Have we any right to be content with conditions like these?  Is the average wage of the average worker, as it is here indicated, all that he ought to ask?  Should society wish him to be content with such an income?  Sit down yourself and figure out just what it would mean to be obliged to maintain a family of four or five on such a stipend as is indicated in any of these trades—­even those best paid.  Find out how much should have to go for rent, and how much for food, and how much for the plainest clothing, and how much for doctor’s bills, and school books, and street-car fare, and how much would be left, after that, for books and church contributions and the wholesome pleasures which we ought to count among the necessaries of life.  Life can be maintained on such an income, but is it the kind of life that we wish our fellow men to live?  And is there any need that life, for the humble laborer, should be reduced in this rich land to its lowest terms?  With the marvelous productiveness of fields and mines and forests and waters, with the immense development of machinery, by which the wealth of the nation is multiplied, might we not have an organization of industry and a method of distribution which would give to the army of manual toilers a much larger average income?

That is the question they are asking, and it calls for a candid answer.  Their needs are not as dire as were those of the German peasants of the sixteenth century, but they are real and serious needs.  Now, as then, a tremendous industrial revolution has dislocated industries and demoralized and impoverished many; now, as then, the concentration of capital in great companies has destroyed small enterprises and left many who were once thrifty stranded and discouraged; now, as then, glaring contrasts in condition excite the resentments of the needy; now, as then, the propertiless are wondering whether this is the kind of thing that the church has been looking for when she has prayed that the kingdom of God may come.  And there is a feeling now, as there was then, among the millions of the toilers, that the church which assumes to represent Jesus Christ needs to be reformed, in order that through its testimony and its leadership the kingdom of God may come.

It is sadly true that there are many among these toiling millions who are embittered against the church, who have no faith in it, and no expectation that any good will come out of it; but the great majority are not hostile to the church; at worst they are indifferent, and this indifference is due to their belief that the church no longer represents Jesus Christ.  Toward him there is often a pathetic outreaching of hope; if the church would come back to the simplicity that is in Christ and would plant itself on the Sermon on the Mount, it would quickly win their loyalty.  And I cannot help feeling that now, as in the sixteenth century, there is in the minds of the toiling millions “a confused dream that the kingdom of God might