misery, directed his attention to saving men from the future of endless torment for sin. To-day the successor of the old prophet of reform finds his energies directed more and more to the task of rescuing men and women from the earthly hells of poverty, drunkenness and wretchedness that now greet our waking vision. But with this change in the nature of saving work, have we of this 19th century had a corresponding restatement, suited to our age and the tasks to be accomplished, of the old doctrine of salvation? Schemes of social reform or amelioration are presented on every hand, in numbers like the sands of the sea-shore. Are any of them restatements, or adaptations of the old Christian ideals suited to the needs of our time; or are most of them the outgrowth of the philosophy of materialism which stands at the opposite pole of thought from those ideals? The thoughtful man can well afford to examine all the prominent panaceas for our social ills that have been offered, with a view of answering these questions. Two of the most prominent of those schemes will now be passed in review, Henry George's plan for taxation and the socialistic scheme for industrial organization.

The advocates of George's single tax come to the poor and to those heart-sick over the misery which they find in the world and say: If you will abolish all other taxes and place a single tax on land values such that it will convert them to public purposes, all poverty and with it all social unrest and wrong and suffering will cease. Will it? Will a scheme of taxation. place the intemperate upon the same level as the temperate, the lazy as the industrious, the vicious as the virtuous? Will it remove the temptation for evil living, change the lazy into active members of society, and convert the vicious to lives of honor and righteousness? Is there any proof, beyond the oftrepeated assertions of its advocates, that the single tax, if put into operation, will accomplish these results? The title deeds of land have never made their owners all virtuous or moral. They can neither make the drunkards as healthy or as successful as the temperate, or cause them to be sober at all times. The use of land, such as the single tax contemplates, cannot do what its ownership never has and never will accomplish. The

ownership or control of property gives a temporary advantage, but the industrious, strong, honorable and intelligent poor man will rise, while the man with lands, but of an opposite type of character and life, will fail and fall. Thus it ever has been and ever will be here below under every system of taxation, with all material adjustments of property, the employment and recompense of toil and the expenditure of human incomes. Mr. George's system of taxation may have, and doubtless does possess, many merits as a scheme for raising public revenue, or adjusting the burdens of supporting public expenditures among the different members of society. But his system is not here referred to from any of those points of view. It is mentioned as the work of the church in Luther's day might be referred to, or the dogmas of Christianity as held by some unregenerate Christians in Wesley's time. Used as an incidental auxiliary to earnest personal work for the uplifting of needy, suffering man, and tax-reform laws will unquestionably, so far as they are founded upon justice, assist in making the world better, as the church and correct dogmas have thus assisted in all ages. But presented, apart from moral agencies, as the all in all for social regeneration, and such laws, and even the agitation to secure them, will prove like the church of Alexander VI, or the dogmas of Luther when preached by clergymen of corrupt and idle lives. They are factors with no saving power and many corrupting tendencies. They call men's attention away from the need of personal, educational work among their fellows, and tend to put the public conscience to sleep with reference to the necessityof individual helpful labor, now and here, among the masses. The single tax movement lays its great stress upon the good that would follow a freer access by the millions to the land for farming and building purposes. But where the lot of one person would be improved by a freer access to farming lands, ten could be benefited by a knowledge of how better to use and cultivate those now open to them. This is also true of the occupation and use of city real estate. The experience of the Salvation Army in its efforts to uplift and save the submerged tenth of our large cities illustrates and enforces this truth. The leaders of that

army, as the followers of the late Henry George, see how thousands of the city poor can be benefited by transplanting them to the land, but they have found by an experience which agrees with that of the race in all ages that it is worse than folly, it is criminal, to take these people from the city to the land until, by personal individual work, they have been trained and fitted for successful life on the farm. That individual, educational and disciplinary work of the Salvation Army is a modification or adaptation of the old Christian scheme of salvation, suited to the social field of the 19th century. It, of course, covers only a small part of that social field, and can thus be referred to as only a partial application of old Christian principles to modern social needs. But even this much cannot be said for the single-tax movement which seeks to accomplish its ends by methods the very reverse of those employed by the Christian church in the centuries when it wrought mightily for personal regeneration and a consequent improvement in the social lot of the millions affected by its work. That singletax movement cannot therefore be considered as an adaptation of the Christian scheme of salvation to modern social work, since it seeks to do by law and the use of lands, forces and influences external to man, what the early church, the followers of Luther and Wesley and the Salvation Army accomplished, or seek to bring about, by change of life, by individual training and development on the part of those converted or saved by their influence.

