harmony with true concepts of God, life, and duty. Behind the work of
the reformer is the dream of the reformer, the meditation of the mystic,
the seer. He must first have in mind a plain, clear conception of what
the relation is of man to God, of what man's environment should be, and
of what the society of the Kingdom should be. The reformer is one who
changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal
environment of his own thought. When he breaks an idol, it is not the
idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept
of the community. What he wishes in place of the idol is a right
conception. No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands.
But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, and the idols
disappeared.

Hence the work of the reformer is deep and heart-searching work. It
means constant study of the spiritual needs of the age, continual
insight into the material forces which are moulding the age-images,
money, conquest, or whatever they may be. He wishes to maintain a
spiritual hold on civilization itself, so to transform the ideal within
a man, a community, a nation, in regard to custom, observance, belief,
that the outer rite shall follow.

To reform is not to rush through the slums, and then preach a
sensational sermon about bad places in the slums, of which most people
never knew before! To reform is to know something of the conditions
which produce the slums--it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast
elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds,
circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social
clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of
righteous conduct in the heart of the slum-dwellers. One must know
something of the slow processes of social change, of social