Our increasing attention to the problem of the social misfit at an earlier stage—through the new study and treatment of mentally deficient children—will considerably reduce the proportions both of pauperism and crime. We are a long way from Samuel Butler’s vision of the time when the liar will be sent to hospital and the sick person to jail; nevertheless, the point of Butler’s _extravaganza_ is becoming recognised in the double fact that a good deal of disease is due to preventable causes, the disregard of which is already treated as a legal offence; and that much of the delinquency that prevails originates in pathological conditions rather than in moral depravity. Especially are we on hopeful lines when we take the mentally deficient child and regard him as the subject of medical rather than of legal treatment. And we shall go yet farther when we realise that though we cannot and dare not eliminate the factor of personal responsibility, yet our social misfits are the products of our social disorder, and it is seen that while justice requires that a man shall pay the penalty of his sins, yet the same justice requires that the society which produced the sinner shall feel a corporate responsibility for his restoration. And restoration is indeed the very centre of our problem in dealing with the social misfit. For our task with the pauper and the criminal is that of making each capable of entering freely and vitally into the fellowship of free men. Yet when we have dealt with the social misfit there will remain, life being what it is, a number of people in every community for whom the burden of life has proved too heavy or whose lives are clouded by sickness or loneliness or death. “The poor,” said Jesus, “ye have always with you.” He did not mean that we need always have physically destitute people with us; He knew better, as we know better. But the smoking flax and the bruised reed we shall ever have with us; and no society can afford to despise a ministry of comfort. Indeed, fellowship will lack its native grace if it fails to produce an unfailing stream of sympathy and consolation to the distressed. Here will be the test of the vitality of our fellowship. For our ideal of fellowship may become hardened in organisation; and personal spontaneity may be lost in a routine habit of life. And to whatever else we may be able to give an organised and official form, it is at least sure that when the ministry of comfort and help loses the touch of personal directness and spontaneity, it is from henceforth a dead and useless thing. VII