The income on bonds with par value of $3500 received some years since from the Treasurer of the National Council, has, as in past years, been paid to such treasurer.

Up to the present time the Corporation has no salaried officers nor expense for rental. Practically the only charge against the funds held by it is, therefore, the commission paid The Bankers Trust Company for its services as Custodian of the Funds.

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE COUNCIL

As in past years I remind the Council that my activities have, for the most part, had direct relation to its various Commissions and Committees. To report upon them would be to cover the ground of reports already in your hands. The portion of my service lying outside this field does not furnish material for comment. You would not be interested in the story of the journeys made, the addresses delivered, the conferences shared, the interviews held and the letters written. I need only say that for another biennium I have tried to discharge the duty assigned me, have found pleasure in my work and come to its close with gratitude to God for the privilege of sharing in the service of His Kingdom and to my fellow Congregationalists for the fellowship I have enjoyed and the kindnesses shown me.

I do not need to tell you that I believe in organization. Otherwise I should not have accepted the tasks which have fallen to my lot the past thirteen years. Dry and irksome as the duties of an ecclesiastical official often are, they form an essential part of the foundation upon which must be built the City of God. No man need feel that in discharging these duties he is forbidden to make full use of his powers. Though he be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, he is yet working in fundamental ways for the conserving and perpetuating of the spiritual assets of humanity.

On the other hand I do not need to tell you that I hold some things to be more important than organization. Offices and officials, commissions and committees, budgets and audits, conferences and councils, programs and campaigns, are as the dry leaves which litter the roadside these October days unless in them there dwell the forces of life. The Church of Christ has often had occasion and now has occasion to mourn the disproportion between structure and spirit. Her plant is greater than her power. Her program tarries for want of dynamic. It is of some aspects of these needed vital forces that I desire to speak.

I begin with certain convictions which I suppose I hold in common with substantially all our Congregational fellowship.

First of all is the conviction that the last five years have freshly demonstrated that the Gospel of Christ and nothing but the Gospel of Christ can meet and master the problems of man and of men. I use the word "Gospel" in no vague and poetic sense. I mean the Good News that humanity bears the stamp of divinity, that the Infinite God loves the world he has made and that he has revealed his love by one supreme and central manifestation of himself in Christ Jesus, our Lord, Son of God and Son of Man. The fierce war years behind us have revealed the inadequacy of all faiths, philosophies, civilizations, cultures-save one. The universal Republic of God, whose capital is a cross-crowned hill, whose law is the spirit of the child, whose industry is the service of the race, whose prizes are joy and peace, and whose hopes stretch past the black shadows of age and the grave-that Republic stands untouched by the flames. The Gospel of Christ by which that Republic was created and by which it is to be brought to its destined goal is our one answer to the questions with which the hour is filled. To interpret that Gospel into the terms of the decisions which men must make is our supreme business. It is a business whose bulk and complexity oppress the spirit. As a mere matter of words -of theory-of advice-what shall one say to the Senators who wrangle over the League of Nations, to the conferees who debate the problems of industry, to the strikers who surge up and down the land, to the employers upon whom rests the responsibility of supplying human needs, to the teachers, to the home keepers, to all the men and women who make or mar their weaving of the fabric of life.

But when you pass beyond the field of speech and endeavor to live your advice, to incarnate it in the deeds of groups and of institutions, when most of all you seek to give it body and power in the Church of Christ, how baffling is the task. Verily these are days for clear heads and warm hearts and victorious faith. I place on record in this hour your persuasion and mine that those who have such heads and hearts and faith shall under God find a way to lead

the world through its wilderness wanderings to the Land of Promise.

On a

I pass to a second certainty. It is that so far as we Congregationalists are. concerned we must proclaim a Gospel of breadth. I use the phrase with no controversial bias toward any who cannot accept it. I simply seek to state what I suppose to be the unquestioned fact that Congregationalists are as a rule Broad Churchmen. Speaking then for those who accept the term, let me catalogue the compulsions it lays upon us. First of all the compulsion to give recognition to the whole range of truth. We have no option in the matter. The tyranny of conviction is upon us. We are under bonds to relate our thinking to the whole wide field. We do not realize the full force of this except by contrast. certain corner of a certain street in the City of New York there is a preacher who proclaims, Sunday by Sunday, his philosophy of the universe. He has it all charted with minute accuracy. From the far past counsels of the Eternal, when some were chosen to life and some to death, down through the Garden of Eden, where a wilful woman and a silly man sprung the trap which engulfed the race in ruin, on to a strange Christ who died to satisfy the justice of an avenging Deity and still on to a nearby future date when that Christ will return with all the pageantry of Heaven to sweep with the besom of his wrath this sin-cursed world and bear his elect away to a haven of refuge-along the whole line our preacher is perfectly at home, so much at home that he does not hesitate to brand with every offensive epithet those who reject his views. I mention this man, not because he is worth mentioning, but because he calls to our minds types of only less impossible teaching under which some millions of our fellow Protestants-not to speak of our Roman Catholic brethrenstill sit. The battle for a rational Gospel is not yet won. Our fathers dedicated us to the winning of it. We accept the dedication. There is no discharge in this war.

In the next place we are under compulsion to proclaim a broad Gospel of unity. We have long known that the spirit of schism, of sectarianism, is of the devil. We have long known, or at least now know, that there is a bigotry of breadth even as there is a bigotry of narrowness. We know

that those who share great fundamental convictions can work together even though sharply divided on every lesser issue. We also know-I hope that the unity for which we pray can only come through a hard won ability to understand the value of positions other than one's own.

To such inclusive comprehension our principles commit us. If we cause divisions or fail to promote unity, it is our shame. Not thus have we learned Christ from John Robinson and Horace Bushnell, from William Hayes Ward and Washington Gladden, from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary Lyon. Ours must be the gracious speech, the discerning eye, the human warmth, the eclectic sympathy which form the bond of unity. There will be ample call for these gifts in the years ahead. American Protestantism can not go on by divided paths. The hearts of Christ's people are stirred with new desire for oneness. Upon us rests the solemn obligation to do nothing to hinder, everything to help.

Still pursuing our analysis of a Gospel of breadth, we note that it demands the steady application of the spirit of Christ to the whole range of human relations. I wonder if there is anyone here who has not sometimes wished he were back in the time when Christianity was pretty much an affair between the individual and God without the perplexing and inconvenient intrusion of questions of social righteousness. There are not a few people still living in that time-so possible is it to belong to one generation in the body and to another in the spirit. But it is not possible for us unless to a miraculous degree we escape the influence of our environThe social Gospel saturates the Congregational air. Willing or unwilling, we are dwellers in its domain. most of us it is a theme for rejoicing. We have come to see that there never was a more meaningless distinction than that which once was made between the individual and the social Gospel. There is only one. The sole question is whether that one Gospel shall be given its legitimate expansion until it covers, as it was meant to do, all life and life's relations. Haltingly and imperfectly, but with honest purpose, we Congregationalists are trying to do just that. No shadow of hesitation haunts our minds. We are sure of our duty.

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