What a travesty of true religion all this clerical cowardice and apathy is! But, alas! how in keeping with the official traditions of that organised religion which refused to help Wilberforce in his struggle to free the slaves--nay, which, in many cases, actively opposed his campaign--and which, in our day, has stood passively by whilst men and women have been thrown into prison and tortured by forcible feeding and other brutal means of persecution! Facts like these stamp the church and its work with ghastly failure. It would not be right for me not to acknowledge the splendid work which rebels within the churches have done on behalf of God and the people, from the days of the early fathers until now, but the work of men like John Ball has been crushed by the dead weight of the episcopacy. A generation ago Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes, and others made a great effort to stir the conscience of the church. In our own day, Stewart Headlam, Conrad Noel, Lewis Donaldson, and their fellow-priests of the Church Socialist League have done magnificent work, striving to make men and women realise that serving God and belonging to the society of Christ’s people on earth involves something more than the repetition of words and phrases and lip-service. In other churches, too, individual men and women have upheld the literal truth of the teaching of Christ, and have pleaded for its practical application to the problems of life--only to find themselves isolated and alone. Yet they have never really been alone, for to them, as to every true disciple of Christ, the promise of the Master is true: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the World.” And that is the message and promise for us all. Leaders may fail us, the churches may fail in carrying the gospel message in all its fulness to the hearts of the people, but the message is finding its way home in other ways. The common people through their own efforts are finding their way back to God, and are realising every day what are the things in life that really matter. And all those who love England, who love Humanity, should range themselves alongside the great army of labour, that army of men and women who are marching towards the light, who gain inspiration, courage, and hope from a firm and unswerving faith in the solidarity and brotherhood of all mankind, and who to-day are hungering and thirsting for a fuller life. It is said that on the scaffold Sir Harry Vane declared: “The people of England have long been asleep; when they waken they will be hungry.” We might well say the same thing to-day. Our people have again been asleep for a long time, and they are once more waking to find themselves hungry. They will not find their food and their satisfaction in the worn-out theories of competition and beggar-my-neighbour commercialism; but, instead, they will discover their greatest incentive to life and effort in the teachings of the great masters of religion. They are discovering that religion is not