losing
its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of
degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.

The people, the great world of people,--what a field for the church to
work in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church
(leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force,
is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building.
Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand
empty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economy
this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would
appear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced to
terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.

What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any
rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this
icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you
picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with
dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds
from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld
spreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in dreary
tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls
by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. What would
happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?

Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling,
and misery. At least we may infer as much from the success of the
occasional experiments which have been tried. We have a few examples to
prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often
been described. It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the
contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented,
the right is almost always preferred.

A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utter
brutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated.
Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusade
against organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and the
public, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into the
hands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest of
degraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate.
Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finally
beca