that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten; be
zealous therefore, and repent." In every generation such chastisement
has been needed; the need is no greater to-day than in past generations,
and the chastening love no less. What Lowell says of this country, many
a Christian believer has been constrained to say of the church:--

"I loved her old renown, her stainless fame;
What better proof than that I loathed her shame."

But this keen sense of her shortcomings is not inconsistent with an
unfaltering faith in the recovery of her integrity and in her final
triumph. And those who have read the history of the Christian church
with sympathetic vision can hardly doubt that her brightest days are
still before her.

For while it must be admitted that she has neglected, hitherto, her
great work of social redemption, it cannot be said that she is more
neglectful of it now than she has been in past years; the truth is that
she is nearer to the recognition of it to-day than she has ever been.
Derelict as she is to her primary obligation, it must yet be said that a
consciousness of that dereliction is beginning to make her uneasy, and
that has never before been true of any large portion of her membership.
Since the earliest centuries the possibility of transforming the social
order by purely spiritual influences has scarcely dawned upon her. So
long as society was feudalistic or aristocratic, the problem seemed to
be beyond her reach; she might hope to improve society, by inculcating
kindness and charity, but hardly to reconstruct it upon new foundations.

The advent of democracy has brought home to her her social
responsibilities. Here in America, more than anywhere else, the nature
of her social obligation has been revealed. Here the fact cannot be
disguised that the people are the sovereigns, and that social as well as
political relations are under their direct control. The sovereign people
have pledged themselves one to another, in their constitution, to
refrain from establishing, by law, any form of religion; but they have
also covenanted together to promote the common welfare. This puts the
responsibility for social conditions upon the whole people, and the
Christian people are among them. They cannot avoid the obligation to
apply Christian principles to social conditions. Power is theirs to be
used in Christ's name and for the promotion of his kingdom. To see that
society is furnished with right