of the truth.  It is hated as impractical by the multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned by the get-saved-quick reformers.  Nevertheless we must find out the distinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and why they are what they are, and what is the good of it all.  There is no more valuable service which the preacher can render his community than to deliberately seclude himself from continual contact with immediate issues and dwell on the eternal verities.  When Darwin published The Descent of Man at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the London Times took him severely to task for his absorption in purely scientific interests and hypothetical issues.  “When the foundations of property and the established order were threatened with the fires of the Paris Commune; when the Tuileries were burning—­how could a British subject be occupying himself with speculations in natural science in no wise calculated to bring aid or comfort to those who had a stake in the country!” Well, few of us imagine today that Darwin would have been wise to have exchanged the seclusion and the impractical hours of the study for the office or the camp, the market or the street.

Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central and abstract matters still obsesses us.  At the Quadrennial Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held recently at Des Moines, thirty-four bishops submitted an address in which they said among other things:  “Of course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompromising denunciation of all violations of laws, against all murderous child labor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe mines, all deadly tenements, all excessive hours for those who toil, all profligate luxuries, all standards of wage and life below the living standard, all unfairness and harshness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of the employer or union, all overlordships, whether of capital or labor, all godless profiteering, whether in food, clothing, profits or wages, against all inhumanity, injustice and blighting inequality, against all class-minded men who demand special privileges or exceptions on behalf of their class.”

These are all vital matters, yet I cannot believe that it is the church’s chief business thus to turn her energies to the problems of the material world.  This would be a stupendous program, even if complete in itself; as an item in a program it becomes almost a reductio ad absurdum.  The Springfield Republican in an editorial comment upon it said:  “It fairly invites the question whether the church is not in some danger of trying to do too much.  The fund of energy available for any human undertaking is not unlimited; energy turned in one direction must of necessity be withdrawn from another and energy diffused in many directions cannot be concentrated.  Count the adjectives—­’murderous,’ ‘foul,’ ‘unsafe,’ ‘deadly,’ ‘excessive,’ ‘profligate,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘godless,’ ’blighting’—­does not each involve research, investigation, comparison, analysis, deliberation, a heavy tax upon the intellectual resources of the church if any result worth having is to be obtained?  Can this energy be found without subtracting energy from some other sphere?”