ruling ideas, and organized on Christian
principles, is their main business. And while there are many by whom
this obligation is still but feebly felt, yet there is a goodly number
of those in whose minds the leaven is working, and to whom the nature of
the kingdom that Jesus came to establish is being clearly revealed. That
this number is destined to grow very rapidly we may reasonably hope.

The present situation is so clearly outlined by a recent writer that we
may welcome a liberal quotation:--

"The first apostolate of Christianity was born from a deep
fellow-feeling for social misery, and from the consciousness of a great
historical opportunity. Jesus saw the peasantry of Galilee following him
about with their poverty and their diseases, like shepherdless sheep
that have been scattered and harried by beasts of prey, and his heart
had compassion on them. He felt that the harvest was ripe but there were
few to reap it. Past history had come to its culmination, but there were
few who understood the situation and were prepared to cope with it. He
bade his disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, and then made
them answer their own prayers by sending them out two by two to proclaim
the kingdom of God. That was the beginning of the world-wide mission of
Christianity.

"The situation is repeated on a vaster scale to-day. If Jesus stood
to-day amid our modern life, with that outlook on the condition of all
humanity which observation and travel and the press would spread before
him, and with the same heart of humanity beating in him, he would
create a new apostolate to meet the new needs in a new harvest time of
history.

"To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the
impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time
needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting
up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a
fair and futile dream. Yet, in fact, it is not one tithe as hopeless as
when Jesus set out to do it. When he told his disciples, 'Ye are the
salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world,' he expressed the
consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity. Yet
it was a Nazarene carpenter speaking to a group of Nazarene peasants and
fishermen. Under the circumstances at that time it was an utterance of
the most daring faith,--faith in himself, faith in them, faith in what
he was putting into them, fait