t its very source. If this be so,
then it is as reprehensible in those whose vocation is to watch over
the moral and spiritual development of their fellow-men to be
indifferent to the conditions by which life is surrounded as it would
be discreditable to the physicians of a city swept year after year by
pestilence, if they took no interest in the insanitary conditions to
which the epidemic was due, but lazily contented themselves with
curing their own patients.

We seem to have arrived at precisely the point in the Church's history
when her mind and conscience are to awake to this aspect of her duty.
One of the most eminent members of the English bench of bishops said
recently, that the social question is the question which the
Christianity of the present day has to solve; and this sentiment is
being echoed in every quarter. Strange it is how age after age one
word of the message of Christianity after another lays hold of the
Christian mind and becomes for a time the watchword of progress. There
can be little doubt that this is the word for our age. The
extraordinary response given throughout the civilised world to General
Booth's _In Darkest England_ proves how deeply the conscience of the
world is being stirred by the misery and degradation of the outcasts
of society.

General Booth's book, and other books and pamphlets like it, have
brought home to us the fact, that at the base of our civilisation
there is sweltering a mass of sin and misery, which is not less a
reproach to Christianity than were the publicans and sinners to the
religion of the contemporaries of Christ; because, though the Church
may not, like the Scribes and Pharisees, despise and hate these
outcasts, it has not yet coped effectually with the problem of their
condition; and perhaps their numbers are increasing rather than
diminishing. There are sections of the community in which the
conditions of existence are so evil that childhood is plunged, almost
as soon as it is born, into an element of vice and crime, the bloom of
modesty is rudely rubbed off the soul of womanhood, and manhood is so
beset with temptation that escape is well-nigh impossible. Can anyone
doubt that an Isaiah or a Jeremiah would, in such a state of society,
have lifted up his voice like a trumpet and cast the condition of
these lost children of our people in the face of the luxurious rich,
and especially of the professors of religion? And is it less obvious
that this is still