become church members, opportunity for social and intellectual
diversion. Parish houses and settlements were established, and these
were furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms,
auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, and
provision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes. These
are all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and study
clubs good, as far as they go. But what a pitifully short way they go!
They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not the
slightest impression on the big social problem. The reason is plain. The
appeal of the institutional church is too intellectual. It reaches only
that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social
opportunity.

To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled since
the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can
be done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losing
its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of
degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.

The people, the great world of people,--what a field for the church to
work in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church
(leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force,
is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building.
Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand
empty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economy
this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would
appear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced to
terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.

What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any