istic
individualism, through our selfish Protestantism, to a glimpse of the
true Protestantism--Democracy.

Our spiritual vision was glowing clearer. We were beginning to perceive
that charity did not consist in dispensing largesse after making a
fortune at the expense of one's fellow-men; that there was something
still wrong in a government that permits it. It was gradually becoming
plain to us, after two thousand years, that human bodies and souls
rotting in tenements were more valuable than all the forests on all the
hills; that government, Christian government, had something to do with
these.

We should embody, in government, those sublime words of the Master,
"Suffer little children to come unto me." And the government of the
future would care for the little children. We were beginning to do it.
Here, as elsewhere, Christianity and reason went hand in hand, for the
child became the man who either preyed on humanity and filled the prisons
and robbed his fellows, or else grew into a useful, healthy citizen. It
was nothing less than sheer folly as well as inhuman cruelty to let the
children sleep in crowded, hot rooms, reeking with diseases, and run wild
throughout the long summer, learning vice in the city streets. And we
still had slavery--economic slavery--yes, and the more horrible slavery
of women and young girls in vice--as much a concern of government as the
problem which had confronted it in 1861 . . . . We were learning that
there was something infinitely more sacred than property . . . .

And now Alison recalled, only to be thrilled again by an electric
sensation she had never before experienced with such intensity, the look
of inspiration on the preacher's face as he closed. The very mists of
the future seemed to break before his importuning gaze, and his eyes
seemed indeed to behold, against the whitening dawn of the spiritual age
he predicted, the slender spires of a new Church sprung from the
foundations of the old. A Church, truly catholic, tolerant, whose
portals were wide in welcome to all mankind. The creative impulse,
he had declared, was invariably religious, the highest art but the
expression of the mute yearnings of a people, of a race. Thus had once
arisen, all over Europe, those wonderful cathedrals which still cast
their spell upon the world, and art to-day would respond--was responding
--to the unutterable cravings of mankind, would strive once more to
express in stone and glass and pigmen