ciation to try and care for those men, upon whom
your success largely depends. Can you be blind to its value? Every
individual man who employs commercial travelers should aid the work. But
how is all this great work for young men carried on? It requires now
thirty thousand dollars a year to do it. Of this sum New York pays more
than one half, Pennsylvania about one sixth, and Massachusetts less than
one fifteenth. But to do this work properly,--this work of the universal
church of Christ for young men,--at least one third more, or forty
thousand dollars a year, is needed. There is another need, however, much
harder to meet--the men to fill the places calling earnestly for general
secretaries. There are nearly three hundred and fifty paid employees in
the field, representing about two hundred associations. Since every
association should have a secretary, and there are nearly, if not quite,
nine hundred, the need will be clearly seen. This need it is proposed to
meet by training men in schools established for the purpose. Something
of this has already been done in New York State and at Peoria, Illinois,
and there must soon be a regular training-school established to
accommodate from fifty to one hundred men.

This is a very meagre sketch of a great work. How inadequately it
portrays it, none know so well as those who are immediately connected
with it. Could you have been present at a dinner given a few months ago
to the secretaries of the international committee, and heard each man
describe his field and its needs; could you have seen the intensity with
which each endeavored to make us feel what he himself realized, that his
special field was the most important,--you would have come to our
conclusion: that each field was all-important, and that each man was in
his proper place, peculiarly fitted for it and assigned to it by the
Master.

A prominent divine has lately said: "I believe the Young Men's Christian
Association to be the greatest religious fact of the nineteenth
century."

What has been effected by this fact? Thousands of young men in all parts
of the world have been brought to Jesus Christ. It has been the
training-school for Moody, Whittle, and hosts of laymen who are to-day
proclaiming the simple Gospel. It has organized great evangelistic
movements both here and abroad. It formed the Christian Commission,
which not only relieved the wants of the body during our war, but sent
hundreds of Christ's missionari