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HE Board has headquarters in New York, but it is not confined to one locality. The expression frequently used, "the New York Board," to distinguish it from other agencies of the home mission enterprise, is very unfortunate. It is a national agency of a national Church,-albeit the designation is employed in the true American sense and involves no civil embarrassments. The Board ought and aims to suffuse the whole life of the Church through its activities and the spirit it embodies. Headquarters are in New York because headquarters must be somewhere, and New York is the best place for them.

There is a growing sense of solidarity among all the churches and presbyteries and synods of the Presbyterian communion, which involves also a growing sense of oneness with all branches of the Christian Church in the country and throughout the world. This sentiment comes to expression most vitally in the Church's home mission work. New and notable

movements are now on

looking to the nation-wide expression of this sentiment. The Board has accepted the commission of the Church for active and leading cooperation in these movements.

"Here is the objective therefore to which a worthy program of evangelization commits us, this: the transformation of human life after the pattern of the Christ life, the reconstruction of our society after the constitution of the kingdom of heaven as Christ conceived it, the capture for righteousness and God of

Every presbytery and every synod is moving toward a more compact and effective organization as a home mission agency. The Board accepts responsibility for promoting this movement in every proper way. Upon it depends the larger life of the home mission enterprise.

The Board aims to express itself in all of these agencies, not alone through its localized activities.

On the field the Board has under commission four field secretaries, representing headquarters in as many different centers and covering as many large districts.

At headquarters the offices are located in the building here shown. Jointly with the Foreign Board, the Home Board Owns this valuable property located on the corner of Twentieth Street and Fifth Avenue. The Home Board offices occupy all of the seventh floor and parts of the fifth, sixth, tenth and eleventh. Portions of the buildings not occupied by the two Boards mentioned

are a considerable and direct source of income.

The Home Board is now in its 110th year, renewing its life with each generation in adaptation to the new problems emerging with each new era in the Church's progress.

every force and process of our civilization, economic, social, political, commercial, industrial, communal, national, international. To attempt less is to cheapen our task till it is unworthy of a serious evangel. We cannot attempt more."-From "World Missions from The Home Base," by J. E. McAfee.

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MERICA is the land of trasts- physical, intellectual, moral. It is a far cry from ice drifts to drifts of palms and flowers. But in both the same kind of missionary work must be done; in both it is going forth to seek and to save the lost. Each has its peculiar difficulties. In Alaska it is a struggle with nature. Our frontier missionaries who are seeking the shut-in miners are on no junketing expedition. Pastoral calling at forty below zero is rigorous work anywhere: doubly so when a dog-sled is the conveyance, boundless fields of ice and snow the roadway, and the smoke of a miner's half snow-buried cabin the end of the perilous journey. But, oh! the blessedness of bringing a blessing to such loneliness, discouragement, soul-hunger. Only an unusual love for souls could inspire such service!

Rev. Charles L. Thompson, D.D.

But one need not go to Alaska to find men lost in the wilderness. In the far northwest there are wildernesses of forest in which the lumbermen are often lost in the woods in a double sense. Fierce temptations, hard work, the perilous reaction from it in dissipation,these constitute the lot of the lumberjack and the chance of the sky pilot. The discovery of these men of the forest by a missionary endeavor, and the ofttime blessed results of the discovery, are a new and glorious chapter in home mission history.

But deserts furnish equal opportunity. The reclamation service of the Government has given us a new view of what may come out of them. A whole civilization has blossomed across American deserts in the last generation. The reclamation service of the gospel has recovered them from moral sterility and made them blossom like the garden of the Lord. Thirty thousand churches have in half a century been built between the Mississippi and the mountains; humble temples of the Lord

and with no architecture-only shelter for God's scattered flock. But consider whereunto they may grow. Scores of churches in scores of western capitals have become fountains of blessing to entire states and vindicated the reproductive power of missionary labors. What a harvest in a few decades is represented by the development of the states of the plains! Three hundred forty Presbyterian churches have been planted in the State of Kansas alone; every one of them has received aid from the Board of Home Missions; all but one of them have been planted by that Board.

The last decade has marked new advances. Providence has opened doors whose existence we had scarce suspected and home missions was invited to march across seas. The rise into prominence of the islands of the Caribbean is one of the marked signs of the last decade. Those who look forward to what will come after the opening of the Panama Canal predict even greater advance in the islands which are rocked like sleeping lilies on the waters of the placid seas. They are awaking to intellectual and religious life. They are rejoicing in the shadowing arms of the great Republic and are longing for the greater opportunity which the word Americanism spells. Twelve years ago there was not a building erected for school purposes in all Porto Rico. There are a thousand today. There are hundreds of Protestant churches lifting the people to a new life. There is an awakening moral consciousness among the people. A dozen years ago there was only one road in Porto Rico and that from San Juan to Ponce, -and it was for purposes of war alone; it was the road built for the tread of armies. Now peaceful roads for commerce-palm bordered-abound on every hand. Christian work in these islands does not encounter the rigors of an Alaskan climate, but it meets the almost equal rigor of an enervating climate, of enervated people even, ignorant, thriftless, and by centuries taught to be indifferent to the dignity of labor and the supreme value of character. But a new day is dawning which will light up not only the hills of Cuba and Porto Rico, but the entire semi-circle of the Caribbean islands.

Rev. Charles Stelzle.

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UILDING upon the foundation of the Department of Church and Labor, which had become the model for similar work in practically every denomination in America and in several European countries, the Board of Home Missions has established its Bureau of Social Service. None of the features of the old department have in any sense been sacrificed. The work among workingmen in shops and factories is to be continued. The approach to the organized workers through their conventions and particularly through their over 300 journals will be pushed with vigor. Other phases of work such as the Correspondence Course in Applied Christianity, the holding of institutes and conferences on practical church problems, and the study of local fields with a view of making recommendations for more aggressive work will be even more fully developed. Special emphasis is this year being placed upon the problems of the city. In the Labor Temple in lower New York, the Board is working out the principles which have long been advocated by the Department. The success which has thus far attended the efforts made in this difficult field demonstrates that the masses in our cities can be reached if the old gospel is adapted to modern conditions, and if it is given to them in the language of the man on the street. The time and energy expended in this center have been justified to the last degree in the splendid response of the people living in the community. Other cities and other denominations have been watching our experiment with

considerable interest. We are here working out for the entire Church one of the most perplexing problems of the modern Church. And this kind of service has been characteristic of the Department of Church and Labor since its organization. It has always been a "Bureau of Social Service" in the best sense.

When the combined Protestant Churches of Greater New York, of Chicago, of Rochester, of Buffalo and of Newark desired to carry on shop campaigns at the noon hour during periods of ten days each, they turned to our Department for the organization and supervision of the movement. When the city missionary societies and the churches of Cleveland desired a comprehensive sociological and religious investigation of their city, they came to us for leadership. In several other cities our Bureau furnished for all the churches the program for an upto-date campaign in city work. The Bureau supplied the Executive Secretary of the Social Service Commission of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ during the first year of its existence, and its superintendent is now a member of the Executive Committee of the National Civic Federation, representing the Protestant churches of the United States.

Two years ago the Department organized the Publicity Campaign for the Home Missions Council, and just now the superintendent of the Bureau is the Dean of the Social Service Department of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, working out the policy and the program of the movement in its social aspects, and selecting all the speakers on the social message. All this will indicate that the Board's Bureau of Social Service has a conspicuous place in the work of the whole Church. It is the privilege of the Presbyterian Church to furnish the leadership in some of the most important modern movements in the Church, and the Home Board is making its contribution towards the leadership.