I have always known from my own introspection that I had more energy to work, more charity for the poor and been less inclined to meanness, when I had good nourishing food, than when as in my school days, I was hungry and faint on watery soup and half-boiled vegetables. With these views I determined on trying an experiment in “Our Club,” as I was sure it would be for good and certainly do no harm. We engaged an excellent manager of the cookery and refectory in an Eurasian widow. Eurasian, as we had decided to employ only our own people, except for the most menial work. It is not a very good commentary on the native Christians of India, that Christian families, padris, missionaries, church committees or even the Bible and Tract Societies will not employ them, but take heathen servants to their exclusion. If Christianity in two hundred years has not been able to produce a servant that a Christian might employ, is it—but what is the use of talking? Apropos of this is a statement made by a prominent clergyman at a Church Missionary Congress. “After a century of effort, the expenditure of many noble lives, as well as of some millions of money, the Church of England, extraordinary to say, has signally failed to establish one solitary or single native church in any part of the world—that is to say, a church self-governed, self-supporting and expanding, or exhibiting any true signs of vitality as a church. This is a tremendous indictment, I know, but for long, my heart has been hot within me and at last I have spoken, not without, however, having weighed well my words.” This woman was a model of cleanliness. One of the mottoes on our walls was “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and under it printed in large type was the remark of Sir B. W. Richardson: “Cleanliness covers the whole field of sanitary labor. Cleanliness, that is purity of air; cleanliness, that is purity of water; cleanliness in and around the house; cleanliness of person; cleanliness of dress; cleanliness of food and feeding; cleanliness in work; cleanliness in the habits of the individual man and woman; cleanliness of life and conversation, purity of life, temperance, all these are in man’s power.” It is in man’s power, God-given always, as all good things are, to make his own moral destiny for this life as for that to come. He can best answer his own prayers by putting his own shoulder to the wheel, instead of praying to the gods. There was a world of instruction in the reply of Lord Palmerston to the Scotch elders of Glasgow, when they requested him to appoint a day of fasting and prayer to avert the cholera. He replied that it was useless to do so until they had cleaned the streets of the city. He relied more on scavengers’ shovels than he did on Bishops’ prayers. We made cleanliness one of the articles in our unwritten creed, for may it not come that cleanliness of life and living will some day be the universal creed to fit us not only for this life, but for the future life?