them to gathering up their abandoned companions. Among those brought in were drunkards, pimps, the most degraded and despicable. There were men that, by their careless habits, had wasted their earnings and disbanded their families. Some of them were living in filth and vice, and some in crime. And yet, last January, about a hundred of these men came up in a body and called upon me, and a better looking set of men I never beheld. They were clothed and in their right mind. We received at one time some forty into the church out of this body of men; and one of the most affecting things I know of is that this class, two or three times a year, gives an entertainment to all the parents of the children in the Bethel Mission. They give it themselves. We furnish the room and lights, but they order a supper, with cake, confections, ice-cream, tea, and coffee. They have music, and also some little amusement— tableaux, or something of the kind—got up for them. They invite all the fathers and mothers of the children in the Bethel Mission. Each of the members of the Bible class wears his little rosette to show he is a manager; and each one is expected to be on the floor to entertain the guests, and to see that every one is happy, comfortable, talked to, and fed. To see these hundred and fifty men,-one of whom said, in relating his experience: 'I know all about rum; I have made it, I have sold it, and I have drunk it to the very uttermost,'-to see such men in the house of God, entertainers, calling in the parents of the poor, wandering children, is enough to make tears come from anybody's eyes.

"I do not believe you ever could have reached those men except by taking the word of God in your hand, calling them together in a place where they felt at home, and then going step by step with them through the truth, teaching them Sunday after Sunday; and while you are doing this, calling out their sympathies, making them work for each other for this is what this class is doing-one here and one there, raising contributions by which they are able to sustain men and get them on their feet till they can get work again. There have been literally hundreds of families regathered."

Again, referring to another class: "I have one teacher

in my Home School of whom I do not hesitate to say that in ten years he has been the instrument of converting one hundred and fifty young men, and chiefly by the application of the truth as it is in Jesus, in the Bible class; and I have found that while our Sunday schools are greatly blessed, there has been no other agency employed in our church that is comparable to our Bible classes for adults, young men and old."

The Plymouth Mission and the Bethel School are doing a grand work amongst the poor and degraded in that part of the city. It is indisputable that our regular churches can never reach and impress the poorest and lowest classes except through mission schools or some other similar organisation. Mission schools are "the tenders of the fleet." "Our churches are men-of-war; our mission schools are little steam-yachts that these men-of-war send out into the shallower waters, or where they cannot go. Every city church ought to have one or two chickens of this kind under its wing." On this important question Mr. Beecher expresses himself on this wise: "There are, in the establishment of these mission schools, two or three principles that I think should be borne in mind as the foundation of all success. First, a mission school ought not, in my judgment, to be placed in a slum. If you are going into neighbourhoods where there is degradation and vice, and all manner of nastiness and rottenness, it is not best to preach the gospel there permanently. Go in to them, and visit them; but if you are to establish an institution, draw people out of that miry pit on to the edge of virtue and neatness and order. It will be easier to draw people out of disorder up to the borders of order than to teach them in the midst of their disorder. There is something in going out of their ill-ventilated houses, their unlighted dirty streets, up to a place which is quiet, which has some element of beauty about it. It becomes attractive to them, and they like to do it, provided they think the place is still within easy reach, and is their own.

"Next, I affirm that a mission school, as a general thing, should remain a mission school. I refuse utterly to allow any of our schools to be nascent churches. Not that it may

not be a good way to send out a school, and thus prepare the way for a church. There are many cases in which that

is a proper thing to do. But ordinarily, in outlying ne

glected neighbourhoods, mission schools are better for the people than churches; for this reason, that they really are churches in the primitive sense of the term, and that the mode of instruction obtaining there is better adapted to the wants of that class of people than is the instruction which they would be likely to get in a church of the ordinary pattern. Our churches tend to extinguish sociality. Their congregations are respectable. They rise high in many elements; but the low, the poor, the ignorant, the vicious, are not susceptible yet of these higher things. Where they are brought into our churches, they are lonesome, they are little interested, and are very soon left behind. you send intelligent men and women down into their midst to put them into classes, and then to do the work face to face, looking to the individual man, calling him by name, going over to where you can lay your hand on him, you are rubbing in the truth in a manner that just suits his unsusceptible nature. You are giving to each man as he needs, not comprehensively as a whole congregation needs.

