The religious activity of the century is further manifested in the enormous sums raised and expended for purposes of charity, reform, and general philanthropy. It would require an octavo volume of four hundred pages to catalogue the various benevolent and charitable organizations in the city of New York alone. Add to that volume the hundreds more which would be required to enumerate the additional thousands to be found in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston,—in fact in every city, town, and hamlet from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nine tenths of which are distinctively Christian,—and you have a faint idea, at least, of the vastness of the spiritual forces at work in these closing years of the century for the amelioration of human ill, the dispelling of moral and spiritual darkness, and the ushering in of the era of peace and good will, for the coming of which the church has so ceaselessly prayed. What these philanthropies are we cannot in detail enumerate. Classified, they are for the poor, for the laboring classes, for the sick, for fallen women, for free schools, for the aged, for the blind, the deaf, the insane, the impotent, the degraded, the outcast, for sailors, for the protection of animals, for city evangelization, for home missions, for foreign missions, for religious publications, for the publishing of the Holy Scriptures, for peace, for Young Men’s Associations, Young Women’s Associations, for every cause that appeals to the sentiment of brotherhood so characteristic of the age. In number they are legion. In origin, three fourths are the outgrowth of that spirit of Christian love without which they could not have been originated, and by which they are maintained and perpetuated. Those who assert that within this century Christianity has done more for humanity than in all the centuries preceding are doubtless correct. It has made men kind, made them humane. It has penetrated prisons, and with beneficent change. It has lifted the prisoner from damp and dreary dungeons into commodious structures, the pride of city and State. So far, indeed, have the reforms inspired by the gospel been carried, that men are beginning to inquire whether the limit has not been reached beyond which it may be dangerous to go.