the plain and common people into the
foreground of the charitable consciousness. Here, too, the facts will
not always travel in straight lines, and the great souls of earlier
ages will be found to have anticipated our best thinking; but usually
the world has failed in {4} any effort to adopt their high standards.
Speaking roughly, several centuries of charitable practice, in the
English world at least, are fairly well summed up in the doggerel
verses of that sixteenth-century divine, quoted by Hobson, who
counselled his flock,

"Yet cease not to give
Without any regard;
Though the beggars be wicked,
Thou shalt have thy reward."

The spirit of the mediaeval church, too, encouraged charitable giving
in the main "as a species of fire insurance." The poor, when they were
thought of at all, were too likely to be regarded as a means of saving
the giver's soul. This view of poverty is either quite dead or dying,
but the sentimental view, which succeeded it, is still very common. We
are still inclined to take a conventional attitude toward the poor,
seeing them through the comfortable haze of our own excellent
intentions, and content to know that we wish them well, without being
at any great pains to know them as they really are. In other words,
our intentions are good, but they {5} are not always good enough to
lead us to take our charitable work quite seriously, and found it
solidly upon knowledge and experience.

But the century drawing to a close has seen two very important
developments in charitable work in England and America; developments
quite as important in their own field as the advances of the century in
the art of fiction. The first of these is the wonderful growth of the
spirit of individual service, which has found one of its highest
expressions in the work of friendly visitors in the homes of the poor.
The second is the new but vigorous growth of the spirit of social
service, which has found its best expression in social and college
settlements. It might be possible to prove that both these
developments are merely revivals, that at several stages of the world's
history the same ideas have been put forward under other names; but
never before, as it seems to me, have they found such general
recognition.

This gives us three tolerably well-defined phases of charitable
progress: the phases of indiscriminate relief, of individual service,
and {6} of social service. In the first phase, we