But if

"There is another reason. I regard these mission schools as the nurseries for training the teachers themselves. All the good we have done to the poor and ignorant in Brooklyn is not comparable with that which has been done to my own people in the process. It would be enough, if only this one thing had fallen out, that the young men and women in my parish had been for years and years giving some of their best time, their best thoughts, their freshest hours, their sweetest enthusiasm, their most disinterested charities to this noble work. They have gone down into the field and made the work of taking care of these men their own work. There are, and have been, many children of wealth and culture engaged in this mission work, who gave up to it not only hours in each single day-meeting in council, meeting in little evening parties that have been arranged for this purpose-but pretty nearly the whole of their Sunday, except the hour of our morning service, and who carry this on for five or ten years, fascinated with it,

I might say. Now, this building-up of these persons makes them worth a hundred times as much to society and to the church as they would be had they merely been recipients, going with open mouth, always eating, and never using the strength which came from digested food. These missions at home keep alive the disinterestedness of men to such a degree, that I have come almost to think the church which has no mission feeling in it, no impetus to go outside of itself, no thought of anything except how to take care of itself, is scarcely a Christian church. I do not think that vital piety is long to be sustained in any body of men gathered together for church services where there is no mission spirit; that is, a spirit of disinterested labour for those who cannot repay you.

"Our mission schools have also accomplished another thing for which I am very grateful. I am ashamed to see great churches, whose wealth is counted by millions, build themselves stately houses, give to them everything that can make them comfortable in the pew, attractive in the choir, eloquent and desirable in the pulpit, and when they have done, pay their minister and all the expenses liberally, and then sit themselves down and fold around themselves the robe of complacency, saying, 'There, if the Lord don't think we have done well, He is unreasonable.' What have they done but for themselves? They have embellished the chariot which is carrying them to heaven, as they think, though sometimes that is a mistake. They have simply made provision for their own religious enjoyment.

"Churches gather together families, and take care of them. They are institutions for families. They forget all outside of their own walls; they forget the community in which they are, which is under their care. If some few of

their members are stirred up to open a mission school in a destitute neighbourhood, what usually happens? With very little interest on the part of the majority of the church, a few disinterested persons go down among the poor and hire a hall. They have to pay almost all of the rent out of their own pockets. They have a dilapidated hall, neither carpeted nor decorated, gaunt and drear; and they gather together a few on Sundays, teaching them the best way they

can. And this is the offering of that church to the poor! That starveling band of teachers in a little miserable, wretched out-of-the-way place that is what they give! They themselves sumptuously fed, living in a gospel palace, having nothing neglected which their hearts or tastes could wish yet when they come to the poor, they take the scraps and mouldy rinds to give to them.

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Now, I hold that every church which wants to do good should give not what it has left over, or what it stingily thinks it can spare, to the poor. That which you give to the poor ought to represent that which God has done for you; it ought to represent the freshness, beauty, art, and sweetness which prevail in the household of the givers.

"When, therefore, we wanted to build our Bethel, when application was made to us as a church to take the school off the hands of those who had been carrying it, I gathered the people together and said to them: 'It is to be determined to-night by vote whether you shall take this school and care for it; but if you do, I want you to understand what you must do. I will not consent to the taking of this school as a poor lame poverty school. You must build them better quarters than you have for yourselves, and must treat that school so that they shall have in the very offerings you bring to them some sense of the richness which Christianity has brought to you.' They assented to it. Now, our own church is not to be compared for beauty and embellishment with the Bethel. That building, with the ground, cost some eighty thousand dollars. The free reading-room is filled with pleasant pictures. In the appropriate rooms we have all the elements of housekeeping that are necessary. The teachers once a month have their tea there together. Every quarter the schools have a festival there. It is a complete little household in all its appointments. Every part of it is fine in taste, ample and excellent in the quality and quantity of the things provided. We spare nothing for them. We have given them as good an organ as Mr. Hook can build. We spend five thousand dollars a year for the expense of running that school. It is entirely a free-will offering. Whatever they contribute goes to mission work. In so far as the school is concerned, we have made it no second