his son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite education.”

If such were the conditions at the social zenith, those at the nadir were scarcely more hopeful.

"At the other end of the social scale," observes Green, "lay the masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the development of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. ... A Welsh bishop avowed that he had seen his own diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of Westmoreland.... In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for two-pence. Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in Europe, the most remiss of their labors in private and the least severe of their

lives.""

Such was the England of Walpole. But as his long term of power neared its close, we see society everywhere stirring as one in a troubled sleep. On every hand signs of a general awakening were visible.

VI. THE SPIRITUAL RENAISSANCE INAUGURATED BY WHITEFIELD AND THE WESLEYS.

Pitt, then young and uninfluential, led a band in Parliament whom the cynical Walpole called the "boys." They thundered against the venality and corruption of government and for a time their words fell on dull ears or were ridiculed and the statements denied. Later, however, we find this political protest against ministerial corruption everywhere taken up.

attracted

Each

"The stir," says Green, "showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot of Oxford students. . . . Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it public attention. found his special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast masses of population which lay concentrated in the towns or around the mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was shown when a dread of 'enthusiasm' closed against lished Church and forced them to preach the new apostles the pulpits of the Estabin the fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his labor the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's preaching was such as England had never heard before. . . . It was no common enthusiast who could wring gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of the green knoll at Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits, and see as he preached the tears 'making white channels down

their blackened cheeks.'

999

persecution on the part of smug conventionalism.

66

"Their lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they aroused was equally passionate. . . . Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student, came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the 'sweet singer' of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more extravagant features disappeared. ... A passion for hymn-singing and a new musical impulse were aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public devotion throughout England. But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon as head of the group of Methodists. . . . In power as a preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the excellencies of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgment, a command over others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of men. was older than any of his colleagues at the start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost covers the century; he had besides a learning and a skill in writing which no other of the Methodists possessed. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight.

He

"The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members at his death, and now counts its

members in England and America by millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the Evangelical' movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible.”

VII.

THE DEMAND TO-DAY UPON THE CLERGY GREATER AND MORE EX

ACTING THAN EVER BEFORE.

Conditions to-day are so strikingly similar in essential particulars to those which preceded the great moral and spiritual renaissance described above, and the signs of heart-hunger on the part of the people and the general symptoms of the awakening of a new civic spirit are so much in evidence that we feel justified in predicting precisely such a moral awakening, if any considerable number of our present-day clergymen should lead a crusade for the restoration of the ethics of primitive Christianity, for the enthronement of the Golden Rule as the rule of life. But the demand on the ministry to-day is far greater than that of any earlier day, because we are living in a world in which the intellectual horizon is more extended than ever before-a world in which science, education and discovery have broadened and changed the concepts of mankind, making it necessary for clergymen to study the fundamental laws that underlie social progress and the obligations imposed by the law of solidarity. The gospel of to-morrow, to be effective on the imagination of man, must incorporate in a living, practical way the idea of the brotherhood of man that necessarily follows the concept of the fatherhood of God. It must address itself to the reason as well as the heart. It must meet the high demands of justice and of equity. In a word, it must insist upon making the new ideal of emancipated manhood-the watchword of de

mocracy, justice, freedom and fraternity -a living reality instead of an empty shibboleth. The church of the future, to be a power, must imitate the life of Jesus by ministering first to the needs of the perishing body, and through the door of justice and love lead the people to the heights. Whenever the sick came to Jesus, he first healed their bodily afflictions. When the multitude were a-hungered, he fed them. And so all through his ministry he made the door of active

present-day service the passageway by which he led the wanderers to the heights. So in his teachings, the parable of the Good Samaritan emphasized the crowning and summing up of his ethics enunciated in the Golden Rule. The church of to-morrow can become powerful, we believe, only through appealing at once to the brain, the heart and the sense of justice in the people, and by making social justice the subject of immediate

concern.

M

I.

RS. MORTON stepped quickly from her carriage and came as near to hurrying up the steps of her sister's house as she would permit herself to do while her coachman watched. An anAn annoyed puzzlement lay in her eyes, and her chin had a pugnacious set. The maid let her in without a word and she went straight up stairs to her sister's boudoir.

