was flung from the platform, and the glass front of the car was crushed, but no one was seriously hurt.

"What did they say to you?" I asked the boy. "Did they arrest you for jumping aboard the cars?"

66

"Aw," he said; "they didn't say nawthin'. Everybody was talkin' and sayin' that it wasn't their fault, and the man that takes the tickets, he was askin' everybody's names and writin' 'em in his book. I says to the motorman, 'Did I do all right? Did I help any?' and he says, 'Yes, yes, boy, you done all right,' so I come away.'

Is not such a boy worth saving? I know of a surety that his morals are not irreproachable, but he took his life in his hands to save others, and I call him a hero.

Among these children the work of the teacher, the specialist, is indispensable. The lack of home care and training leaves a wide field for this kind of missionary effort. Where the mother knows nothing of sewing, and there is scarcely needle or thread to be found in the homes, the mission. sewing-school becomes a necessity. It is the same with cooking and other domestic arts. The boys are as ignorant of the use of saw and hammer as they are of Sanscrit. Even the country boy's harmless and necessary jackknife becomes, in the hands of his little brother of the alley a weapon of sinister omen. "He carries a knife," is said of one with exactly the same inference with which one would say, "He has a revolver," or a billy, or a slung-shot.

But even the worst of these unruly urchins are sometimes more amenable to feminine than to masculine control, our brothers themselves being witness. I was talking one day with a man well known as a writer on social topics, and asked his advice about securing a young man to take charge of our boys' club work. He said, "Why do

"Be

you get a man for that work?" cause," I said, "because-why-of course. A man would be able to control them better, and having been a boy himself, he ought to understand their heathenish ways."

"Not at all," said the great man, calmly. "You get a good woman to take hold of that work. You'd have to have a first-class man, an extraordinary man, to take hold of a proposition like that, and he'd have to have a big salary."

"Oh," I said, "we haven't much money. We should have to find a cheap man, who loved the work; a sort of deaconess man."

I'm afraid you can't find one," said he, "but you can get three or four first-class women for what you'd pay one man, and they'd do better anyway. That's my advice."

I was humiliated by his cheapening of women's work, but I reflected upon his advice. I remembered that through the winter I had had a couple of young lady cadets from the Swedish Sloyd school to teach our class in carpentering. When the summer vacation came I thought I was exceedingly fortunate in securing the services of a competent and experienced man to take the class for a six weeks' term. But the boys surveyed the new teacher and walked out in a body. They wanted a woman teacher, they said, "one who knew something." And this, you understand, was to teach them to drive nails, to whittle sticks, and to make boats and boxes.

I also remembered that within a few months we had had three different Y.M.C.A. students to take the gymnasium work. The last one was a young Hercules for size and strength, and my club boys ran him out in six weeks. I had persuaded a stalwart young medical student to undertake their Sunday-school class, and they fell out in a month. So I concluded

that within certain limits my learned friend knew what he was talking about.

When the Church comes to look these down-town problems fairly in the face, and begins to grapple with them in earnest, it will find that, not only among children, but among the adults, the great burden of the work will be done, can only be done, by the women folks. I am not going to lift one atom of responsibility from the shoulders of our brothers. I hope to see the time when the best brains and the finest culture in the ministry are found in just these places.

And there is work for laymen to do. If there is anything in your beautiful City of Denver that I covet-that I would like to take back to Chicagoit is not your splendid new State House, of which you are so proudnot your Rocky Mountains that tower protectingly above you-it is your judge of the Juvenile Court and his able assistant, Dr. Merrill. I wish we had a score of such men at work there.

There is enough for men like them to do. But there is plenty that they cannot do. There must be so much of the personal contact, of hand-tohand, heart-to-heart work, that only those who have a "sublime capacity for flinging themselves away upon details, apparently trivial, will have the courage to undertake and to persevere in it. Take the mere matter of racial antagonism, for instance. As much finesse, as much social tact and diplomacy, are needed to bring Mrs. Morony, and Mrs. Skubinsky, and Mrs. Olson, and Mrs. Essenmacher together in the social club, and to affiliate them with the plain Browns and Robinsons, as to steer clear of breakers in a court drawing-room.

Above all, how much there is needed in homes of poverty and sorrow the patience, the subtle sympathy -the something that understands

the pity that presses so close to the burdened heart that somehow it can share the burden!

A visitor once stood in the home of a poor Bohemian woman and listened to her story of misfortune. The husband, who drove an ice-wagon, had crushed his hand, and been for a long time out of work, and there had not been bread enough for the hungry children. Then sickness came, and with it debt. "First, Proslav got a measel," she said, "den Vina, she got a measel, den de baby, and there was all my five childrens sick wid de measles." The doctor came, and his bill, though not large, meant pinching economy for months if it was ever paid. The poor woman said, with tears rolling down her cheeks, "I try to be a good woman; I do no harm to anybody; I know not why all this trouble comes to me."

