wn city, a family made a small child
not their own a source of income by having it baptized frequently in
different churches, so that three charitable members of three Episcopal
churches were astonished to find, on comparing notes, that they shared
the responsibility of being the child's godmothers.

But it is needless to multiply illustrations; almost every church has a
collection of such experiences, and the bad effects of successful
deception upon the deceivers are apparent enough. I pass to the
important fact that this class of the poor, though numerically
insignificant by comparison with the poor in general, are yet so much
in evidence as the objects of Christian zeal, and the church wastes so
much time in coddling them, that the self-respecting poor often hold
aloof. It is a common thing to hear a poor man say that he is not
going to attend church, and be suspected of {170} trying to get
something. It does not increase his respect for Christians to find
them easily deceived, and it outrages his sense of justice to see that
laziness, drunkenness, and vice are rewarded by church workers. Even
among tramps, the variety known as the "mission bum" is looked down
upon by his fellows, and there is a lesson for the mission worker in
this simple fact.

In writing thus frankly of home missionary work, I am not unmindful of
all the difficulties with which Christian ministers have to contend.
Many of them are as much alive to the dangers of indiscriminate relief
as any one can be, and many of them have risked unpopularity and
misunderstanding to lift their churches out of the tread-mill of
ineffectual, dole-dispensing charities into vital contact with the
needs of the poor. The difficulties of Christian ministers are
twofold. Their first duty is to develop the charitable instincts of
church members, to overcome the selfishness and inertia of the natural
man. When they have succeeded in arousing a desire to do something for
somebody else, they must also furnish ample opportunity for {171} the
exercise of this newly awakened impulse. Now the charitable
development of the individual follows the development of the race; the
individual outgrows slowly, if at all, the sentimental and patronizing
view of poverty. To carry church members beyond this phase and make
them effective workers, genuine powers of leadership are needed, and it
is much easier to let them follow their own devices. We have seen in
the last chapter th