we are not proficient in Italian. How shall we address them? In the one universal language,

- in the language of fraternal deeds. A loaf of bread is a loaf of bread in every dialect which is spoken by the human race. And brotherly love is brotherly love all the world over. And the love of man is the best interpreter of the love of God. The gospel of the fatherhood of God is really preached only when they who listen lift up their heads, and new hope and new love begin to grow in their sad hearts. And no mere words can effect that.

It is idle to tell people that God loves them unless we ourselves show them the truth. of it by loving them. It is vain to tell the poor that God is their Father unless we make that plain to them by being ourselves their brethren. God will help them, we say - such is the blessed gospel. Yes, but how? Not out of the clouds, not by any dramatic miracle, but by the hands of us ordinary people. God helps by sending us to help.

That is how the gospel is to be preached to the poor. We must We must go and preach it by bringing hope into their lives-giving them some reason for hope; and by bringing happiness into their hearts giving them some good cause to

be happy. We must assure them of the watchful, wise, and loving care of God by making that love plain in our own fraternal provision for their needs. Not by words only, but by our helping hands, must we preach the gospel to the poor.

THE CHURCH AND THE LABOR

MOVEMENT.

WHAT can the church, as an organization, do in the labor movement? At present very little; first, for lack of disposition.

Many members of the church are enthusiastically disposed toward the cause of the workingman, but not all; probably less than a majority. Some who hold back do so from interested motives, being themselves upon the other side. A portion of the employers, the operators, the owners, the capitalists, against whom the labor movement is directed, are members, or at least attend the services, of the church. Dives belongs to the vestry; Mammon passes the alms basin. It was nat

ural and easy for St. James and some of the other writers of the New Testament to preach against the rich, because their audiences were made up almost entirely of the poor. Wealth in that day was all on the side of the devil. Such sermons are not common in our pulpits.

The parable of the camel vainly essaying to pass the eye of the needle is not often taken as a text. Nor will you hear a well-dressed congregation exhorted either in the words or in the spirit of this apostolic utterance, “Go too, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries which shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Behold the hire of Behold the hire of your laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them that have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth."

Some, of course, will be prompt to say that we do not preach after that fashion because we fear that such a sermon would affect our salary. But, while I am not prepared to deny that the clerical mind works in some cases quite like the lay mind, I am altogether convinced that the chief reason why the clergy of the present day do not more often shake their rhetorical fists in the faces of the rich is because they do not feel that the rich deserve that sort of treatment. Most parsons are acquainted with a great many people of all conditions, rich and poor, employers and employed; and they know perfectly well that the figures

of a man's income do not at all show where he stands upon the scale of sanctity. You cannot persuade them by any socialistic arguments that the poor are all saints, and that the rich are all sinners. They know better. They know that the bad and the good are closely intertangled in this queer world. They are personally acquainted with labor leaders who are wholly given over to selfishness, and with capitalists who are altogether devoted to the good of others.

Moreover, it ought to be kept in mind that in the present condition of things, when the capitalist goes to church and the workingman stays away, the parson naturally knows the employer better than the men whom he employs. And personal acquaintance counts for much in the formation of our judgments. I am surprised that there is so much disposition toward the cause of labor as there is in the church, where so many of the leading laymen are men of wealth, and where the clergy are so naturally turned for counsel toward their direction.

In addition to these members of the church, who are thus in the position of partisans in this matter, and who can hardly help looking