orth, with commanding voice, against all the corporate wrongs that
infest society. It may be that by her testimony the magistrates will be
strengthened so to enforce the laws that aggressors shall be restrained,
and freedom and opportunity secured to all; and that thus the existing
industrial order may become, so far as law can make it, the servant of
justice and good-will.

This is the first step toward social redemption. The reenthronement of
justice is the primary obligation. John the Baptist must speak first.
The conviction of social sin is the beginning of social righteousness.
The church has a great work to do in awakening the public conscience to
forms of injustice which are so involved and concealed that our
attention is not fixed upon them. Professor Ross has just announced a
volume with the title "Sin and Society." It is an illuminating word. The
deadliest of the evils which are oppressing the community to-day come
under this category. They are hidden from the public view. They assail
you from ambush and you are helpless. The deadly missiles smite you on
every side, but there is no revealing flash by which you can locate your
foe. The social order is so complex that wrongs of this nature are
easily perpetrated. Many of the transactions by which we are wont to
profit are veiled injustices. They are of a nature so subtle and
indirect that the law has not yet defined and forbidden them. Those who
suffer these injustices are at a distance from us, and there is a
network of legal and commercial relations between ourselves and them; we
know that they will never confront us and call us to account; it is
safe for us to do wrong, and we keep on doing it until our consciences
are dulled, and we are not able to see that any wrong has been done.

The fact is, that such a complex social system as ours needs for its
safe administration a kind of conscientiousness far higher and finer
than that which men needed for honest living fifty years ago. Unless our
minds are trained to see the right and wrong of very intricate
transactions; unless our ethical imagination is sensitive enough to
discern the nature of far-reaching and wide-spreading social relations,
we shall constantly be profiting by the injury of our neighbors.

It is the business of the church to train the consciences of men for the
moral problems that confront them, and this work has been but
indifferently done. The first step in the redemption of the social order