everywhere the medial power. Today the world is weak, and man staggers toward conflict and turmoil and strife, because this medial. power is rejected. Workingmen draw off from employers, labor separates from capital, class parts from class, and society is divided. into caste conditions, because this medial power is not employed. There is no work given Christ to do by these maddened, rebellious men on either side. The church is left out in the cold in all these disputes as much as is a water-logged ship from the count of an effective navy.

Religion is kept for Sundays and sanctuaries, not for workingmen in trouble or for great corporations at their wits' end how to defy competition and still make a profit. It is all wrong. It is stupid. We ought to know God better, and trust more implicitly in the help of one who has done what man could not do, and who has found his opportunity again and yet again in man's extremity. Jesus Christ can not only mediate between God and man and save the soul; he can mediate between man and man, between labor and capital, between different and differing nationalities, in accordance with the promise: "I, the Lord, will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear thou not, I will help thee."

Our duty deserves consideration. The words of the context indicate what that duty is. Let us hear the great apostle: "I exhort, therefore, that first of all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men." What a command to be dropped into the resolves of a workingmen's meeting! And yet there is power in it. Think of the employed taking to their hearts and into their prayers the interests of employers, and asking their Saviour to cause them to plan wisely and pay generously, while they resolve to labor faithfully and live frugally, that all may be blessed. Think of the influence of a Christian company, in a factory, who learned of their employer's need and offered to give a day's wages to help him through. Behold the conception-the whole race occupying one broad level of moral equality, with no recognized distinction in the sight of heaven but that of personal character. Then the dream of a Burns would be realized, and a man would be "a man for a' that." Wonder not that this ennobled the disciples, lifting the fisherman to the height of an apostle and making the proud and haughty Jew the champion of the brotherhood of man.

Before Christ came, the dominating thought was that the power of the good spirit, the one supreme mind, was confined to the spirit world, and that the devil controlled this sublunary sphere. They believed that the evil to which man is heir lay enfolded in the connection of his spirit with the body and its material surroundings, and all deliverances or redemptive power were to be sought in the voluntary withdrawment of the spirit from matter, thus to be prepared for a return to the higher life.

They separated religion from life. From this prevailing idea sprang the ancient hermit life of India and Egypt, the old Buddhistic codes for the maceration and starvation of the body in order to redeem the spirit from its power; all degrading, revolting forms of religious asceticism, from ages preceding the existence of Hebrew nationality down to the mean and miserable life of an Indian fakir or of the Italian mendicant monk of our time. There is no place in such a system for a great, strong body, fed with the best food of earth, furnishing a home to the Lord Jesus Christ, so that it may be true. Because of this reception of Jesus into a strong and healthy organism the right to be called God's child shall be attained. The conception of a Christian is for the most part that of a puny, pale and emaciated body inhabited by faith. We have no room for the brawny arm of a giant or for the ponderous brain of a great thinker or for the resistless eloquence of a potential orator. It is all wrong. We are weak today because Satan, through the qualmishness of puny Christians, cheats us out of the use of the mental and physical resources with which society is blessed. This locks religion up in forms and ceremonies; it does everything with it but use it. It bridges no chasms between God and man. It refuses to touch life. It dares not speak with the voice of authority to living men in the storm and whirlpool of life, saying to the preacher: "Live, as well as preach, Christ."

Faith in Christ the mediator helps men. Faith cures grow out of it. The work performed by men like Muller is the result of this interposition of our personal God, at work for us and in behalf of us and instead of us with the men whom it is wise to influence and a pleasure to command. The work accomplished is seen in the faith which enables the church to lift burdens never before taken, and perform work that it seemed madness to attempt. Christ's presence

among men disturbs the foundations of evil, lays broad foundations for universal philanthropies. The work achieved proves that man does not have to be less a man to have God's help, but that receiving God in Christ into the soul blesses and ennobles manhood. The Christian, instead of being compelled to withdraw from life to obtain communion with God, is permitted to welcome Christ to his heart, and so obtain the blessing that brightens every joy and sweetens every cup of bliss and confers upon the soul of the believer immortal happiness. It does not withdraw man from the activities of life, but commissions him to proclaim Christ and to live the glad tidings of the gospel. It makes the Christian an illustrated edition of the gospel of the Son of God. It proclaims Jesus as the ruler of this world, and in this world. No caste, no distinction because of wealth or previous condition; but one God, one mediator, one humanity. This makes the world the possession of a loving Father. In it we are to pray for all, love all, and work for all, and so shall we lift mankind out of the gloom of evil into the sunlight of an eternal day.

THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA FOR
ROMANISTS?

"I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." Deut. 30: 19. This is the keynote for the Pauline Propaganda and for the Christian church. Romanism has suffered a political defeat. Boston has been taken out of the grasp of Rome. The opportunity has come to the board of education, not only to put back Swinton's book as a beginning and until a better and truer history can be found, but to find a way out of the public schools (which Rome fights and from which she withdraws her children) of every Roman Catholic teacher now employed, and the way into that place for a teacher in sympathy with the spirit of our institutions and the letter of the constitution. The citizens of this free land owe it to the rising generation to dismiss Leo XIII from the position of superintendent of public instruction in the United States. The story is told of a gentleman being roused from his sleep by some one saying "There is a robber in the house." "What is he doing?" "Hunting for silver or money." "Watch him, and if he finds anything come and tell me, and I will take it away from him." Rome has found something. Let us take it away from this robber of the nineteenth century.

The Index Expurgatorius ought to be our guide in regard to the books used in the public schools. What Rome rejects, we must insist on. What Rome hates, Protestants must love. Run over the list of the books she fights. They are what the children need. Give them what they need. Have done with expediency, with policy, with sentiment, with what is called toleration of men who seek to scuttle the ship on which we all ride, of incendiaries in cities in which we live, of dynamiters attempting to disrupt and destroy the education of the youth, which is the foundation of hope for the people.