ived a profit from conditions which
were an abomination to God. It would be but an idle mockery for them to
go and build a settlement house, if they did not first reform their
lives.

Here there had been a decided stir among the pews. Hodder had not seemed
to notice it.

When he, their rector, had gone to Dalton Street to invite the poor and
wretched into God's Church, he was met by the scornful question: "Are the
Christians of the churches any better than we? Christians own the grim
tenements in which we live, the saloons and brothels by which we are
surrounded, which devour our children. Christians own the establishments
which pay us starvation wages; profit by politics, and take toll from our
very vice; evade the laws and reap millions, while we are sent to jail.
Is their God a God who will lift us out of our misery and distress? Are
their churches for the poor? Are not the very pews in which they sit as
closed to us as their houses?"

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert
cold or hot."

One inevitable conclusion of such a revelation was that he had not
preached to them the vital element of Christianity. And the very fact
that his presentation of religion had left many indifferent or
dissatisfied was proof-positive that he had dwelt upon non-essentials,
laid emphasis upon the mistaken interpretations of past ages. There
were those within the Church who were content with this, who--like the
Pharisees of old--welcomed a religion which did not interfere with their
complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth, with their
special privileges; welcomed a Church which didn't raise her voice
against the manner of their lives--against the order, the Golden Calf
which they had set up, which did not accuse them of deliberately
retarding the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a spiritual,
not a material affair. In that religion, vainly designed by man as a
compromise between God and Mammon, there was none of the divine
discontent of the true religion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth of
the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with Nicodemus and
the rulers of the earth, "How can these things be?"

And there were others who still lingered in the Church, perplexed and
wistful, who had come to him and confessed that the so-called catholic
acceptance of divine truths, on which he had hitherto dwelt, meant
nothing to the