The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-03-18
CITIZENSHIP IN ETROSPECT
Continued from Ninth page.)

Being limited to a single town, laWless
 liquor sellers dive-keepers, gamblers and others of that ilk soon learned their l Faces and were able to detect their ap- l pfoaCh. The officers themselves be-
 came so we'll acGuainted with these l classes as to feel reluctance to cause l them trouble. Again the officers were
 subjected to political and other inhuen-
 ces which human nature finds it hard
 to withstand all due te their sphere of
 activity being confined to one locality. | Happily all this has been changed.
 The occasional examples of selfishness
 which evades jury duty or shuns un-
 remunerative public offices are to-day 1 held up to scorn. But such cases were
 common century ago and hardly ex- 1 cited criticism Again, we may glean rom the court records and newspapers
 ot that period that civic courage had then only budded. The very men who fought with Roosevelt, afterwards president, in Cuba, and with Dewey at Manila Bay, acted like scared babies when they got home and occasion called for a little moral courage. Sometimes in an entire neighborhood scarcely any podJ SpuId JC 1OuilU lldIIll9 lO lGSlIly
 against a notorious dive there. It is
 astonishing how memories were para
 lyzed by the atmosphere of court
 rooms at that period. Persons whose
 veracity not even a horse trade could
 debauch, would evade and lie under
 oath, through cowardce It was com
 mon, too, for saloon to sell on Sun
 day in the eyes of a whole neighbor-
 hood, and not a soul protest to the
 authorities. False standards of honor,
 too, largely prevailed. It is as evident
 to us to-day that any person eognizant
 of violations of law is under obligations
 to the state to report the facts, as it
 is that a soldier is under obligation to
 report the approach of the enemy This
 means great development of the sense
 of civic responsibility.
 One of the most astonishing strides
 of the century has been that of the
 church in it's relation to civic responsi-
 bility and the problems of the social
 organism. Not that the ministry failed
 to- pay attention to such themes in 1901. Nevertheless, there was an other
 worldliness about the attitude of the church at large, a diSlocation between churchly profession and civic perform ance, which has been largely outgrown. The church, without losing it's hold on the world that is to come, has taken a healthful grip on the world which now is. That churches could be faced by vice and not instinctively rec ognize therein their deadly enemy, and grapple with it as with the devil him. oJf T sJ,1 l. j,,r men should pray the Lord to save their sons and daughters and not fight in the name of theI Lord of Hosts to overthrow the enticing evils that threaten those and daughters resembles a paradox. That a man should profess to be a Christian and prove to be a coward is paradoxical indeed. Such paradoxes are less in evidence than theytforinerly were. Christianity may have become less insistent in matters of creed but 1t has become more insistent in prac- tice. It has burst it's hermetically seal ed compartments and dtffused itself | through politics, business, everything. It recognizes far better than it did century gone by, that the good Christian must necessarily be good citizen,
 
 civic responsibility there is something the matter with his Christianity. The church is opening it's eyes to it's broad mission. Rainsford, the divine, whose ,areer on earth closed three quarters of a century ago, spoke prophetically when he said, This will be the spirit of
 he religion of the future, that the wer- ship of Most High God is service for most fallen man" Sectarianism counts Or less than it did, but Christianity counts for more. The process of con- solidaton of kindred denominations has we'll advanced. The institutional ,hurch which is interested in every hing pertaining to human welfare, which furnishes besides religious ser yices strictly speaking, healthful gymnasium exercise, in-
 truction by lectures and classes, which ights vice looks after the unemployed, uccors distress of every kind and fills he whole community with it's uplifting has become the order of the lay A century ago three churches tood on the Green. There is one on he Green to-day, the great institutional hurch with it's multiplied functions, with it's work systematized and carried / n by business-lilSe method, with infiu- nee more than treble that of the an tent three combined, and with far reater economy in proportion to the esults achieved. Out in the country arts there was many a manufacturing c illage in the Christian year of 1901 l, yhere the workmen had no place of t ecreation offered them except some n obacco shop or vile saloon, and where r he church had, not laid it's hand upon \ hem in any way which they could f Those were the days V hen ministers preached on the topic f Why do workingmen stay away from h hurch?" A developed sense of Chris I, on citizenship, which is simply n anse of the brotherhood of man, has T hanged this to a degree and conse- T uently more workingmen are attend- q lg church. The intense practicality
 hich marks the Christianity of this ge, does not the less fit it to stand le great test proposed by the Founder, n By their works ye shall know them.'' t, $ aim is to put its stamp upon every \ apartment of human activity and fit e len for the life which is to come by r aking them true to all the relations of s le life that now is. E Such my friends, are some of the as- E scts of the extraordinary development s;