Christian. It was Jesus Christ who raised the value of both the human
body and the human soul, abolished gladiatorial shows, raised up
hospitals, created cemeteries, even for the poorest, made life
insurance companies possible, and put even such value on human life as
could be recovered in action by law from corporations which murder men
through sordid economy or criminal carelessness. Lorenzo Coffin
wrought for the application of Christianity to railway men. When
finally the law was passed, compelling safety-couplers and air-brakes,
and when, in the constitution of New York State, the limit of five
thousand dollars replevin for a human life destroyed by a corporation
was abolished, and no limit set, there were two new triumphs of
Christianity. In these phenomena, we see only further illustrations of
that Kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Christ, and illustrated both in
the hidden leaven and the phenomenal mustard-seed.

A sermon by the pastor of Shawmut Church, on "Lions that devour,"
depicted the great American slaughter-field. It set forth the array of
figures as given him in the reports of the Inter-State Commerce
Commission, sent by his friend, the Hon. Augustus Schoonmaker, of
Kingston, New York, and then in Washington, one of the Commissioners.
There was considerable surprise and criticism from among his auditors,
and the facts as set forth were doubted. There were present, as usual
on Sunday mornings in Shawmut Church, men of public affairs,
presidents of banks, the collector of the port of Boston, a general in
the regular army, a veteran colonel of volunteers, several officers of
railway companies, and, most of all, Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin. He
and they thought the statements given of the slaughter of young men on
railroads in the United States must be incredible. Even Carleton had
not then informed himself concerning that great field of blood
extending from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf,
which every year was strewn with the corpses or mangled limbs of
twenty-five thousand people. He thought his friend in the pulpit must
be mistaken, and frankly told him so.

On the following Sunday, having received the figures for the current
year, from the best authority in Washington, the preacher was able to
say that his statements of last Sunday had been below reality, and
that, instead of exaggerating, he had underestimated the facts. This
gave Mr. Coffin, as he afterwards confessed, fresh impetus