Ethel heard her coming, but did not follow her natural impulse to meet her in the hall. She did not care to risk having their first words carry down the open staircase to a servant's ears.

"Well?" said Mrs. Morton as she stepped into the boudoir and swung the door to behind her.

"Well," began Ethel with a firm mildness that seemed habitual to her; "things are not going right—and I thought you ought to know."

"Oh, I knew something had happened from your voice on the telephone; but what is it?"-impatiently.

"The marriage may not be-may be postponed." "Never!"

Ethel was silent; and the two women looked straight into each other's eyes. First there was shocked enquiry in Mrs.

"She was unworthy of his confidence," declared Mrs. Morton decisively, plainly finding relief in a mental movement in some direction.

The pain came back into Ethel's eyes. "It was a terrible shock to the poor girl," she said simply.

"But his frankness-his manliness in telling her before marriage-when so many men would let her find it out afterward," protested Mrs. Morton, her excitement growing. "She should have risen to that."

"She is prostrated, I learn," said Ethel, her mildness becoming more obviously firm than usual.

"And Paul?" cried Mrs. Morton, turning quickly on her sister.

III.

The heavy Parker carriage was making its slow way up from the wharf some six months after the November day on which Mrs. Morton learned from her sister that the longed-for marriage of their erring brother might not take place, and then drove over to Stella Norwood's to "show her her duty." Mr. and Mrs. Paul Parker were just home from a honeymoon in Europe, and Ethel and Mrs. Morton had been down with the carriage to meet them. A dress-suit case covered with foreign labels sat on the box beside the coachman; a smaller bag lay between the feet of the quartette in the carriage; and each held something fragile and precious which could not be left to come up with the trunks.

Stella wore a face submerged in content, and looked out the carriage windows with glad eyes on the familiar streets.

"I can never help feeling," said Mrs. Morton, "that paying duty is like paying blackmail."

"I don't mind paying it," said Paul, some remnants of a late annoyance still audible in his voice. "But I can't stand the offensive way in which the officials assume that you may be a perjurer and a thief."

“I am afraid,” laughed Mrs. Morton, "that I am both every time I come back from abroad."

"I don't admit it," declared Paul. "I'm a sudden free-trade convert-that is all."

"Well, you had a good time anyway," said Ethel, addressing Stella.

"Very!" exclaimed Stella, her face lighting up. "I am not quite sure that I wanted to come home"-and she tried to look shocked at the enormity of her remark.

"Oh, you are to be forgiven that on a honeymoon," Ethel assured her.

Paul's eyes traveled with amused fondness over the erect figure of his bride, up to her smiling face with the sea-tan still on it.

"When I tell you that Stella has learned

Here Stella's gloved hand thrust suddenly over Paul's mouth stopped his satirical drawl, and he dodged laughing into his corner.

"I did get to love them," declared Stella, a girlish seriousness mingling with the mischief in her face. "We were a long time in Siena, and I used to go over nearly every day to the Belle Arti to look at their curious old saints and Madonnas. You must n't think of them as modern paintings at all"-the seriousness was now in full possession of her face—“the artists had to do everything in a conventional way; but you can see them actually struggling to express themselves inside of their limiting conventions

"Like a society woman who has discovered an idea in her head,” broke in Mrs. Morton with a round, low laugh she had.

"I had to listen to that sort of thing day after day," said Paul from his corner, shaking his head pathetically.

"You had begun to like them, too," said Stella to him with sweet reproachfulness. "You know you had—you admitted it.

"Under torture," shot in Paul, sinking farther into his corner.

"Incorrigible!" breathed Stella at him; and as her eyes shone over at him, they grew more and more tender until she forgot to look away.

Mrs. Morton moved a little uncomfortably in the mild light of this stray beam from the honeymoon, and looked pointedly out of the window; but Ethel looked at Stella's radiant face as an elder sister might at a happy girl.

IV.

Ethel and Mrs. Morton were walking among the flower-beds of the Morton summer-place. When they lifted their faces to look to the east, they could se