"FOR

God and My Neighbor

BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD

(See pages 66, 121, 170)

all that, Robert, you're a notorious Infidel." I paused-just opposite the Tivoli-and gazed moodily up and down the Strand.

As I have remarked elsewhere, I like the Strand. It is a very human place. But I own that the Strand lacks. dignity and beauty, and that amongst its varied odors the odor of sanctity is scarcely perceptible.

There are no trees in the Strand. The thoroughfare should be wider. The architecture is, for the most part, banal. For a chief street in a Christian capital, the Strand is not eloquent of high national ideals.

There are derelict churches in the Strand, and dingy, blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there are slums hard by.

There are thieves in the Strand, and prowling vagrants, and gaunt hawkers, and touts, and gamblers, and loitering failures, with tragic eyes and wilted garments; and prostitutes plying for hire.

And east and west, and north and south of the Strand, there is London. Is there a man amongst all London's millions brave enough to tell the naked truth about the vice and crime, the misery and meanness, the hypocrisies and shames of the great, rich, heathen city? Were such a man to arise amongst us and voice the awful truth, what would his reception be? How would he fare at the hands of the Press, and the Public-and the Church?

As London is, so is England. This is a Christian country. What would Christ think of Park Lane, and the slums, and the hooligans? What would He think of the Stock Exchange, and the music hall, and the race-course? What would He think of our national ideals? What would He think of the House of Peers, and the Bench of Bishops, and the Yellow Press?

Pausing again, over against Exeter Hall, I mentally apostrophize the Christian British people. "Ladies and Gentlemen," I say, "you are Christians in name, but I discern little of Christ in your ideals, your institutions, or your daily lives. You are a mercenary, self-indulgent, frivolous, boastful, blood-guilty mob of heathen. I like you very much, but that is what you are. And it is youyou who call men 'Infidels.' You ridiculous creatures, what do you mean by it?"

If to praise Christ in words, and deny Him in deeds, be Christianity, then London is a Christian city, and England is a Christian nation. For it is very evident that our common English ideals are anti-Christian, and that our commercial, foreign, and social affairs are run on antiChristian lines.

Renan says, in his Life of Jesus, that "were Jesus to return amongst us He would recognize as His disciples, not those who imagine they can compress Him into a few catechismal phrases, but those who labour to carry on his work."

My Christian friends, I am a Socialist, and as such believe in, and work for, universal freedom, and universal brotherhood, and universal peace.

And you are Christians, and I am an "Infidel." Well, be it even so.

WHE

FROM THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

HEN he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!

From the Bottom Up

BY ALEXANDER IRVINE

(The life-story of an Irish peasant lad, born 1863, who became in tura stableman, man-of-war's-man, slum-missionary,

AFTER

clergyman, and Socialist agitator)

FTER some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.

Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly; as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which he is the executive head. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as the poor saints have it by themselves.

FROM THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

IF a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a

liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen. And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.

The Inside of the Cup*

BY WINSTON CHURCHILL

(One of the most popular of American novelists, born 1871. This story has for its theme the failure of the Church in the face of modern social problems. In the following scene a rich man is rebuked by his pastor)

THE perceptions of the banker were keen, and his sense

of security was brief. Somehow, as he met the searching eye of the rector, he was unable to see the man as a visionary, but beheld and,-to do him justice-felt a twinge of respect for an adversary worthy of his steel. He, who was accustomed to prepare for clouds when they were mere specks on his horizon, paused even now to marvel why he had not dealt with this. Here was a man-a fanatic, if he liked-but still a man who positively did not fear him, to whom his wrath and power were as nothing! A new and startling and complicated sensation-but Eldon Parr was no coward. If he had, consciously or unconsciously, formerly looked upon the clergyman as a dependent, Hodder appeared to be one no more. The very ruggedness of the man had enhanced, expanded-as it were until it filled the room. And Hodder had, with

* By permission of the Macmillan Co.