strife until the gospel of the Church shall successfully change the motive of greed into the desire to serve. To meet this challenge we must have a converting church. Conversion of the individual, transforming a selfish man into a ministering man is fundamental. The goal of the Church is social, the method of the Church is individual. We want parks, playgrounds and modern plumbing, but social betterment will not save the world. "The soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul. The world will be saved only as persons are transformed and made partakers of the divine nature. The business of the Church is to bring men to repentance, for error must have a change of mind, and to regeneration, for selfishness must have a change of heart.

Side by side on my desk are two pamphlets, one the bulletin of the National Catholic War Council and the other a copy of one of Babson's Commercial Reports. Each was discussing social reconstruction. One summarized a quotation from Pope Leo the XIII, "Christianity alone can save society. Capital and labor must both reform. Humanity must be considered first." The commercial report asserts, "The need of the hour is not more legislation; the need of the hour is more religion. Congress is playing politics over the League of Nations. Those who like the President line up for the League of Nations; those who do not like him line up against it. Congress needs more religion. The solving of the labor question is wholly a question of religion. The only great organization which has the machinery and opportunity to develop the constructive motives of love and sympathy and hope is asleep."

We must have a converting Church. The Twentieth Century Church needs to restudy the sources of First Century power. The Apostolic Church lacked the assets of the modern church-great numbers, great endowments, large incomes, conspicuous social standing. For the most part all of these forces were in opposition, but the Church of the apostles had a revolutionary program. It turned the world upside down. The business of the modern church is no less revolutionary. It ought to turn the world right side up. The Church of Jerusalem was ordered to tarry until endued with power and its members became effective as witnesses of Christ. They were the witnesses of a Christ who was more than a dead carpenter who had left a record of noble sayings. Saul, the persecutor, discovered that he was blind when light fell upon him from heaven, and he began to pray. When a humble witness had opened his eyes, he began to proclaim Jesus as the Son of God. The whole group of Christians went everywhere preaching the Word; the great and mighty marvelled

at their boldness, but the Lord added to them day by day such as were being saved. The Lamb that was slain goes forth to war with the beast. To as many as believe on Him, accepting His teaching as the wisdom of God and His presence as the power of God, He gives power as sons of God to follow in His train. In the arena of international conflict, of industrial strife and the soul's warfare between duty and desire, the kingdom of good will wins victory only as individuals experience a change in heart and motive, because the Church is a converting Church.

THE PLACE OF THE CROSS.

Commercial Corinth's social and moral problems appear strangely modern. The greatest apostolic witness declared that among them he preached nothing but Christ and Him Crucified, that is, that aspect of the character and message of Jesus which was revealed in His cross. The sacrificial principle incarnate in Him who hung upon the cross is the only possible foundation for co-operative life. As soon as it becomes the central motive, the individual life becomes dynamic, capable of the most powerful co-operative living.

Impatience with traditional and sometimes immoral theories of the Atonement which caricature God and distort the Scriptures must not weaken the conviction that the converting Church of today must be the witness not only of the Christ who is eternally alive but of the Christ whom God exalted because He endured the cross. Scourged and bleeding beneath the trampling of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse -pestilence, war, famine and death-stricken humanity has found a new reality in the gospel of sacrifice, which requires that if any man would live as Jesus lived, it must be by the way of the cross.

Thirty-six hours after the German inflammables had set fire to the cathedral at Rheims, an aviator flew by night over the city. At first he saw nothing but one vast, dark ruin, when suddenly, looking straight down, he saw in a frame of perfect blackness a glorious cross of fire, all that a mad vandalism had left of the most beautiful of French cathedrals. The business of the Church is to lift up the souls of men out of the blackness of greed, brutality and unbelief unto God. Ours will be a converting Church whenever through the power of our faith men are lifted up toward God. Then at the very heart of the present black distress the glorious cross will be seen blazing with power and promise that the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ.

THE COUNCIL SERMON

THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

Rev. Raymond Calkins, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"That he might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish."-Ephesians 5:27.

The Church is coming in for a good deal of criticism. We are told that church-going has practically ceased to be a habit of the American people taken as a whole; that corporate Church loyalty is dwindling; that the thought of the Church does not measure up to the problems of the hour; that its ethics are narrow, without moral range and vision; that its social program is petty, parochial, provincial. And we are told that it is without moral leadership; that whereas we used to have wooden churches and granite ministers, now we have granite churches and wooden ministers.

