best that Christian civilization has as yet been
able to do toward a true social system." Let my friend take heart. She
herself has been busy in my sight all these years binding up the wounds.
If that be the most a Christian civilization has been able to do for the
neighbor till now, who shall say that it is not also the greatest? "This
do and thou shalt live," said the Lord of him who showed mercy. That was
the mark of the brotherhood. No, the gulf is not widening. It is only
that we have taken soundings and know it, and in the doing of it we have
come to know one another. The rest we may confidently leave with Him who
knows it all.

God knows we waited long enough; and how close we were to one another
all the while without knowing it! Two or three years ago at Christmas a
clergyman, who lives out of town and has a houseful of children, asked
me if I could not find for them a poor family in the city with children
of about the same ages, whom they might visit and befriend. He worked
every day in the office of a foreign mission in Fifth Avenue, and knew
little of the life that moved about him in the city. I picked out a
Hungarian widow in an East Side tenement, whose brave struggle to keep
her little flock together had enlisted my sympathy and strong
admiration. She was a cleaner in an office building; not until all the
arrangements had been made did it occur to me to ask where. Then it
turned out that she was scrubbing floors in the missionary society's
house, right at my friend's door. They had passed one another every day,
each in need of the other, and each as far from the other as if oceans
separated them instead of a doorstep four inches wide.

Looking back over the years that lie behind with their work, and forward
to those that are coming, I see only cause for hope. As I write these
last lines in a far-distant land, in the city of my birth, the children
are playing under my window, and calling to one another with glad cries
in my sweet mother-tongue, even as we did in the long ago. Life and the
world are before them, bright with the promise of morning. So to me seem
the skies at home. Not lightly do I say it, for I have known the toil of
rough-hewing it on the pioneer line that turns men's hair gray; but I
have seen also the reward of the toil. New York is the youngest of the
world's great cities, barely yet out of knickerbockers. It may be that
our century will yet see it as the greatest of them all. The task th