It was a hard question, and one that the visitor felt it was vain to try to answer. But she looked upon the wall where hung a picture of the Christ, with thorn-crowned head and bleeding heart-a cheap and tawdry thing, but telling its message of love and pity. "I don't know why it is," she said, "but you see He suffered too. He knows," and then, because her own heart was aching with the pity of it she kissed the heavy-eyed baby in the mother's arms, and went her way, and forgot it.

But the mother did not forget. Months afterward the deaconess came again with a little gift for the child, who was on her cradle roll. But the heavy-eyed baby was gone, and a tinier baby was in the mother's arms. She brought a faded picture of the dead child, and said: "You remember him, lady?-Frankie-the baby you kissed, standing right there by the door?" All those months that touch of sympathy had left its tender spot in the mother's heart, and the visitor, bewildered to see how much it had

meant, wondered if perhaps the little one had taken that kiss-less, even, than a cup of cold water-and laid it at the Saviour's feet.

A wise man said to me the other day, "I think I've found out your secret; you love your people." I said to him, "What business would I have with them if I did not? That's no secret."

Tolstoi says: "We think there are circumstances where we may deal with human beings without love, and there are no such circumstances. We may deal with things without love. We may hew down trees, hammer iron, make bricks without love; but we may not deal with people without love." And a greater than Tolstoi, speaking with authority, said: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

If once we could but believe that! If even the Church of Christ would accept it as the sane, perfect, and possible law of faith and practice, it would do more to eliminate the bitterness of social strife than all the policemen in the country. Instead, we make our appeal to law. Law must be enforced. The laws must be obeyed. The words do sound large and fine, and we make them our slogan of battle. We forget that human law is but a tool, a machine, a weapon, perhaps a whip with a stinging lash. And with hatred in the hand that wields it, it can bring but a harvest of hatred, and riots, and tumult in return. It can never bring lasting peace in the strife between masses and classes.

But if we will accept it, there is a power above law, greater than law, a power that makes not for oppression, but for righteousness. Until this power is recognized in business, civilization will continue to be but a series of struggles between rich and poor, between labor and capital, between selfish brain and selfish brawn. Human reason has figured it out that

God is law; God is force. But inspiration says, God is love; and His law is love.

The Church has the secret of this power, if secret there be. To woman's hand especially has been committed the sceptre of its authority. What matter if we are not law-makers? We will conquer by the sign of the cross, the sign of utter sacrifice for love's sake. The symbol of humility, and service, and suffering, but the symbol, too, of the power that guides all power —of the silent, irresistible force that sooner or later must bring all forces under its control because it is of the essence of God Himself.

In the conflicts between capital and labor, law has been administered, sometimes in heroic doses, to the foreign laboring classes, while the Church has for the most part let them severely alone. Is it not time the Church took a hand in this controversy? Dare she stand between the two contestants, and preach to both alike the great Commandment—and not only preach but practise it? And then let her send her women to publish the tidings, a great host, into byway and alley and slum.

It is possible that in adapting itself to present conditions in a country that is undergoing "such an inpouring of people from all corners of the earth as the world has never seen," the Church may have to change somewhat, not its power, but its machinery, perhaps to add new machinery to what it already has. The power must be harnessed, and made practical. Love for humanity must be incarnated in service to humanity. These cannot be separated. Love not expressed in service is but mysticism; service not inspired by divine love is but cold humanitarianism. Either alone is but half a gospel. Together they form the ideal Christian life.

Have we ever thought that in the picture Christ gives of the judgment,

that last dread day of final adjustment, everything hinges upon this question. of service? The test is not, after all, How many thrills of holy rapture have you experienced, how many prayers have you offered, how many words of testimony spoken? but, How have you ministered to the Lord Jesus in His humanity? Have you fed the hungry, clothed the needy, visited the sick and suffering, even the prisoner in his cell? What have you done for humanity? That tells the story.

And when the Lord asked of Peter, "Lovest thou me?" what did He demand as a testimony of that love? Three times-" Feed my sheep ""Feed my lambs."

The service must be real and genuine-often toilsome and painful, but what of that? Let us be done with the sentimentalism of too much of our literature. We read of criminals converted by a kind word said by a passing stranger; of a smile and a tract from the pretty new Sundayschool teacher starting a wharf-rat on the way to become a philanthropical millionaire; of a flower bringing a Magdalen to the feet of the Saviour. And we come to think a life of Christian service mere dilletantism.

