It is hard to understand the attitude of the church, through all those weary years, towards the people it was meant to shepherd, except upon the assumption, which was a fact, that it, too, had been seized and carried away by the prevailing craze, taking the thing for the soul of the thing. Handsome church edifices went up, with brown stone and marble and carvings without stint, further and further from the people’s homes; though not always as the record shows. In the rear of Trinity Church and “overlooked by the stained-glass windows of that beautiful edifice,” the legislative committee, of which I spoke, pointed, with a scorn it hardly made an attempt to conceal, to a tenement containing fourteen families in which “filth and want of ventilation were enough to infect the very walls with disease.” As a matter of fact, two epidemics of yellow fever and of cholera had started in that row. But whether the churches were near or far, the people kept aloof from them. _That_ is not hard to understand, when I recall the dive in William Street, with two stories of vileness underground, that was known in the Health Department to belong to a New Jersey church corporation! The profits were the devil’s wages and they went to pay for what some Christians called God’s work! I suppose they persuaded themselves—men can persuade themselves to almost anything if they want to—that that was the reason they were not willing to give them up, and they fought stubbornly the efforts of the authorities to break up the dive where unspeakable debauchery held high carnival most of the day and all of the night. It is not hard to understand, when there comes to mind the congregation of Christians that moved up-town from Mulberry Street and sold their old house of worship to speculating builders, who converted it into a rear tenement, put a brick building in front and into these barracks piled a hundred families, a total of three hundred and sixty persons. What kind of home altars were there, think you? That was at the Five Points where the dives were particularly vile, but I will warrant that there was nothing in the saloon in the front basement one-half as bad as in the flats in the rear, where men and women had once sat and worshiped their God, to whose service they had dedicated that house. In 1868, the death rate in the “Old Church Tenements,” as they were called until for very shame we destroyed them, was _seventy-five per thousand_, counting only those who died in the houses, not those whose end came in the hospitals to which those tenements were “among the largest contributors.”