The ways and means of improving the condition of the people are at hand. It is time we gave up the game of party politics and took to real work. It is time we gave up speculation and did what waits the doing. Here are men and women. Are they what they might be? Are they like the Son of Man? How can they be helped to reach the standard of their manhood? That is the question of the day; before that of Ireland, Egypt, or the Game Laws. The answer to that question will divide, by other than by party lines, the leaders of men. He who answers it so as to weld old and new together will be the statesman of the future. SAMUEL A. BARNETT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XIII. _THE WORK OF RIGHTEOUSNESS._[1] [1] A sermon preached on Advent Sunday, November 27, 1887, at St. Jude’s Church, Whitechapel, before a body of men and women engaged in the work of social reform. ‘If I find ... fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’--_Genesis_ xviii. 26. My first thought, as I face you this evening, is of your variety--of your different classes and creeds, of your various communities, and your various views. My second thought is of your common object, of the one longing--the voice of your real selves--which converts variety into unity. You would save the city. Like Abraham, you have seen doom impending; like Buddha, you have seen sights in your daily walk which make the life of ease impossible. You have met poverty, ignorance, and sin. You have met Poverty. You know families whose weekly income is under the price of a bottle of good wine; men dwarfed in stature, crippled in body, the inmates of a hospital for want of sufficient food; women aged and hardened, broken in spirit because their homes are too narrow for cleanliness or for comfort; children who die because they cannot have the care which preserves the children of the rich. You have met Ignorance. You know men and women gifted with divine powers, powers of clear sight and deep feeling, you have seen such people taking shallow rhetoric for reason, delighting in exaggeration, clamouring for force as a remedy, adopting swindlers as leaders, making a game--a Sunday afternoon’s excitement--of matters which should tear their hearts, killing time which might have been fruitful in thought and joy and love. ‘The future belongs to the man who refuses to take himself seriously,’ says the mocking philosopher. The ignorance which accepts the teaching, and which goes with a light heart to agitate or to repress agitation, is a sight to destroy anyone’s ease of mind.