and even where it is adequate, the most vital social center should be the church itself. And that, not by way of organizing the church, the social church. That is not my topic to-night. That is another topic; but of making the community realize that the congregation, and particularly that the pastor, is interested in everything that is important for that community, and that the members of that church are ready to coördinate and the pastor ready to lend his time and his energy to the amount of organization which is necessary outside the church as well as in, for the benefit of the community.

It seems to me that the country pastor has an unparalleled opportunity to be a county leader, to make everybody realize that he, as the representative of Christ, believes himself related to everything human, to everything human that has as its object the uplift and construction and inspiration of the community for the betterment of any of its conditions. And that if any pastor will make it felt throughout the community that this is his spirit and that this is his interest, and that he is ready to draw his elders and his deacons and his vestrymen with him as active agents in the betterment of the community, the church will begin to have a dominating influence in the community such as it has lost for the time being and which we must find means to regain.

For example, in a farming community one of the things that the Department of Agriculture at Washington is trying to do is to show the farmers of the country the easiest and best methods of coöperation with regard to marketing their crops; learning how to handle their crops in a coöperative fashion, so that they can get the best service from the railroads, learn how to find the prevailing market prices in the accessible markets, so as to know where it will be best and most profitable to send their farm products; and draw themselves together into cooperative associations with these objects in view.

The church ought to lend its hand to that. The pastor ought to say, "If you want somebody to look after this for you, I

will give part of my time and I will find other men in my congregation who will help you and without charging you anything for it. We want you to realize that this church is interested in the lives of the people of this country, and that it will lend itself to any legitimate project that advances the life and interests of the people of this country."

Let the rural church find that and then discover, as it will discover, that men begin to swing their thoughts to those deeper meanings of the church to which we wish to draw their attention, that this is a spiritual brotherhood, that the pastor and associates are interested in them, because they are interested in the souls of men and the prosperity of men as it lies deep in their heart. There are a great many ways by which leadership can be exercised.

The church has too much depended upon individual example. "So let your light shine before men "has been taken to be "put your individual self on a candlestick and shine." Now the trouble is that some people cannot find the candlestick, but the greater trouble is that they are a very poor candle and the light is very dim, and it does not dispel much of the darkness for me individually to sit on the top of a candlestick. But if I lend such little contribution of spiritual forces as I have to my neighbor and to my comrade and to my friend, and we can draw a circle of friends together and unite our spiritual forces, then we have something more than example. We have coöperation, and coöperation, ladies and gentlemen, is the vital principle of social life.

I think I know something about organization. I can make an organization, but it is one thing to have an organization and another thing to fill it with life. And then it is a very important matter what sort of life to fill it with. If the object of the organization is what the object of some business organizations is, and the object of many political organizations is, to absorb the life of the community and run the community for its own benefit, then there is nothing profitable in it. But

if the object of the community is to afford a mechanism by which the whole community can coöperatively use its life, then there is a great deal in it, and organization without the spirit of coöperation is dead and may be dangerous. So that the vital principle is coöperation, and organization is secondary. I have been a member of one or two churches that were admirably organized and were accomplishing nothing. You know some people dearly love organization. They dearly love to sit in a church and preside. They pride themselves upon their knowledge of parliamentary practice. They love to congregate and write minutes. They love to appoint committees. They boast of the number of committees that their organization has and they like the power and the social influence of distributing their friends among the committees. And then, when the committees are formed, there is nothing to commit to them.

This is a nation which loves to go through the motion of public meetings, whether there is anything particularly important to consider or not. It is an interesting thing to me how the American is born knowing how to conduct a public meeting.

I remember that when I was a lad I belonged to an organization which seemed to be very important, and which was known as "The Lightfoot Baseball Club." Our clubroom was an unoccupied corner of the loft in my father's barn, the part that the hay did not encroach upon. And I distinctly remember how we used to conduct orderly meetings of the club in that corner of the loft. I had never seen a public meeting, and I do not believe any of the other lads, with whom I was associated, had ever seen a public meeting. But we somehow knew how to conduct one. We knew how to make motions and second them. We knew that a motion could not have more than two amendments offered at the same time, and we knew the order in which the amendments had to be put, the second amendment before the first. How we knew it I do not know. We were born that way, I guess.

But nothing very important happened with the Lightfoot Baseball Club, and I remember distinctly that my delight and interest was in the meetings, not what they were for, but just the sense of belonging to an organization, and doing something with the organization, it didn't very much matter what. Some churches are organized that way. They are exceedingly active about nothing.

Now, why not lend that organization instinct, that acting instinct, to the real things that are happening in the community, whether they have anything to do with the church or not?

We look back to the time of the early settlement of this country and remember that in New England the church and the school were the two sources of life of the community. Everything centered in them; everything emanated from them. The school fed the church and the church ran the community. It sometimes did not run it very liberally, and I, for my part, would not wish to see any church run any community, but I do wish to see every church assist the community in which it is established to run itself to show that the spirit of Christianity is the spirit of assistance, of counsel, of vitalization, of intensive effort in everything that affects the lives of men, women and children.

So I am hoping that the outcome of this conference and all that we say and do about this important matter may be to remind the church that it is put into this world not only to save the individual soul, but to save society also, and it has got to go to work in society, in one sense with a greater sense of the exigency of the thing than in the case of the individual, because you have got to save society in this world, not in the next.

I hope that our society isn't going to exist in the next. It needs amendment in several particulars, I venture to say, and I hope that the society in the next world will be amended in those particulars, which I will not mention. But we have nothing to do with society in the next world. We may have

something to do with the individual soul in the next world by getting it started for the next world, but we have nothing to do with the organization of society in the next world.

We have got to save society, so far as it is saved, by the instrumentality of Christianity in this world. It is a job, therefore, we have got to undertake immediately and work out all the time, and it is the business of the church.

Legislation cannot save society. Legislation cannot even rectify society. A law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

Law records how far society has advanced and there have to be instrumentalities preceding a law that advanced society up to that point where it is ready to record. Try the experiment of enacting a law that is the moral judgment of a very small minority of the community, and it won't work. Most people won't understand it, and if they understand it, they will resent it, but whether they understand it and resent it or not, they won't obey it.

Law is a record of achievement; it is not a process of regeneration. Our wills have to be regenerated and our purposes rectified before we are in a position to enact laws that record those moral achievements; and that is the business primarily, it seems to me, of the Christian.

There are a great many arguments about Christianity. There are a great many things which we freely assert which we can't, in the ordinary scientific sense of the word, prove; but there are some things which we can show. The proof of Christianity is written in the biography of the saints and by the saints I do not mean the technical saints those whom the church or the world have picked out and labeled saints for they are not very numerous - but the people whose lives — whose individual lives have been transformed by Christianity.

It is the only force in the world that I have ever heard of that does actually transform life. And the proof of that trans