Now I ask you plainly, “Can you expect the 40 clergy of Lambeth (for that, according to the ‘Clergy List,’ is their number) to cope with this unassisted? What are the 23 clergy of Southwark to do unassisted among a population of whom 68 per cent. do not attend service?” In saying this I am not underrating the labours of Nonconformists; but while we thank God for the honest hearty work of many among them, we have no business to take that work into calculation, if we want thereby to lessen our responsibility as members of the _National_ Church. Now you see the extent of the evil. How can it be remedied? By multiplying our bishops, no doubt, and providing more clergy in each parish. That will do good; but it will be of no avail without a working laity. If the working classes are to be brought to church, _you_ must bring them; and once brought, _we_ must keep them. I want to tell you _why_ you must bring them, and _how_ you must bring them. _You_ must bring them, because many of them seem to think that we talk to them in a professional way; we are a sort of ecclesiastical barristers holding a brief for the Bible. It is an unjust estimate; but there are many unjust estimates in this world. Therefore we want laymen who will go from house to house—who will conduct prayer-meetings and Bible classes, and cottage lectures—who will come and say to the members of the classes alienated from the services of the sanctuary, “I come to tell you about the religion of Christ, because I have found it helpful to myself. I come to ask you to seek pardon from Him, because I have found it myself. I come to ask you to frame your life according to the Gospel of Christ, because I find it makes my own heart happy and my own life bright with the sunshine of God’s love!” We want such helpers as these, and they _must_ be laymen, and laymen of different classes. “I proceed . . .,” writes an earnest clergyman, who worked at one time in Manchester, “to indicate what appears to me to be one of the greatest causes of the evils for which our large towns have gained such an unhappy notoriety. It is needless to say that I allude to the separation of classes—a gigantic wrong, to which it is not too much to say may be traced all the physical and moral degradation and spiritual destitution over which so many philanthropists lament, and for which so few seem prepared to offer a remedy.” {13} We want to “gather of every kind,” to recruit from every class for the great army of Lay-helpers. Those who promote the work have no fear about this. Whatever God puts it into a man’s heart to do, that let him do in due subordination to the Church’s primary laws. Will you resist this call?