es. In order to do our
part in giving the bread of life to these worthy people, Lafayette
Avenue Church has always maintained two, and sometimes three, auxiliary
chapels. Of these, the "Cuyler Chapel," built and supported entirely by
our Young People's Association, is a fair representative. It has an
excellent preacher, who visits the plain people in their homes; it has a
well-equipped Sunday school--prayer meetings, kindergarten--its own
Society of Christian Endeavor, and King's Daughters, its penny savings
bank and its temperance society--in short, every appliance essential to
a Christian church. Many others of our strong Brooklyn churches are
working precisely on the same practical, common-sense lines. If all the
wealthy churches in New York would illuminate the darker quarters of
that city with a hundred well-manned light-houses, well provided with
the soul-saving apparatus of the poor man's Gospel they would do more to
silence the cavils against Christianity, and more to bridge the chasm
between the rich and the poor than by any of the superficial methods of
the "Humanitarians." What a poor man wants is not only a clean shirt, a
clean home, and a clean account on Saturday night; he wants a clean
character and a clean soul for this world and the next. Christianity
makes a sad mistake if it is satisfied to give him a full stomach, and
leave him with a starving soul.

In recent years we have heard much about the "Institutional Church" as
the long sought panacea. It is claimed by some persons that the churches
cannot succeed unless they add to ordinary spiritual instrumentalities,
various useful annexes, such as reading rooms, kindergartens,
dispensaries, and certain social entertainments. But it is a noteworthy
fact that the chief pioneer in "Institutional" methods was the late
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and he was the prince of old-fashioned gospel
preachers. He never thought of his orphanage, and other benevolent
adjuncts of the Metropolitan Tabernacle as substitutes for the sovereign
purpose of his holy work, which was to convert the people to Jesus
Christ. He subordinated the physical, the mental, and the social to the
spiritual; and rightly judged that making clean hearts was the best way
to secure clean homes and clean lives. I have no doubt that a very
strong, well-manned and thoroughly spiritually managed church may wisely
maintain as many adjuncts, such as reading-rooms, libraries,
dispensaries, kindergartens a