to get married, Mr. Irvine," the
undertaker said.

They came into the study and were married, and I shook hands with the
three, and they went off. Next day I went to the undertaker--indeed,
he was an undertaker's helper. I went up to his desk and laid down a
five-dollar bill, one-fourth of the marriage fee. Without being
invited, I pulled a chair up and sat down beside him.

"Now, tell me, brother," I said confidentially. "Why did you bring
them to me?"

A smile overspread his features.

"Well," he said, "it was like this. You remember that funeral
business?"

"Yes."

"Well, I figured it out like this: that one of the two of us was
puttin' up a damned big bluff; but I hadn't the heart to call it.
Shake!"

CHAPTER XII

WORKING WAY DOWN

After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would
find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to
be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on
the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in
morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual;
social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be
touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red
line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible
for them.

Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to
this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the
missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as
eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social
standing whatever among the people whose alms support the
institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the
executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has
absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as
the poor saints have it by themselves.

Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets
of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one
night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon
the sweltering mass that covered the roofs, fire escapes and
sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children
panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little
children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle
the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages
lined the sidew