on election day and lets the Republic go to the dogs. Well may the president make the slum an issue in his message! He is right, for citizenship is murdered there. And well may the Church put the redemption of the slum increasingly into its preaching and into its practice! It is angling for living men, not for dead ones. I spoke of pigsties. Tell me, what sense is there in a man’s sitting comfortably in his pew of a Sunday, inviting his soul with a view of the beautiful mansion he has engaged on high, and letting his brother below wallow in his slough the while? Do you think that bargain will stand? I do not. I think he runs a very excellent chance, when his race is over, of having to take his turn in the sty. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and you and I together have to carry the load which is of our making. Try you ever so hard, you cannot lay down your end, and neither can I, mine.

Is it not the old, old story of human selfishness that tries ever to get the easy end at the expense of the toiling brother? The woman who shuts her eyes to the fact that “women’s wages have no lowest limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them,”^[1] and joins in the rush at the bargain counter, the pennies she saves literally, literally the life-drops of her sister, body and soul! the selfish man who says: “What is it to me?” the labor leader who, for personal gain, sacrifices his cause, which is the cause of human progress, “the effort of men, being men, to live like men”—these are they who are selling the American home in our cities into slavery. If anything could make me believe in purgatory, it is the existence of their kind. We all need making over, but they seem to need purging by fire to turn the demon of selfishness out of them, that the spirit of brotherhood may enter. I do not know—I am not a prophet—but I think I can make out that we are on the eve of great social changes, for which our democracy was meant to prepare us, but for which it finds us even now unfit. And all because of that one thing, the great obstacle!

The blindness of them, not to see it! Whichever way we turn, where the selfishness crops out that is where the mistake is made that forfeits public sympathy, while it holds up the cause of human progress. Capital earns its fair reward. Promptly it seeks to crush out its neighbor—calls it protecting its own interests, as though we were so many beasts of prey whose appetites were the one thing we had in common; proclaims from the house-tops the age-old doctrine of privilege—God-given privilege!—from which the world has been trying for centuries to get away; calls the President of the United States, when he tries to make peace, a tinkering politician; and sits in the high seat of the constitution, as if it were made for the protection of property only and had nothing whatever to do with the people! I yield to no man in my respect for the constitution of our land. It is so great and so real that I object to having it worked up into either a sceptre to coerce men, or a fetish to cajole them, as much as I object to having the Bible used that way. I take the constitution to be a human document, the record of action taken by wise and patriotic men to meet emergencies that arose in their day. Unless we are to assume that wisdom died with them; that human experience was completed and bound in volumes to file away on dusty shelves, with nothing more ever to happen that requires judgment or action; or unless we are to confess ourselves unable to take such action when the time comes, we shall be wise to drop the fetish business and to deal with the constitution as men capable of defending their lives and their liberties, including the right to work, and the right not to be frozen to death at the dictation of a half dozen coal kings, upon any plane upon which those liberties may be attacked. This intense regard for the constitution, that is wont to develop in men and newspapers in exact ratio as their love of the brother dies, always suggests to me the fatal ritualism that is akin to the letter that killeth. Something has to make up for that which has been lost; but nothing ever can.

The wrongs of wealth! We all know them. “It is the denial of them,” said Theodore Roosevelt to me the other day, “that has confronted the world with the challenge that ‘property is theft.’” And he was right. But capital has no monopoly of wrong. Labor organizes its multitudes and instantly raises a club to keep out the man who does not think as the next man does, with violence if he will not go willingly. The shallow self-seeking of its advocates, the ignorant blundering of their followers, is often enough to make one sick at heart. We have to look beyond them to the real claims of the cause of labor to having served the world by making homes out of hovels, by making free men out of slaves, by giving back to man his self-respect. We have to take the long-range view to forget the immediate injury and put things right. Organized labor, with all its mistakes, has put us heavily into its debt, for it is true that “only a self-respecting people can remain a free people.” Wrongs there are on both sides. If capital sought but its just reward, it would find it compatible with giving labor its fair share. If labor thought of the rights of the employer with its own; if the fight were ever for the good of the race as it was meant to be; if the union label always guaranteed honest work, a living wage, no sweat-shop or child labor, a clean shop and a fair observance of the factory laws, its cause would be irresistible.

