The advent of democracy has brought home to her her social responsibilities.  Here in America, more than anywhere else, the nature of her social obligation has been revealed.  Here the fact cannot be disguised that the people are the sovereigns, and that social as well as political relations are under their direct control.  The sovereign people have pledged themselves one to another, in their constitution, to refrain from establishing, by law, any form of religion; but they have also covenanted together to promote the common welfare.  This puts the responsibility for social conditions upon the whole people, and the Christian people are among them.  They cannot avoid the obligation to apply Christian principles to social conditions.  Power is theirs to be used in Christ’s name and for the promotion of his kingdom.  To see that society is furnished with right ruling ideas, and organized on Christian principles, is their main business.  And while there are many by whom this obligation is still but feebly felt, yet there is a goodly number of those in whose minds the leaven is working, and to whom the nature of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish is being clearly revealed.  That this number is destined to grow very rapidly we may reasonably hope.

The present situation is so clearly outlined by a recent writer that we may welcome a liberal quotation:—­

“The first apostolate of Christianity was born from a deep fellow-feeling for social misery, and from the consciousness of a great historical opportunity.  Jesus saw the peasantry of Galilee following him about with their poverty and their diseases, like shepherdless sheep that have been scattered and harried by beasts of prey, and his heart had compassion on them.  He felt that the harvest was ripe but there were few to reap it.  Past history had come to its culmination, but there were few who understood the situation and were prepared to cope with it.  He bade his disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, and then made them answer their own prayers by sending them out two by two to proclaim the kingdom of God.  That was the beginning of the world-wide mission of Christianity.

“The situation is repeated on a vaster scale to-day.  If Jesus stood to-day amid our modern life, with that outlook on the condition of all humanity which observation and travel and the press would spread before him, and with the same heart of humanity beating in him, he would create a new apostolate to meet the new needs in a new harvest time of history.

“To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a fair and futile dream.  Yet, in fact, it is not one tithe as hopeless as when Jesus set out to do it.  When he told his disciples, ’Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the