In short, the Jews in America very seriously wanted to complete their Americanization. They were honestly striving for education, for refinement, for community and public service, for devotion to art, music, and culture. Welcome, then, this prophet Adler--this great reformer! His sterling qualities as a thinker; his wonderful resourcefulness; his pure and lofty private life, and his totally uncompromising attitude toward evil, secured him the admiration of all those who had in their own modest way been hopelessly striving to reach this plane. Adler by inheritance and by studying the older prophets had mingled that knowledge with the wisdom of the present day. Here was pure ethics unencumbered by religious form, the way Emerson taught it, the way Garrison and Lincoln practised it--and this man was trying to direct this current, which led away from the old-fashioned religion into a new field tending toward agnosticism and atheism, and bring it, instead, into this new field of ethics. His sincerity could not be doubted. He had voluntarily abandoned an honourable and care-free career that had been offered him by Temple Emanu-El, and like a modern Moses had undertaken the harassing and difficult task of satisfying the unexpressed yearnings of these people, who were discontented with the existing requirements of their religion and had hopelessly sought for moral guidance. I was among Adler’s earliest adherents. When he organized his United Relief Work, I was one of its directors; I participated in his Cherry Street experiment in model tenements--the first in America, which eventually brought about legislation to do away with the dark rooms of which there were over fifty thousand in New York City alone, and I assisted in the establishment of the first Ethical Culture School, which was started in Fifty-fourth Street, near Sixth Avenue, and was chairman of the Site Committee that secured the present location on Central Park West from Sixty-third to Sixty-fourth streets.