That is it. You know it and I know it. The right, when it appears stripped of all self-seeking, is irresistible. Hence our fight is never hopeless or vain.

The employer who says that he will not treat with his men, that they must obey or get out, forfeits public sympathy and loses his case in our day. The self-seeking union that betrays its cause has no standing in the court of public opinion. It means that appeal can be made to the good in men, can be made with more success than ever. I am warned to beware of a false optimism that digs pitfalls for our feet by making us think there is nothing more to mend. I know that danger; but that the warning should be uttered is in itself the greatest endorsement of my faith in the better day that is dawning. There was little enough to tie that faith to in the days when I wrote “How the Other Half Lives”; but there is enough now for us all to see, and I, in turn, warn him who will not see it, against the pessimism that is both false and disabling. No, thank God, you can at last make your appeal to the consciences of men, and that is why I make it here. I want the church to back it. It is from that quarter that I expect the strong blows to be struck for the home, the blows that will tell. “All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and womanhood” in the crowded tenements of New York City, of the metropolis, “make for unrighteousness.” Is not the call to the Church of God?

Yes! and it has heard the call and is heeding it. I have before me the record of the social activities of one church, St. George’s, of which my friend, Dr. Rainsford, whom you know, is the rector. The year books of Grace Church, of St. Bartholomew’s, of Calvary, of scores of churches in New York, would have like stories to tell. This grocery department, this sewing school, this employment society, these helping hands, kindergartens, cooking schools and mothers’ clubs—they all mean one thing, the determination to reclaim the home that is in peril; they mean that the men and women struggling there shall have backing; that they shall not be permitted “to be content” as they are, for when a man lies down under the slum he is lost. It means that war is declared against the slum, and is to be fought to the bitter end. The Church is coming to the rescue, and I am glad to bear witness that mine is in the van in generous rivalry with its neighbors.

Shall I tell you how I came to be an Episcopalian? I had long been tempted by my friendship for the rector whose church I attended in my own town, though I was not a member of his flock. I had been a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Congregationalist in my day; I would be a Roman Catholic rather than be nothing at all, though that would go hard with me. Denominational fetters ever sat lightly upon me, perhaps too lightly. So that I marched under the flag, I cared less what regimental badge I wore. But one day, I read in my newspaper a growl from the East-side about Bishop Potter’s Mission, the Pro-cathedral in Stanton Street. “Their services,” wrote the man who did me this favor, “are of the kindergarten class: clubs, gymnastics, mothers’ meetings, girls’ dress-making classes—and they call that religion!” Ah! I thought, is that what they are doing over there? and I waited for the answer that was not long in coming.

“Yes,” wrote the priest in charge, “we call it that; and, furthermore, it is our belief that a love of God that does not forthwith seek to run itself into some kindly deed to man is not worth having.” That was their creed—I called it ever after “the Bishop’s creed,”—and I told Bishop Potter then and there that if that was the creed of his church I would join, and I did.

I shall have occasion to show you how the church missed its great opportunity once; how it slept through its chance in the days that are gone, and in its sleep did grievous wrong to the people’s homes, which it ought to have defended. Those are of the sins of the past, and they have to be atoned for; but, please God, we shall not sin thus again. The home that is in peril shall appeal, does appeal to-day to the Christian conscience—appeals from the rule of gold to the golden rule, from the rule of might to that of right; and no longer does it appeal in vain. There was a time, even in my memory, when it was said with more show of reason than I care to think of, that the greatest church corporation in the land was the worst tenement-house landlord in New York City. But to-day our appeal is to the churches. They aroused our consciences to action twenty years ago; they and the Christian men and women who sit in them head every movement in our great city towards the redemption of the home; they led in the fights for reform, for decent living conditions for the people, that wrested victory from the slum twice in the last half dozen years. You all remember those fights and the share that this same Pro-cathedral with the Bishop’s creed bore in the last one.

