The Newtown bee., 1901-06-07

a moral offense when a preacher has tt
 support a family on three or foul
 hundred dollars. Let me give a few figures: Sixty-nine of the preachers o1 this Conference receive $500 or less twenty-six receive $4OO; thirteen re-
 ceive $500; three, S2O0 and three, S1OO' One hundred and seventy-tWo
 reachers-considerab more than
 half the Conference-receive S9OO or
 less. In the Roman Catholic Church there is minimum allowance for each
 priest. In Connecticut the allowance is $500. Among the Methodists of Eng
 land there is a minimum allowance.
 Is it not our duty at this session to
 appoint commission of ministers and
 laymen who will give earnest consider
 ation to this subject and report to us
 year from now?
 Several of my churches have been
 injured, almost wrecked, as we'll as the
 towns in which they once flourished,
 by those modern missionary societies called trusts. Factories and houses are to let in many New England towns
 where once varied industry furnished
 bread and independence to a church. going people. For example, in New town the Rubber Trust gobbled up the rubber factory where for generations the people of our little church found employment. Somewhere down on the flats of New Jersey, a State in which corporations, like ancient conquerors, set their boundaries whenever they will, the rubber industry has centered under conditions where the output is regulated, not according to the needs of the commonwealth (that word may have to come out of the dictionary, but according to the greed of capital ists. This process by which the labor of 'the many" is tapped into sluices that concentrate and discharge into the cOffers of the few is one that con- cerns the Church as we'll as the State. The Church of the ''plain people" is bound to suffer by it, and that is the Methodist Church.
 Gladstone said some decades ago that a man with a hundred millions in his hand was a menace to society, but to- day single mind yields a thousand millions and puts band of steel around the world. This thing cannot go on forever, but who is the prophet to lead the people into the better future? Baron and dependents are impossible in the twentieth century. The President of Yale and Abram Hewitt, the first citizen of New York, say in twenty-five years an emperor. Whatever be the remedy-and an emperor is no remedy-the most inane cry of the times is the one often heard in churches, namily, that the Golden Rule is the panacea for the iniquities of tyrannous capital.
 A few complaints have come to my ears, as have gone up and down the New York District, but whether such should make part of an elders report am in doubt. At the risk of against usage in this matter will Say that complaints have been made to me because certain per sons receive money from the Con- ference Claimants Fund who have support from other sources. The law in Discipline, as we'll as the regulation adopted a few years ago by our own Conference, de- clares that needy persons are alone proper claimants on these funds. When the churches find that money is paid from this fund to persons who are not needy the collections will suffer. We must not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
 On two or three charges something like this was said: "Our minister was reluctant to come to us, and he has in- formed us in various ways that injust- ice was done him in sending him to so small church. His heart is not in his work, and we are not hopeful till we get another pastor." Human nature is human nature, and some things are hard to bear, but we will all grant that confessions of that sort on the part of a pastor are a blunder and should be scrupulOusly avoided.