I do not say such things never happen. The spark of the divine lies deep hidden in the heart of fallen humanity, and the Holy Spirit is ever waiting to convey the answering flash from the heart of God. Such things do happen; but they belong to the unusual, to the marvellous. But we dwell upon them until they seem common. Lazy human nature loves to see great results with small outlay. we come to believe that we have only to walk through the city's streets sowing smiles and flowers, and little acts of easy kindness to reap a harvest of grateful hearts and redeemed lives.

So

But life is too precious to be bought so easily. There must be long and

patient watching, and toil, and heartaches, and tears, and desperate holding on to God, and conquering faith, if we would win these submerged lives from bondage, and give God His own. Why should we expect to do the Master's work so easily, when He gave drops of blood and sweat of agony? Even the poor themselves. shame our half-hearted service in the kindnesses they show one to another.

You go into a little home of two bare rooms and find that they have taken in a stranger, a poor woman turned on the street for rent. There is but one bed, and the husband gives the stranger his place, and sleeps on the floor. How many times have we sent the wanderer on rather than disturb our immaculate guest room?

In another home you find a cheeryfaced woman sweating over the washtub, her head tied up with a handkerchief, and an odor of camphor in the air. It is late, the room is in disorder, the children, happy, but dirty, have turned the chairs upside down. The little mother explains that across the way there is a dead babe lying in its coffin; and as that mother has six children while she has but three, and as the other mother is quite ill, while she has but a headache, and both are very poor, she has brought over the family washing, to do it for her. Why, if I did things like that I should think I deserved a halo. And they are done quite as a matter of course by those who suffer and know what pain and poverty are.

In the deaconess order, properly directed and inspired, the Church has an arm of power that can help it to reach these masses, and to solve these problems, in so far as they can be solved in one generation. And in what way can woman better pay her obligations as a citizen than in helping to save to society, to the Church, and to the State these peoples who have sought with us an asylum from Old

World oppression? Love and service are the watchwords of the order. "Your servants for Jesus' sake," its

motto.

But we should consider that service need not be servitude. The deaconess is not the bond-servant, but the sisterservant. As Paul says, "Our sister— a servant of the church." Paul knew the difference between the service that is sold for money and that which is freely given for love of Christ and in His name. There is no great uplifting joy in a commercial transaction, however honest and honorable it may be. Too often we measure a man's worth by what he gets, when we should measure it by what he gives to the world. A man must take from the world, in return for what he gives it, a shelter for his head, food and clothing for his comfort and health. If he must also sell the service of brain and heart for fine broadcloth, for costly equipage, for jewels, and the luxuries of the table-that is the pity of it. But if he can live superior to broadcloth and damask, and give to the world royally of his manhoodthat is the glory of it.

And the Church needs women for service who can give thus rovally. Women of such unquestioned ability that cynics will not dare measure the value of the service by the dole that is received for it. Women who can wear their gowns of serge like a queen's robe, and never dream it a sacrifice.

And if women can be found who are willing-glad-to give the best things patience, and sympathy, and love, and life itself to the cause of the people, should not the Church stand behind them with its gold and silver? Not doled out in penny collections, just enough to keep the light of hope from going out altogether, but royally, with bank-cheques that will put heart and life into struggling institutions, that will build in the slums edifices for glory and for beauty suited for

new and practical uses, centres of life and light to burdened women, to sinenslaved men and to neglected children; buildings to which we can point with pride and say: "This is what Methodism is doing for the masses; this is our faith in the promises of God."

Then we need women especially trained for service. Women who are not only good, but good for something, definite and special. We want kindergartners, and nurses, teachers of domestic science and gymnasium work, teachers of all kinds of useful and practical things, above allteachers-leaders.

We older women are soon to be dropping out of the ranks. Life goes fast in this work, much of it can be put into twelve years. We were but the advance guard anyway-emergency women, holding the fort until the regularly trained. militia can be brought up. And as we falter and fall from the ranks we want to know that we are passing the work on to younger hands, stronger, better trained, more faithful, more efficient than we ever were, who will carry the banner of the King on to victory.

There are such women here tonight. Are you satisfied with your present life? I do not ask if you are busy-who ever heard of a woman who was not busy? But are you doing the best things you are capable of things that are worth while? You are sitting and weighing the chances. and counting the cost, and thinking, perhaps, of the sacrifice. Let me say to you, my sisters, there is no sacrifice in His service. If God is calling you to His great white harvest fields I bid you accept the call with uplifted faces as a royal commission not less honorable than that of any queen on her throne; and if you truly serve for love of Christ and in His name, you need not envy the happiness of any woman on earth.