Now nearly every item in this general indictment can be challenged. The Church has by no means failed in spite of the monotonously repeated assertion that it has. It is not true that the people no longer go to church. Has loyalty disappeared? When was there ever such a united demonstration of church loyalty as the great Methodist campaign, rolling up the unprecedented sum of $110,000,000 for work at home and abroad? Are the laymen uninterested? On the contrary, they never were more interested in the Church. Are we ready to sneer at the men who compose the ministry of the Church today? But a secular journal not long ago paid them the tribute of saying that this band of men, unrecognized, underpaid, overworked, unassuming, that never complain, never strike, is accomplishing under conditions that make their performance nothing short of heroic, a work that is fundamental to the stability and permanence of our civilization.

Is the social service of the Church to be despised? But men forget that every institution that they hold dear, school, hospital and college, is as closely related to the Church as an

apple to a tree; and that every modern movement for the reclamation of mankind owes its origin, its existence and its maintenance to the heart of love that still beats warmest where two or three are met together in the Master's name.

THE HEROES OF TODAY

Is the Church without its militant heroes and an imperial statesmanship? But I remember that this is the annual gathering of the oldest foreign missions organization in the United States. From the day of those first missionaries, over a hundred years ago, down to the very day in which we live, the roll of its volunteers contains the names of some of the most intrepid heroes this land has ever produced. And when I found myself thrilled with the stories of a self-sacrifice so complete that there was literally no self left to sacrifice, I was proud to ask myself what group of men anywhere can produce representatives that will compare on the whole with the devotion and selfless heroism of our ordinary everyday missionary. When I read of plans for the betterment and rebuilding of the world, I say to myself: Do not nearly all of them lack precisely that vision, that breadth, those spiritual dimensions that make our foreign missionary program the most inclusive and fundamental plan for the ultimate redemption of mankind that is in the eye and mind of men today? The world statesmanship of the Church's missionary program contemplates the redemption of the backward races of the earth. Beside it, many secular schemes look petty and narrow, sectional and provincial. For a truly imperial plan for the reconstruction of a broken world, we can look only to the Church of Jesus Christ.

AN ADEQUATE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

Such, then, to my thinking, is the perfectly just and sound. apologia that may be made for the Church of today. The real question is, Can the Church herself, can those of us who love her, believe in her, and are giving our lives in her service -can we be satisfied? Is there nothing lacking? Can we say that the Church is without spot or wrinkle or any such thing? Is there nothing for which we have to reproach ourselves? Is there nothing earnest, vital, meaningful, for us

still to do? I believe there is. The great outstanding need of the Church today is the possession of an adequate social conscience.

To compress in a word what I want to say, it may, I think, with justice be urged, not that the Church has not a social conscience, but that that conscience has been, and to a certain extent still is, conventional in its range; that it lacks a penetrating moral vision and an uncompromising moral courage. The defect in its moral outlook lies here: that it too often seems to provide only a foundation for the existing social or economic order, whereas its Gospel ought to be spiritual interpretation and proclamation of the essential teachings of Jesus from which a higher, better and juster social order must emerge.

THE DISTURBING IDEALISM OF JESUS

I do not know who it was who spoke of the "disturbing idealism" of Jesus. No one can read his New Testament intelligently without discovering that it was just that.

It disturbed the Scribes and Pharisees, and the elders of the Jewish Church. It had all kinds of upsetting potentialities in it. When the New Testament Church uttered the idealism of Jesus, it had the same effect. The message of St. Paul at Ephesus did not let things alone. The industries of Ephesus were indignant: "Sirs," they said, "ye know that by this business we have our wealth."

If the Church today truly interprets and utters and lives the idealism of Jesus, it will do more than provide a foundation for the existing social order. It will contribute the spirit of Jesus to the ideals which are provocative of discontent with the existing status. If we look at the contemporary ecclesiastical conscience, must we not say that it is too often content to think what has been thought, to echo the word that has been spoken, to do the possible deed, and to walk in a path that has been already blazed? Can it be claimed that its thought is critical and constructive? That its outlook overleaps present conditions and is passionately bent on the creation of a juster and truer social order? That its conscience is keen, awake to defects in actual conditions, and