h a task, however, an orderly system must be adopted.

When our Lord fed the five thousand, He first commanded them to sit down
by companies. "And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties."
These 400,000 souls may first of all be grouped in families. Let us say
90,000 families. These are scattered all over the greater city, most of
them in close proximity to some one of our 150 churches. To each church
may be given an average assignment of 600 families.

The average number of communicants in each of our churches is nearly
400. Some churches have less, others more. To an average company of 400
communicants is committed the task of evangelizing 600 families, not
aliens or strangers, but members of our own household of faith, people
who in many eases will heartily welcome the invitation. Some of these
400 potential evangelists will beg to be excused. Let us make a
selective draft of 300 to do the work. The task required of each member
of this army is to visit two families.

Whatever else may be said of such a computation it certainly does not
present an insuperable task. It can be done in one year, in one month,
in one week, in one day.

Without presuming to insist upon a particular method of solving this
problem, is it not incumbent upon the Lutheran churches of New York to
face it with the determination to accomplish an extraordinary work if
need be in an extraordinary manner? "The kingdom of heaven suffereth
violence and the violent take it by force."

Seventy years ago a great company of Christian men met in the old Luther
town of Wittenberg to consider the needs of the Fatherland. It was the
year of the Revolution. It was a time of political confusion and of
desperate spiritual need. It was then that Wichern, in an address of
impassioned eloquence, pointed the way toward the mobilization of all
Christians in a campaign of spiritual service.

He was directed to prepare the program. It appeared in 1849 under the
title "Die Innere Mission."

It was a clarion call to personal service and it met with an immediate
and remarkable response. The movement marked an epoch in the history of
the church.

Because the Inner Mission lends itself in a peculiar way to works of
charity it is often regarded as synonymous with the care of the helpless
and afflicted. In this use of the term we lose sight of the larger
meaning and scope of the work which has made it one of the great
religious forces of the nineteenth cent