In order to retain the doctrine of depravity under such modern conditions as freedom of thought, popular education, and greatly widened acquaintance with humanity, a three-fold demonstration would have been necessary: _First_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a great and evident contrast between the daily lives of those who experienced and those who did not experience the asserted special infusion of divine power. If the doctrine was true, some experience here and now, not merely in the hereafter, had to separate men into sheep and goats. _Second_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a regenerate church as an organ of world-regeneration. Not necessarily an infallible church; not necessarily an organization perfect in its constitution and free from foibles in its administration, but at least one clearly discriminable from all other social institutions by the intensity, the continuity, and the independence of a superior motive. _Third_, it would have been necessary to demonstrate the reversal of human nature’s evil traits socially as well as individually, and outside the church as well as inside it. In particular, the “new creature” would have had to appear within the structure of the industrial order. Not that any sudden or complete conversion of the industrial order is here implied, but at least some recognizable beginning, some certain evidence that the process of industrial regeneration is starting. Feeding those who are left hungry by the economic machine, or binding up the wounds of those who have been hurt by it, or soothing the asperities of the industrial warfare, is not enough; the required demonstration had to reach and modify the central motives that give to the system its specific character. Unless objective evidence could be adduced that the kingdom of property, profits, wealth, and wages can be transformed into a Kingdom of God--not, of course, by charitable distribution of a surplus, but by shifting the main direction--then nothing could keep alive the doctrine of regeneration.