tor.

"We shall vote your bill down to-morrow, ten to one," said a senaAn appeal, however, was taken; it was a night of prayer. And the next day the senator said, "I don't know what has come over us, but we are going to pass your bill. I don't know how I am going to explain my inconsistency. It is queer, but we are going to pass it." And after three hours' debate there were only two votes against it. In fact, it was so reasonable that it was wise legislation.

During fifteen years this work has been going on; for twelve years the Superintendent of this Department of the W. C. T. U. has given her entire time to it, at her own charges. With the preparation of literature to meet the school demand, and the instruction of teachers, there has been developed a Bureau of Scientific Temperance Instruction, and the movement has extended into other lands. The enterprise has, indeed, become so far a public one as quite to transcend ordinary private means, and it is likely that its limit will be marked only by the limited means for its extension.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union,

under the leadership of Frances E. Willard, LL.D., is one of the most wide-awake and aggressive working bodies in the world, being a hundred thousand strong, and including some of the most progressive women of the age. They hold Gospel temperance meetings in every principal city in our country. And they make their power felt in every political campaign, in their advocacy of advanced temperance legislation. This perpetual agitation of reform, and the zest with which they grapple with all moral questions in politics, recalls the observation of old-time voyagers,- that the mermaids were sad and heavy in fair weather, but glad and merry in the hour of tempest.

The church is everywhere foremost in this reform. The great work of the Methodist Church South was alluded to by their Bishop Galloway, in his address in Boston last winter. His own state of Mississippi is one of the most advanced prohibitory states in the Union, of seventy-five counties there being only eight that tolerate and legalize the sale of liquor. It is entirely a non-partisan and interdenominational movement, enforced by a true and loyal national sentiment determined to be rid of the curse of drink. In England the aggressive methods of the C. E. T. S. are carried to an extent quite unknown in America, — bearing upon its roll more than eight hundred thousand members, occupying five thousand points in Great Britain, distributing thirty thousand copies of temperance publications every weekday of the year, opening everywhere counter attractions over against the

gin shops, wheeling coffee on barrows wherever workmen are gathered in crowds, sending out five vans to track for temperance the rural roads of England, establishing homes for inebriate women, ministering to prisoners by sixty-five missionaries in the Police Court Mission, rescuing the poor and the wretched, visiting nearly two-score thousand homes where vice and crime have gone before them, and meeting sixteen regiments of returned convicts, with help for re-establishing their homes.1

Rum-selling dragons in these times club together and sail to Africa, as, according to the scientific authorities of Europe, five hundred years ago it was common to see four or five dragons fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and sail over the sea and over rivers to get good meat. The modern destroyers, in the year 1885, took ten million gallons of liquor from Christian lands to West Africa; four-fifths of it from Germany. "The African," inquires Dr. Cust, "has survived slavery, the slave-trade, tribal wars, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and murder for witchcraft, is he now to fall a victim to the distilleries of London, France, Germany, and the United States?"

This damaging fact of non-Christian greed in godless dragon dens in Christendom, coupled as it is with the sending forth of the opium devil to China,3 gives emphasis to the counter fact that the Church of God is the foe of intemperance, hating with a perfect hatred whatever is inimical to the peace of the homes of the world.

1 The Author desires to acknowledge the favors of HIS GRACE THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, President of the Church of England Temperance Society, and of the Secretary, F. EARDLEY-WILMOT, ESQ., R.N., for valuable papers received relating to the work of the C. E. T. S.

2 Report of London Missionary Conference, 1888, Vol. II, p. 550.

3 Opium is the blight of Asia. Chinese wives and daughters are sold to pay opium debts. Yet when treated by missionary physicians, and when renewed by the power of God the victims become good citizens and amend their ways, caring for their homes. — Dr. D. H. Clapp, Shansi, letter to the Author, April, 1894.

4. THE CONFLICT OF THE CHURCH WITH SOCIAL IMMORALITY.

BY THE RT. REV. F. D. HUNTINGTON, S.T.D., D.C.L., LL.D., BISHOP OF Central

NEW YORK.

It is true that morality and immorality are as much personal as religion and irreligion, or faith and unbelief. That does not alter our responsibility for sins which are aggravated, and sometimes may be said to subsist, by their aggregation.