One of the most widely read expositions of the socialistic scheme of industrial organization is that found in Bellamy's Looking Backward. That book presents a beautiful dream of a renovated human society. It is a picture of a world, not only without social gulfs between rich and poor, but also one with no idleness, intemperance, vice or crime. Defects of human nature as well as in social conditions have vanished, and that without the interposition of any moral influence, without a change of heart, or the influence of what the old preachers referred to as the grace of God. In this book we are told how the world has long been going on from bad to worse, is so marching in the wrong way, and that, before the culmination

of the story, it had continued so to march for over a century from this time. The gulfs between rich and poor had become greater, poverty had increased in its intensity and damning effects for evil, and all manner of crime, wrong, vice and evil had increased and multiplied. Intemperance and the social evil had cast their blighting influence in ever-enlarging circles upon a world sunken in misery and wretchedness indescribable. Men had become more and more selfish in their nature and acts until the end was reached in a social bankruptcy. Then came a revolution, and in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, all was changed, and that by the interposition of a public statute, the legal adoption of state socialism, the creation of the co-operative commonwealth.

Ordinarily we are bidden to judge the possibilities of the future by the events of the past. But where in human history has there been presented such a change in character and social conditions as we find in this picture of Bellamy? Before accepting that picture as true, it is worth while to ask, was Paul right when in preaching the gospel of a redeemed world he framed his antithesis of grace and law, or is Bellamy correct when he pictures how, without the influence of grace, a socialistic statute placed upon the law book of a realm makes all its citizens altruistic in act and thought, and men are saved from all that can hurt or destroy or even make afraid?

The annals of time clearly establish the fact that Paul was right when he taught that salvation is more of faith than from material forces or civil or ecclesiastical law. They also make clear the fact that the only permanently saving forces are educational and moral and not material. No reform affecting morals was ever completed mainly by or through law. Slavery in England was abolished, as Macaulay has pointed out in chapter I of the first volume of his history, not by law, but in spite of it. For over 500 years from William the Norman, Parliament passed countless laws to keep the people from rising from slavery or from acquiring the rights of liberty and equality. Not one of those old laws in the interest of slavery has ever been formally repealed to this day. Not one law was passed for nearly six centuries giving the masses freedom. The moral

forces directed by the church were mightier than the power of the state, and saved the people from old slavery and led them up to new opportunities.

In opposition to the statements of the last paragraph it may be said that slavery in America was abolished by law, and that here a moral change was accomplished by statute. One part of this objection is true, the other is incorrect. The negroes of the South are free so far as they can secure freedom by statute law. But the law giving them freedom has effected no moral or intellectual or industrial change in their lot. They are still in subjection to old ignorance, brutishness and degradation. The emancipation acts and the acts giving the negroes the ballot and many other subsequent laws enacted in their interests have fallen far short of realizing the ends sought for by their promoters. The gift to each one of them of 40 acres and a mule would have failed as much as did these other laws of making the lot of the negro equal to that of the white man. Legal measures, the gift to men, or the distribution among them of material riches, either in small or large proportions, never has and never will touch more than the hem of the garment of earthly misery and degradation. That misery and degradation can be cured only by moral and educational forces, and hence we find after near 40 years trial of legal and material remedies, that the real condition of the negroes of the United States has been improved only as it has been touched since the war by the moral forces of education, refinement and civilization, thus giving them increased industry, honesty, virtue and all the other manly and Christian graces.

Bellamy's dream of a world made better by a statute establishing the co-operative commonwealth but transfers to a new field of operation the fallacies which led to the endeavor to make the negro the equal of the white man by a "be it enacted" of a body of finite legislators. His socialistic scheme, as a panacea for all social ills, like the single-tax receipt, is a purely materialistic plan for social salvation. It is not, therefore, in any sense of the words, a re-statement suited to our century of the spiritual and moral saving movement of the early Christian church or the later manifestations thereof witnessed in the work