One cannot undertake to speak with knowledge on a subject so complicated as this is with private motives, personal temperaments, social circumstances; but, as far as my memory goes, the clergy, as a class, have been too much engaged with matters ecclesiastical to be deeply interested in any cause of reform, and too timid to take the initiative in any matter involving disagreeable relations with controlling powers. While towards the rich the attitude of the clergy is one of allegiance, towards the poor it has been one of patronage. This is a danger. "The poor ye have always with you, and whenever ye will ye can do them good," expresses their doctrine of charity. As if the poor were created in order that others might exercise beneficence; as if poverty was a providential institution, maintained in the interest of religion! It is hard in a so-called "Christian" community to get away from this view. The modern scientific theory and the "Christian" theory are thus at war; the former being intent on the well-being of society, the latter having in mind the cultivation of the individual in tenderness of sympathy; the former educating intelligence, the latter educating feeling. Still there was charity. The Catholic Church, to say nothing here of any ecclesiastical purpose in keeping masses of men and women out of the world, gathered those who could not help themselves into great buildings and took care of them. In the Protestant Church the care of the poor has been held to be a religious duty, and a large part of the efforts of Christian ministers is directed to the fostering of pity and generosity in the hearts of the wealthy. To give to those who had nothing was reckoned the chief of graces, and "charity"--interpreted as love for those in want--was placed above "faith" and "hope," even when money alone was given. Not long ago a Unitarian minister exhorted his congregation to set apart for the uses of the poor one tenth part of their annual income, and doubtless he had the consciences of nearly all his hearers with him, for the monstrous proposition has been so often asserted as to seem by this time a commonplace. Probably no man living does that or ever did, and the practice of it on a large scale would pauperize the community. Think of it! Five thousand dollars a year is not a great income, yet if every one who had as much bestowed a tenth part of it on charitable objects what a fund for human demoralization would be raised! And when the income is ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, the amount of imbecility created would be indescribable; inertia would be frightfully increased, and multitudes would sit with folded hands who otherwise would have lifted them to do some honest work. A moral lethargy would fall on the toiling masses; wealth-producing labor would shrink to narrower and narrower limits, and a paralysis of energy would steal over the will of those whose need of resolution is the sorest. Wealth would