their lives--_the service of humanity_.

We have in the Salvation Army thirty-nine Training Schools in which our
own men and women, both for our missionary and home fields, receive an
intelligent tuition and practical training in the minutest details of
their service. They are trained in the finest and most intricate of all
the arts, the art of dealing ably with human life.

It is a wonderful art which transfigures a sheet of cold grey canvas into
a throbbing vitality, and on its inanimate spread visualizes a living
picture from which one feels they can never turn their eyes away.

It is a wonderful art which takes a rugged, knotted block of marble,
standing upon a coarse wooden bench, and cuts out of its uncomely
crudeness--as I saw it done--the face of my father, with its every
feature illumined with prophetic light, so true to life that I felt that
to my touch it surely must respond.

But even such arts as these crumble; they are as dust under our feet
compared with that much greater art, _the art of dealing ably with human
life in all its varying conditions and phases_.

It is in this art that we seek by a most careful culture and training to
perfect our officers.

They are trained in those expert measures which enable them to handle
satisfactorily those that cannot handle themselves, those that have lost
their grip on things, and that if unaided go down under the high, rough
tides. Trained to meet emergencies of every character--to leap into the
breach, to span the gulf, and to do it without waiting to be told