In recent years we have heard much about the "Institutional Church" as the long sought panacea. It is claimed by some persons that the churches cannot succeed unless they add to ordinary spiritual instrumentalities, various useful annexes, such as reading rooms, kindergartens, dispensaries, and certain social entertainments. But it is a noteworthy fact that the chief pioneer in "Institutional" methods was the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and he was the prince of old-fashioned gospel preachers. He never thought of his orphanage, and other benevolent adjuncts of the Metropolitan Tabernacle as substitutes for the sovereign purpose of his holy work, which was to convert the people to Jesus Christ. He subordinated the physical, the mental, and the social to the spiritual; and rightly judged that making clean hearts was the best way to secure clean homes and clean lives. I have no doubt that a very strong, well-manned and thoroughly spiritually managed church may wisely maintain as many adjuncts, such as reading-rooms, libraries, dispensaries, kindergartens and other humanitarian annexes as it has the means to support. An illustration of this is seen in the successful and Heaven-blessed Bethany Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, founded and maintained and guided by that hundred-handed Briareus in the service of Christ--my beloved friend, the Hon. John Wanamaker. The aim of that great church and its well-known Sunday School, is to make people happy by making them better, and to save them for this world after saving them for another world. When a church has the spiritual purposes and spiritual power of the London Tabernacle and the Bethany Church, and is guided by a Spurgeon or a Wanamaker, it may safely become "institutional." But some experiments that have been made to establish churches of that name in this country have not always been conspicuously successful.