leave. Conscience decided the matter." After describing the hardships to which they were exposed upon their arrival, he continues: "All combined did not discourage us until we discovered that we had come to the place under a false impression. The church to which I had been called was largely made up of those who were strongly Methodist in their sentiments, and a Methodist elder was enraged to find the Congregationalists occupying the field. There were five ministers on the ground; one of whom, a Baptist, was meeting the needs of nine tenths of the people. In fact, the religious needs of the town were amply provided for, and we felt like the fifth wheel to a coach, no need and no place for us." With only about half a dozen Congregationalists he went to work, built a church, fought the saloons and gambling-dens, and for nine months did an excellent work. "But," he concludes, "I worked against odds from the first, because there was no room in the town for a Congregational church. In June I was obliged. to give up, as I thought for a six weeks' vacation, but it proved a vacation of years instead of weeks. The field does not belong to the Congregationalists and never did. At the present writing. (September, 1893) the Congregational church stands deserted on the prairie, while two other spires pierce the heavens, and Baptist and Methodist preachers feed the flock. I meanwhile am almost a total wreck, with agony packed in every nerve."

Is it too much to say that some one blundered in sending that man to that field? Is not the policy that permits such things itself a gigantic blunder?

In business, such blunders bring bankruptcy. In war, such blunders cost officers their commissions and bring armies to defeat. Do we not owe it to our noble army of missionaries to adopt a policy which shall guarantee to every man who enters the service that his life and labor shall not be spent in vain ?

Third: We owe it to the people whom we seek to evangelize. It is not of much use to make a man a specialist in a particular branch of science unless you also make him a scholar. It is not of much use to make a man a Republican or a Democrat unless you also make him a patriot. It is not of much use to make a man a Baptist or an Episcopalian unless you at the same time make him a Christian. Yet the tendency of the minute subdivision of the church in small towns is to make men sectarians without being Christians. This very summer I was in a town where

the Congregationalists had been given a bell. The bell was rung occasionally to call together the Methodists, who had no bell. Whereupon one Congregationalist was so distressed that he travelled ten miles to ask the donor of the bell whether it was meant for the Congregationalists or for the community. The donor, fortunately, was both a Congregationalist and a Christian, and replied, "I gave the bell to the Christian community, and as long as it rings I don't see how you can keep the Methodists from hearing it." Is it any wonder that in that same town, when the presiding elder gave them their choice whether to have a separate minister or to unite with the Congregationalists, the Methodists voted (the two of them who constituted the church meeting) to have a minister of their own? And so that Congregational minister must go on for another year preaching to three quarters of the community three Sabbaths in the month, and travelling on the fourth Sabbath to a neighboring town, while a Methodist comes in to minister to the other quarter of the Christians in his

town.

There is enough that is little and petty and narrow in rural life without introducing into it sectarian jealousy and strife. If we have nothing better than this to offer we ought to keep out altogether.

Fourthly, and finally: We owe it to Christ and our common Christianity. Christ came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. The Christian church should do likewise, or else do nothing. Unless the church can be a benefactor to the spiritual life of a community, unless it can be a leader of its daily work, a lawgiver to its business and political morality, a sanctifier of its social life, an educator of its youth in virtue, a comforter of its homes in sorrow, a safeguard of its manhood against temptation, it has no business there. Yet under the present system these are not and cannot be the most prominent aspects which the church presents. It is as circulators of subscription-papers, as managers of competing festivals and fairs, as originators of rival moneymaking devices, as centres of oratorical, musical, or ceremonial attraction, that these superfluous and feeble churches figure in the public eye. If we will have in these communities churches that shall represent rather than misrepresent the saving, serving, loving grace of Christ, we must adopt the policy of planting strong, self-respecting, self-supporting, community - serving churches,

where they are needed, in place of this wretched policy of thrusting in mendicant, impotent, self-seeking, community-plundering churchlings where they are not needed. We owe it to the Christ whom we serve and whose name these churches bear that they shall not stand as beggars asking alms alike of saint and sinner; but shall everywhere be a mighty, independent power to help and bless the poor man, be he virtuous or vicious, and to rebuke and awe the knave and the oppressor, whether he be poor or rich.