There was never such an arraignment of a city government as that made by the Bishop of New York in his letter to the mayor, calling upon him, “in the name of these little ones, these weak and defenseless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, but from homes in which God is feared and His law revered,” to save the people from a “living hell” of vice and corruption; and never was there such a response of an aroused city as to that summons. The heart of the people is all right; it is on the side of the Lord and His hosts, all doubting Thomases to the contrary notwithstanding. Let us be glad!

I remember a cry for help that came from over on that East-side, of which we hear so much. It was a good many years ago when I was a reporter in Mulberry Street, and it came from a church in a letter to the Police Board asking for protection against the boys who played in the street in front of it and disturbed the Sunday worship. The captain of the precinct retorted that they had no other place in which to play and no other time for it, and that the minister of that church had better be about getting them a playground. That was in the days of little sense, and the result was that other cry that went up and made itself heard at a great meeting of all the churches: “How shall we lay hold of this great multitude that has forsaken our altars?” They have learned since to lay hold of it with gymnastics, kindergartens and boys’ clubs, and the little handful of discouraged communicants has grown into hundreds that throng about the altar rail of St. George’s and the other churches every Sunday. We have come into the days of good sense. I shall not be charged with false optimism in this; for I remember the day when the families on the register of St. George’s could be counted in one short breath, whereas now the communicants number more than eight thousand, the vast majority of them from the East-side tenements—with the mayor of the city teaching the Bible class in the Sunday-school and the president of the Citizens’ Union and the greatest financier of any day among the strong backers of the rector and his work. I am but stating the facts in which I rejoice. My eyes are not shut to the troubles that are ahead in the changing populations over there; but I am not afraid of losing the Lord’s fight, and neither are those in charge of St. George’s. I speak of it as typical of all the rest of the parishes in New York who are enlisted in that war. It is the men who are not afraid who win battles. But first you must plan them.

Right here, I want to point out to you young men, who are going to take a hand in it, one of the weak spots, if not the weak spot, in your campaign for the home—that home which all the influences of the modern day combine to put in peril. I mean the disappearance of the family altar. Hand to hand with the crowding of the home to the wall, has gone the crowding out of the things that make it the representative of heaven on earth; until now one seldom hears of the old family worship, so seldom that it almost gives one a start to be asked to join in family prayer. And I am not referring to the homes of working men especially, but to those of the rich and prosperous as well. The causes of it? They are many and complex in the setting forth of them, I suspect: the hurry of our modern life, the new freedom that makes little minds think themselves bigger than their maker, the de-moralization of the public school, the pressure of business,—it is hard to get the family together—which is merely setting up the fact of the scattering of the home in the defense of it. The causes are many, but the result is one: the wreck of the home. I said it before, of child labor, that it was dearly paid for. So also the business prosperity which makes us forget God is bought at a price no man can afford to pay. It is my cherished privilege sometimes to break bread with a pious Jewish friend, and when I see the family gathered about his board giving thanks, a blush comes to my cheek, a blush for my own people. Whence the abiding strength of that marvelous people through all the centuries of persecution in the name of the Prince of Peace, but from the fact that they still hold to the God of their fathers in their homes? I have been told of the experience of a friend in a town not far from mine, who asked his pastor on the occasion of a friendly evening visit to his house, to remain and pray with the family. The good man’s face lighted up with pleased surprise, as he said: “I have been in this parish more than a year and this is the first time I have been asked to pray with any of my people in their homes.” Is it any occasion for wonder that they have been vainly trying for more than a dozen years in that place to build a new and very much needed church? They have never been able to raise the money, though their own houses are particularly nice; there is not a poor man in the parish in the sense of his wanting any of the necessities of life. But why should they build a house for the Lord when they have put Him out of their own homes? What sense would there be in that?

