The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
The demands for a better trained ministry and membership in the churches
are being strongly emphasized by such statements of what the community
expects of them as Dr. Howard A. Kelly of the Johns Hopkins University
medical faculty recently made in an address at the annual meeting of the
New York Probation and Protective Association. In giving his consent to
print some of his remarks, he writes, with special reference to his
efforts against the social evil:
“I feel as though my own work in this field were to bring the churches
together for neighborhood social interests. If we do not get the
churches actively to work, I believe all the social developments of
the last thirty years are destined to failure. I fully believe that a
few strong men, say five or six in a city like Baltimore, can
effectively put persistent effort into the work of amalgamating our
churches for the expression of the Christian life in the active
service of their fellow men.”
In his address in New York, after stoutly combating, from his
professional and public points of view, the policy of segregating vice,
he declared that the social work of the church is indispensable to
progress, and that it is the duty and the opportunity of the church to
fulfil the need in this direction. He spoke substantially as follows:
“The most effective of all agencies in breaking down the strongholds
of vice and in building up the national character is the church. For
some reason unknown and unfathomable, some of my associates in this
beneficent work who don’t go to church fight shy of discussing any
enlistment of the churches everywhere. Not a few who have never had
any personal interests in the church even stand ready to declare, with
a distinguished head of our public libraries, that the church
represents the largest outlay of capital for the smallest return in
interest the world has ever seen.
“The utility of the church in the social field is best defended
perhaps by citing an investigation of over 1000 social workers of all
kinds showing that over 90 per cent are church people, and I venture
confidently to affirm that if the inspiration of the church direct and
indirect is taken away from our various social movements, they will
die outright in short order. I can furthermore now aver what I could
not have said twenty years ago, of a group of splendid humanitarian
workers who have no church affiliations, that this indefatigable but
weary band has at last come to realize that unless the church comes to
the front and does her duty this great purifying work will never be
done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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