"I mean just this," answered Dick, rising to his feet and walking slowly back and forth across the room, "there is plenty of food in this world to give every man, woman and child enough to eat, and it is contrary to God's law that the _helpless_ should go hungry. There is enough material to clothe every man, woman and child, and God never intended that the needy should go naked. There is enough wealth to house and warm every creature tonight, for God never meant that men should freeze in such weather as this; and Christ surely teaches, both by words and example, that the hungry should be fed, the naked clothed, and the homeless housed. Is it not the Christian's duty to carry out Christ's teaching? It is an awful comment on the policy of the church when a young man, bearing on his person the evidence of his Christianity and proof that he supported the institution, dies of cold and hunger at the locked door of the house of God. That, too, in a city where there are ten or twelve denominations, paying at least as many thousand dollars for preachers' salaries alone each year." "But we couldn't do it." "The lodges do. There is more than enough wealth spent in the churches in this city, for useless, gaudy display, and in trying to get ahead of some other denomination, than would be needed to clothe every naked child in warmth to-night. You claim to be God's stewards, but spend his goods on yourselves, while Christ, in the person of that boy in the cemetery, is crying for food and clothing. And then you wonder why George Udell and myself, who have suffered these things, don't unite with the church. The wonder to me is that such honest men as you and Mr. Wicks can remain connected with such an organization." "But," said Charlie, with a troubled look on his face, "would not such work encourage crime and idleness?" "Not if it were done according to God's law," answered Dick. "The present spasmodic, haphazard sentimental way of giving does. It takes away a man's self-respect; it encourages him to be shiftless and idle; or it fails to reach the worthy sufferers. Whichever way you fix it, it kills the man." "But what is God's law?" asked the other. "That those who do not work should not eat," replied Dick; "and that applies on the avenue as well as in the mines." "How would you do all this, though? That has been the great problem of the church for years."