The Twentieth Century will need its preachers and leaders in religion. Some say, idly, that religion is losing her hold in these strenuous days. But she is not. She is simply changing her grip. The religion of this century will be more practical, more real. It will deal with the days of the week as well as with the Sabbath. It will be as patent in the marts of trade as in the walls of a cathedral, for a man's religion is his working hypothesis of life, not of life in some future world, but of life right here to-day, the only day we have in which to build a life. It will not look backward exclusively to "a dead fact stranded on the shore of the oblivious years," nor will its rewards be found alone in the life to come. The world of to-day will not be a "vale of tears" through which sinful men are to walk unhappily toward final reward. It will be a world of light and color and joy, a world in which each of us may have a noble though a humble part,--the work of the "holy life of action." It will find religion in love and wisdom and virtue, not in bloodless asceticism, philosophical disputation, the maintenance of withered creeds, the cultivation of fruitless emotion, or the recrudescence of forms from which the life has gone out. It is possible, Thoreau tells us, for us to "walk in hallowed cathedrals," and this in our every-day lives of profession or trade. It is the loyalty to duty, the love of God through the love of men, which may transform the workshop to a cathedral, and the life of to-day may be divine none the less because it is strenuous and complex. It may be all the more so because it is democratic, even the Sabbath and its duties being no longer exalted above the other holy days. What sort of men does the century need for all this work it has to do? We may be sure that it will choose its own, and those who cannot serve it will be cast aside unpityingly. Those it can use it will pay generously, each after its kind, some with money, some with fame, some with the sense of power, some with the joy of service. Some will work hard in spite of vast wealth, some only after taking the vow of poverty. Those not needed you can find any day. They lean against lamp-posts in platoons, they crowd the saloons, they stand about railway stations all day long to see trains go by. They dally on the lounges of fashionable clubs. They may be had tied in bundles by the employers of menial labor. Their women work at the wash-tubs, and crowd the sweat shops of great cities; or, idle rich, they may dawdle in the various ways in which men and women dispose of time, yielding nothing in return for it. You, whom the century wants, belong to none of these classes. Yours must be the spirit of the times, strenuous, complex, democratic.