Connecticut western news., 1893-06-22

They are fools enough to believe In the possibilities of saving men and women. They get into one of these iceboxes and preach for few months, until the very marrow in their bones is chilled, and then they try to get the peo3ie in. They grow restless. They make desperate effort, but the dear brethren sit down on them, and they are smothered to death.
 There are fewer Methodists in New York now than there were 20 years ago. and yet stirring Methodist evangelist has been packing great theater full of people during the past few months, and the dear old mossbacks are clamoring for his head in a charger. They say he is disturbing the cosmic dust that has set tied on their churches. They say that he is drawing away their constituency, and they are going to make motion to cast him out of the synagogue. A man passed by church where there was great excitement the other day. He asked if revival was in progress. The sexton said no; they were trying q her etic. We have life of a certain sort. It is expended in hunting out the heretics and crucifying them and letting the world go to the devil.
 THE THIRTEEN REASONS.
 Some of these men are scared to death, not because they are weak and craven, but because they are human. They have the 13 reasons for not doing many things they want to do-a wife and 12 children They are anxious to please the pews, and they initiate the great preacher of the sixteenth century. A fellow wrote to me some time ago to recommend him to church looking for a preacher and begged me to write him in advance the day the committee would come to hear him preach that he might be on the lookout for strangers in the pews Many of our preachers are afraid of the power of criticism. It is hard to be cursed, to be lied about, to be misrep- resented and slandered. by the tradition al forces that maintain things as they are and by blackguard press that is ever ready to take up any cry against minister of Christ.
 And, alas! some Of these men are worked to death. T;ic work to be done in a modern city church cannot be done by one man. Whatever our fathers may have done, the man who stands at the head of church in modern city and has undertaken the impossible. It can not be done. The only churches in the city of New York-the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic-that have made any progress have been the churches in which the number of workers in given parish have been adequate to the work to be accomplished. There are churches in this city that reqrire 10 men in the capacity of associates ;nd assistants, in which solitary little Protestant preach CT stands up and hammers away until they carry him off to the cemetery and bury his little wornout body, for else they take him to the insane asylum or to some sanitariun, where he has the lux ury of an inralid's life and poverty and suffering for his portion.
 THE BROADWAY GABLE.
 It is time for our churches to wake to the fact of their failure and to adapt themselves to the changed conditions of modern city life. We do not need any more ecclesiastical tombs buildings. The people do not want them. They will not go into them after they are built. They are useless baggage. We need buildings adapted to catch men. We need sacred secular buildings. We need gospel cars to preach to railroad men be- heath the sheds. We need to lay our hands on the ways of travel. We need to preach through the press and to con- vert the modern press to Jesus Christ to preach to the press and through the press. The time has come for us to be all things to all men, if by all means we may save some, and not be afraid of making a sensation; to be wise as ser pents, to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness-that is, to use com mon sense, to be alive, to do the work of the Master in living ways.
 Whenever the church determines to do it's work it will be done. The power is at hand, if we will but utilize it. It is not question of the loss of power; it is the refusal of the Christian to use the power. A little child exploded the mine under He'll Gate and cleared the channel of rocks that had defed navigation for centuries. The little child simply pressed the button that connected the electric current with the hidden battery. The Christian has simply to touch the elec- tric current of the Spirit of the Most High God, and the hidden mines deep down in the human soul will be ex- ploded; the hidden rocks that have ob- structed our progress in society through the centuries of the past will be cleared, some of them in an instant. A little child with her tiny hand start ed the great cable on Broadway and sent the cars spinning over their track. The child simply opened the steam valve. and the steam did the work. The Christian has simply to lay his hand-as Chris tian-on the world, and the Spirit of God will do the work. The trouble with us simply is that we have not come in vital contact with the world.