Hard to understand that men fell away from the church? They must have thought that the Lord had forgotten them; but it was only the men who professed His name that had forgotten. _He_ remembered. The day will come, I hope,—I think it is on the way now,—when we shall be permitted to forget the greatest wrong of all; that it was a church corporation, the strongest and wealthiest, and alas! our own, that, for its temporal advantage and to save a paltry few hundred dollars, took up the cudgel for the enemy we were battling with and all but succeeded in upsetting the whole structure of tenement-house law we had built up with such weary toil in our effort to help the man to a level where he might own himself a man. You know the story of that and how bitterly it has rankled these many years. The church corporation was a tenement-house owner, one of the largest, if not, indeed the largest in the city, and its buildings were old and bad. It suited its purposes to let them be bad, because they were down-town where the land was rapidly getting valuable for warehouse purposes, and the tenements were all to be torn down by and by. And so it was that it achieved the reputation of being the worst of landlords, hardly a name to attract the people to its pews. We had got to the point in our fight where we had made good the claim of the tenant to at least a full supply of water in his house, though light and air were yet denied him by the builder, when that church corporation chose to contest the law ordering it to supply water in its houses, and won, for the time being, on the plea that the law was arbitrary and autocratic. They are all autocratic, the laws that are made for the protection of the poor man; they have to be while the purpose to hinder rather than help lives in his brother. We trembled on the edge of a general collapse of all our remedial laws, until the court of last resort decided that any such claim was contrary to public policy and therefore inadmissible. It was not long after that, that a distinguished body of churchmen in my city invited me to speak to them of slum evils. And I showed them pictures of the little children from the gutter, until at last some unthinking brother made the comment: “Oh, well, they wouldn’t wash, if you gave them the chance.” Perhaps you can imagine the result. I would not have missed that opportunity for a good deal.