Vices are not organized except in states of society demoniacally corrupt, but they are always gregarious, and in these very communities where we live, they have sunk to that depth of mad and infamous depravity where they are propagated and made at once attractive and destructive by social combinations. They publish themselves by signs more or less intelligible, in a subservient and mercenary, if not salacious newspaper press, in buildings, in streets, in conspicuous and soliciting entertainments. They come in contact with legislation. What do I say? Legislation itself is bought up, enslaved, prostituted by them. Unless the reorganized organs of public information are grossly untrue, there are senators and assemblymen who bend in abject slavery to their dictation, or are enslaved by their blandishments. Votes are sold, rulers are made merchandise, elections are made mockeries, the honest rich are robbed and honest poor are pauperized by them. They tax, tempt, torment, every class of the people.

Intemperance and licentiousness are not single iniquities; they live in broods; they herd together; they go delirious by the herding. They spread by ingenious inventions; they advertise their poisons and seductions; they carry on a traffic; they are better known in these cities, and in the villages too, than libraries or museums or houses of mercy. Their resorts cost more money, they are better supported, in some places they are more frequented, and they are more constantly open, than the churches. Domestic safety and honor are imperiled by the commercial custom which separates thousands of young men, married and unmarried, from any home, the greater part of the time. Family life is polluted at the fountain.

Not one interest of human welfare in either world is left without injury, even to misery if not destruction, by a public sale of alcoholic drinks. In effect, the saloon in this country is an institution. In its practical alliance with seduction, it is doubtless the most malific power organized and tolerated in any country where Christianity is the religion of the people,- an institution which, on an immeasurable scale,

and with persistent energy, gives what is lowest and beastliest in human nature a command over what is right and good in it.

Worse than all, this malignant despotism lays its savage hand on the Ark of God. Are there no communicants at our altars, no women sworn to be daughters of God, who are bound by an unwritten but actual bondage to the Prince of this world? Do we need to be told that there are men who go out of the church door to follow a business where, as they privately confess, honesty would be ruin and truth impossible, who have agents to collect their rents for houses of debauchery, who build fortunes on falsehoods, and are afraid to do right, and twist or hide or disown their consciences, lest they should offend a customer, or disappoint their party, or by missing a bargain part with their money?

Every effort to separate either the practice of morality or the science of morals from the religion revealed in Christ has failed. There have been virtuous heathen and non-Christian ethics, but history, psychology, and in large part intuition, stand with the Bible, immovable contradictions to any scheme for making men good without God, or the human race right and true and clean without the new creation in the Second Adam, the Incarnation with its perpetual power. This makes our way plain. Only by an utter abnegation of our baptismal and ordination. promises can we hold ourselves aloof from an open strife with that impious trinity-the world, the flesh, and the devil-which celebrates its filthy feast every day in the year. Indifference will be disloyalty. An apology that we are preoccupied with other things will not answer, because those other things are less than this thing. I think it deserves a fair inquiry whether the Church is vigilant enough, active enough, fearless enough in a public contest with vice.

Huntington.

I.

PART FOURTH. THE PHILANTHROPIC WORK OF A REDEEMED WOMANHOOD.

SELF-DEVOTEMENT. THE DAUGHTERS OF

THE KING.

TEN TIMES ONE. WORKING GIRLS' CLUBS.-THE GIRLS' FRIENDLY SOCIETY.

'Tis related in the Gospel story that our Saviour was ministered unto by devout women; and the Apostolic founders of the Church record their gratitude to those devout women who were "helpers" in their mission. Saintly women became at once the ornament of the new faith, and their influence made itself felt in the advancement of a Christian civilization. Self-devotement to the Master has come to be the deliberate choice of holy women the world over: self-devotement to the poor, the homeless, neglected children, friendless age, raising the fallen, pulling down wickedness from high places, — devotement in the Master's name to some project to be of use to God and man. "Whom not having seen I love," was the motto in an English maiden's locket. Love for the unseen Saviour has been the great motive actuating devout maid and ministering matron, in great numbers in every age of the Church,- as if the angels of God had come to the earth in womanly guise.

Of old time, Olympias, the sister of St. Basil, was left a widow at eighteen, and she deliberately chose the companionship of the Heavenly Bridegroom, rather than allow her mind to be slightly diverted by the duties pertinent to the wife of a Roman Emperor. Vain was the suit of Theodosius, who was enamoured of her beauty, her fine intellectual endowments, her aristocratic rank, and her great wealth. Concerning this last, he sought to relieve her of carnal cares by appointing some one to look after her property, whereupon she straightway wrote to His Majesty:

"You have shown towards your humble servant the wisdom and goodness, not only of a sovereign, but of a bishop, by laying the heavy burden of my estates upon an official, and thereby delivering me from the care and disquietude which the necessity of managing them well imposed upon me. I now only request one thing more, by granting which you would much increase my joy: Command them to be divided between the Church and the poor. I have already felt the strivings of vanity which are wont to accompany one's own distribution, and I