To sum up, these are the claims of co-operation in church extension. It is fair to all denominations, for it leaves each supreme within its own sphere, merely asking it to direct its efforts in harmony with the efforts which others are making for the common cause. The beginning made in Maine shows that it is practicable. Hundreds of abandoned churches; thousands of superfluous organizations; millions of squandered money; unnumbered martyr missionaries proclaim the need of radical reform. The duty of economical expenditure of missionary funds, and wise direction of missionary effort; the duty of giving the people a broad and generous gospel, and of making Christianity a potent force for social good, commands us to co-operate. The times of ignorance incidental to early pioneering are past. We may trust that God winked at the rude and barbarous sins of those early days. Now the facts are before the world. Nothing but wilful love of darkness can prevent any man or any denomination from bringing their missionary doings to the light of Christian conference. Henceforth the denomination that dares to carry on its missionary work in avowed disregard of the interests of God's kingdom as represented by other bodies of Christians will do so in open defiance of the God who is equally the Father of all his children, and in flagrant disobedience of the Christ whose law requires the bearing of one another's burdens.

Christian co-operation in church extension is no far-off vision. of church union; no speculative theory of an ultimate catholic church. It is a plain, practical duty which the churches as they are now constituted ought to do at once. That the doing of that duty now will lead to large results in the future we may well believe. Yet that it will destroy or harm any worthy form of church, none need fear. Neither this nor any scheme man can devise will reduce to uniformity the diverse denominations which we have to-day. We may, however, bring to pass before this

nineteenth century shall close what is more in harmony with the organic life of nature, with the trend of history, with the spirit of our civil government. We may develop, not the unity which is a dead and monotonous absence of difference; not the unity which is a shallow and superficial ignoring of difference; not the unity which is an arbitrary and tyrannical suppression of difference; but the deeper, richer, mightier unity which is founded on difference, and is expressed through the harmonious co-operation of the many members which together constitute the unity of its organic life. The dream of an American church may remain as idle as the dream of an American empire. Yet, as out of the voluntary conference of independent colonies for defence against a common foe and the establishment of satisfactory commerce there has grown the Union of the United States, with supreme authority in national affairs; so out of the co-operation of independent denominations against the common foe of sin and for the establishment of Christian righteousness shall be raised up the united churches of America, with supreme authority to guide and guard the spiritual interests of the land.

REMARKS BY MR. MORNAY WILLIAMS, OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTING THE BAPTIST DENOMINATION.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I suppose I shall be fully justified in your eyes in taking the same position which the preceding. speaker has taken, replying entirely from the standpoint of the denominations that are represented here to-day.

I shall have to make a confession in the opening few words I shall say, that the Baptists have not made the contribution to Christian unity which they certainly ought to have made. It seems to me that they have not made it for the reason that they have forgotten the due gradation of the truths for which they believe themselves to stand.

More and more as I have thought of this matter, I have been impressed with the truth of the necessity in the minds of other men of a true gradation of truth, of holding those things first which are first, and those things secondary which are secondary.

Now, I am afraid I must confess it has been among Baptists

the habit to emphasize the lines of denominational demarcation rather than the essential principles which justify, if anything justifies, their separate existence.

I suppose that no one would contradict me if I said that those things which are supposed to be the essential objects of the Baptist denomination are baptism by immersion, and close communion; yet these are not at all the things that ought to represent or do truthfully represent the things for which Baptists, as a denomination, ought to stand.

They stand, if I understand the principles of the denomination for entirely greater things and much greater principles than these. They stand, with our brother, for the independence of the local church; they stand for a denomination that holds that there is but one creed in the Bible, and no creed made by man; and they stand for a regenerate church membership. There would be nothing in the struggle for the distinctive things to which I have alluded, if they were rightly regarded as corollaries that ought not to be emphasized. There is a demonstration of weakness in emphasizing secondary things that have nothing to do with the essential principles of the denomination, and it is upon these that we have laid the emphasis instead of emphasizing the essential things, and as a consequence we have not contributed what we ought to have done toward holding the other truths and toward bringing about the great kingdom of God, which is the one mission of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I am the more convinced that this is right, because I can go back to the chiefs whom I have been trained to reverence and plant myself entirely on the principles they professed. I suppose. there is no one who knows anything of the history of the denomination I represent, and of its missionary work, who does not know that with the possible exception of William Carey there is no name more honored than that of Andrew Fuller.

Now Andrew Fuller, writing a letter to my grandfather, said something like this. I can almost, I think, quote the words: "It is necessary for a man to hold that first which is first, and that secondary which is secondary. Among us in this portion of England I have seen that which is known as 'dissent' insisting on that which is secondary, in place of that which is first. Had their zeal been first for those truths for which it ought to have