I say to you young men preparing for the priesthood, if you want strong churches and strong men and women in them, go worship with your parishioners in their homes. Take my word for it that you will be surprised at the result. We have filled the hungry mouths in our land of plenty, but there are more starving hearts than you know of all about you. Build up the family altar, and the home will come back of itself. Do not bother yourselves about “God in the Constitution,” if you have Him installed in the people’s homes. If God is feared in the home, there is written the Constitution which will never need amendment. The greatest peril that besets the American home to-day is its godlessness. Put back the family altar and let there be written over it the old stout challenge to the devil and his hordes: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord;” and even the slum tenement shall seek to attack it in vain.

In the town of which I spoke, there have in the last half dozen years grown up two clubs, one for the men, the other for the women, and I am told that practically they all belong. The result has been the disappearance of pretty nearly all of the pleasant neighborhood life of that day when a man gave his arm to his wife after supper and they went together for a social call upon some neighbor, for a chat, a little music, going home in good season for bed, telling one another that they had had a good time. There are no good times in that town any more—not of that kind at all events. The men spend the evenings bowling at the club; the women meet in committees to plan public improvements. The old time supper has become a later dinner and it is the rarest of all things to find a neighbor “dropping in” unannounced—so rare that one feels that it somehow is not good form any longer. The family firesides are cold. And the young—I am told that there is a disproportionate number of them growing up idle and useless, if not worse. They have lost their hold, though they do not know it. I am no enemy of clubs, although I know little of them; but, as a substitute for the altar, I will fight them until I die. And I am a great backer of woman’s influence in public affairs—it has been good always and everywhere in my sight; but I say to you now that I would rather see, we could better afford, that every club and organization in the land should cease to exist, and every ten-pin alley stand silent and deserted, than that the old home life which centred about the family hearth should go from among us. With it goes that which nothing, no commercial gain, no advance in science, or government or human knowledge, can replace.

“But they are gone,” I hear some one say, “the old patriarchal days, and you can’t call them back.” I wish there was no such word in the language as “can’t.” It has made more mischief than all the rest of them together. But in the last sifting the world is run by the men who can, while those who can’t stand and look on. Who says you cannot do the thing that is right? That is what we are here for. Our business is to make out the right and then go ahead and do it. The Lord has all the time and all the resources that there are, and, if we do our best, we can leave Him to attend to the rest. Can’t! If the Church says to-day that it cannot restore the old faith, that it cannot rekindle the altar fires that have grown cold, it had better go out of the business; it has become an unfaithful steward.

But as a matter of fact, it not only can, but nothing is easier. We are fighting wind-mills of the devil’s making. He put them there to frighten us off. In so far as we have lost our grip, it is because we Christians have been untrue to our mission, have failed to discern it. I see in all the social unrest and longings of the day the yearning heart of the world, which doctrine and ceremony and printed prayers have left and ever will leave cold. It is the praying life it cries out for. The very infidel owns the perfect man in our Christ; and he turns upon our faith in anger because he feels that he has been cheated of the love that must be lived by His followers to be felt. Only so can the world be made to see God in man. It was never more impatient for the sight than it is to-day.

When the century drew to a close, in common with many others, I looked for a great revival that should sweep over men and set their minds toward the things on high; and, when it did not come, when the new century came in without it, I was disappointed. Until one day there came a letter to me from a friend whom I had known in all the years to be ever busy among His poor, toiling early and late in the Master’s steps; a letter that expressed the same thought, the same disappointment. “When will it ever come,” she wrote. And all at once it flashed through my mind that it had come, so silently, so gently,—even as He Himself came into the world, unheralded except by the angels’ song to the shepherds in the field—that we knew it not until it had passed and become history. What else is the mighty philanthropic movement of the last twenty years that has swayed the minds and hearts of men; that has given us the social settlement; that goes into the byways and the hedges searching for the lost neighbor and compels him to come in? What else is that but a revival of our faith on the lines Christ Himself laid down: binding up the wounds, caring for the sick and the stricken, helping him over the hard places, even paying his rent if he is helpless and poor?

“And on the morrow when he departed he took out twopence and gave them to the host and said unto him ‘take care of him and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again I will repay thee.’”

