There may be special circumstances about the present war which make it different from all others, but the organised exponents of religion have supported all wars within my memory. A faint voice, here and there, as now, has feebly protested; but in the main the wars of the past sixty years have all been blessed by the followers of the Prince of Peace, and all the strikes, all the efforts of labour to organise itself, have been opposed. The labour struggles have been, if not frowned upon, at least left alone. The churches, when not hostile, have been benevolently neutral towards the employer. A bishop whom I respect very much said the other day that there were some disputes in which it was a sin to be neutral, in which Christians must take sides. He was speaking of the attitude of neutral nations, particularly of America, towards Germany in the present war. When I read the report of this speech I could not help wishing it had been possible to tell him that practically all Christendom had for centuries been either neutral or hostile to the workers in their great struggles for freedom, and that the failure of the churches was entirely due to this one fact. Indeed there has been no great popular movement for social equality which has not been bitterly opposed by the organised churches. The churches profess to believe in and to teach brotherhood, love, and co-operation. The mass of humanity pays little or no heed to their message, because it believes the leaders of the churches do not believe what they say they believe. I spoke recently at a great National Mission meeting in the North of England, where I tried to express the thought that our Lord intended His teaching to be acted upon, to be lived up to, and that we who profess to be Christians must find some means of bringing this about. A clergyman followed me with a witty, clever speech in which he tried to drive home the fact that in his opinion the church could and should lay down great principles, but must never attempt to say how these principles should be put into practice. In the same speech he defended the war as a war of righteousness. This speech distressed me, not because of the support given to war, for I think I do understand the point of view of Christians who support the war; but it seemed to me such an extraordinary theory that the church should be considered worthy to lay down great principles of life and conduct, but should not be considered worthy to tell us how to apply these principles. It is sheer cowardice and fear which make the church, in its corporate capacity, such a helpless organisation when social questions have to be dealt with. Drunkenness is a terrible scourge, brought about by a variety of conditions, but made possible because some people want to make money out of the trade. Prostitution is a social evil, bringing in its train mental, moral, and physical death; it is aggravated by the double standard of morals as shown in