for every man to be true. We are trying to establish such conditions as shall enable men to live out their free and full individual lives. For the work of government is to protect persons and property, and enable the individual to be free, and by combination to make common property, so far as we are able, the result of the world's civilization so far attained. If we know what we are doing, we are trying to build the kingdom of God here on earth. Dream as much as you please of the kingdom of God in the skies; but it is our business, as men in politics, to do all we can to realize the kingdom of God right here and now.

Father, let us realize how solemn a thing it is to have in our hands the power that touches the welfare of our fellows, and let us, in the light of the Eternal, try to be true in the exercise of that power. Amen.

Published weekly. Price $1.50 a year, or 5 cents single copy

Entered at the Post-office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter.

A MAN IN REFORMS.

A MAN will always be a reformer; that is, a full, complete man, conscious of his position and the relation in which he stands to the past, the present, and the future, will always be engaged in some direction, in some department of life, in helping the world to be better, in helping to reform, remake, existing things into higher and finer things. This necessity, the necessity of all true men being reformers, is found in considering two great facts. The first of these is that humanity starts in feebleness, in ignorance, with almost no consciousness of its own nature or powers, with very little knowledge of its conditions, and with almost no power of control over these conditions. And, starting thus, human history represents an advance, a gradual growth, new steps taken towards the attainment of better things. And since humanity is growing thus, as the world goes on, you will see that there lies in the very fact of this statement the necessity for constantly making things over, reforming things, disturbing old conditions, bringing the actual facts of life and of the world into accordance with higher thoughts, with truer ideals of what is just and right, into clearer accord with human love. And the other fact, and one which I shall have to deal with considerably more at length, is the tendency of humanity, at any particular stage in its history, to pitch its tents with the desire to stay there, an unwilling

ness to move.

I suppose that this grows partly out of the fact that the advance of the world is necessarily so slow. People get the impression that things have always been about as they are now, and that there is no use in expecting to make them very much better. They get into the mood of the old

writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

He said there was nothing new under the sun: whatever is now has been of old; and we cannot expect the future to do anything more than to repeat the past and the present. The life of a man, the life of any generation of men, is, of course, only a moment in the life of the race; and just as a child, who sits and watches the hour hand of a clock, does not see it move, and wonders whether it will ever reach from one figure on the dial to another, so people who do not study, and become familiar with the tremendous changes that have taken place in the past, become somewhat sceptical of the possibility or the necessity for changes. And there are several characteristics of the human mind that tend to bring about this condition of affairs. I wish to refer, to make the matter clear, to some of them.

The ideal, of course, would be that there should be no reform in the sense of tearing down and rebuilding. Human institutions of every kind, if we could only reach the ideal, would be flexible, and would grow like a tree. The late Walter Bagehot, in a very remarkable book called "Science and Politics," deals at length with this question as it concerns the matter of human government. He takes a tree for his illustration. A tree, being a living organism, at least up to a certain period in its development keeps its bark flexible, so that it can expand from within, become larger, put forth new twigs, new branches, and at the same time keep its old form. That is, it is the perfect ideal of a balance between the conservative and the radical forces that underlie the life of the world in every one of its departments. There must be enough of the conservative to keep the form, to hold the order of things; and then, if you could have this conservatism flexible enough to make way for the radical force of growth, then you would have, I say, the ideal condition of affairs. But this has almost never been attained in the history of the world. It is rather true, in a general way, that the conservative forces forget that there is any place in the world for the radical, and do their ut