Showing mercy! That is the badge of the neighborly spirit. “Go thou and do likewise.” That the world is coming back to Him by the door which the Saviour Himself pointed out, and which we shut, perhaps that is a rebuke to us for our luke-warmness, for our little faith and understanding. Let us learn the lesson, then, in humility and repentance, but let us never again be found saying “can’t” in His fight.

I spoke of the de-moralization of the public school. Observe that I did not say demoralization; I think we are working out of that. What I was thinking of was that, in our sectarian zeal to see that no heresy got in, we have, perhaps, come perilously near shutting the door against both reverence and truth, and so helped on worse mischief. It is a matter that has caused me a good deal of uneasiness. I am troubled about it, and yet I do not know how to help it. Is it a sign that the school, too, is coming around to the neighborhood goal? that we have all, unknowingly, been helping to haul it around that way—this, I mean, that the ideal is growing which would have the school be the neighborhood soul, no longer the barren mind, merely? I like to think that it is, and that this was the thought which moved the Methodist ministers to promise me last summer to join heartily in the effort to get the public schools in my city opened for Sunday concerts. The “Lord’s Day” stood in the way no longer—rather, it was what decided them. It had too long been the devil’s day among those East-side multitudes.

I marked out for myself a straight talk, when you asked me to come to you,—and no preaching. The Lord knew what He was about when He made me a reporter, a gatherer of facts, and not a preacher: He makes no mistakes. But brethren! If it had been different—if I had been worthy——Oh! when I look upon you young men preparing to take up His work in the world—what can you not do if you but believe that your cause is His! What is there you cannot do? In my day, I have seen the merest handful of men and women, fewer in number than you can count upon the fingers of your two hands, but standing firmly for the right, pull my city upward, upward towards the light,—even in the worst of its bad days, and in spite of them. I tell you now that if all of you here, going out to your work as you believe with the apostolic charge upon you, were to go determined to follow in the apostles’ steps, looking neither to the right nor to the left—to the living that is to keep you, nor to what expediency whispers—never losing hope, never hanging your heads, not being afraid of being called optimists—Christ was the great optimist of all ages; He never lost hope even of us—what could you not do? I learned something when I was last in Denmark, where they make butter for a living and where they have two kinds of Christians, the happy Christians, as they are called, and the “hell preachers”; I learned there that, if you want good butter, you must buy it of the happy Christians; they make the best. So it is in all things in the world; the happy Christians made it go round. I tell you, brethren, that if all of you here now, or the half of you, or the fourth of you, were to go out to your work in that spirit, in the spirit of a dear old Lutheran woman I once knew who said on her deathbed, “I know but Him and Him crucified; if there is anything else I should know I am afraid I don’t,”—if you were to go forth to your work in that spirit, letting all else go, Christian unity would come on the wave of an irresistible flood; so does the world hunger for the message you carry.

Suppose you do not live to see it come? We have so little time that we are always in a hurry, but He has all the time there is. Why should I let the fact discourage me that wrongs are not all righted at once? It is nineteen hundred years since Christ came to a sin-ridden world to free it from bondage, and it is sin-ridden yet. Why should I think that I should be able to do better in my little time? I have a friend who, for many years, was connected with the naval observatory in Washington. A couple of years ago, when he was retired, I said to him that I always looked upon an astronomer with a kind of awe,—he seemed to me to be so near to the Almighty, at his elbow seeing Him work, as it were; and my friend smiled.

“I have not looked through a telescope at a star in a dozen years,” he said. “All the years I have been in the service I have been carrying on certain calculations that were begun before I was a man and that will go on years after I am dead. When they are finished at last, we shall know something worth knowing. Meanwhile, I and the rest of us have been but links in the long chain upon whose trusty work depends the final value of it all. That I have tried to do my part faithfully must be my reward.”

What greater reward could any man ask than this—to be a link, however humble, in the chain which links our world of men with God’s kingdom on high and helps prepare this earth for His coming in His own good time?