For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to him who had nowhere to lay his head; who pay a preacher $15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in the great cities of every Christian country children must steal or starve and women choose between death and dishonor. New York is crowded with costly churches that lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the clouds with golden fingers--monuments which Mammon rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value mounts up into the millions; yet I learn--from a religious paper, mark you--that 100,000 men, women and children were evicted in New York alone last year for the non- payment of rent; turned into the streets to suffer summer's heat or winter's cold--to beg, or starve, or steal, as they saw fit. I find these startling statistics in the same column with a tearful appeal for more money to send missionaries to black barbarians--on the same page with a description of a new church that must have cost a cold half-million of cash. That's what I call sanctified assurance--gall masquerading as grace. And what is true of New York is true, in greater or less degree, of every town from Plymouth Rock to Poker Flats, from Tadmor-in-the- Wilderness to Yuba Dam. Everywhere the widow is battling with want, while we send Bibles and blankets, prayer- books and pie, salvation and missionary soup to a job-lot of lazy niggers whose souls aren't worth a soumarkee in blocks-of-five--who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates were wide open, but once inside would steal the eternal throne if it wasn't spiked down. Let the heathen rage; we've got our hands full at home. I'd rather see the whole black-and-tan aggregation short on Bibles than one white child crying for bread.