nd you will see a genuine and vital
protest against the economic corruption of the Church. In America, the
"Knights of Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a
"War for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y.M.C.A. in the
training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern
common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army.
William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his
hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the
slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his
captives to Jesus---

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.

Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He had
not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared
hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how
utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for
the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their
diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced
into useful work--old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas
dinners, farm colonies--until today the bare list of the various kinds
of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done
with the money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to
authority, but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's
Preservative", and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with
port.

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and
there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching
the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are
making attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more
vital churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the
practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys
clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for
mothers, social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always
before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches,
like everything else, in its migh