wider theology and the Socialist gospel will be seen to be one and the same, and until it does come I offer myself, with all the little power I possess, to the service of every young man who is trying to make his way against the tide of prejudice and obscurantism with which this joint movement is at present assailed. It is but little that one man can do except to help where opportunity affords, in the true spirit of comradeship, the causes that most need helping. One cannot do more, and would not willingly do less. CITY OF NEW YORK, THE CHURCHES AND THE MASSES The decline of church-going. We are to-day confronted by the startling. fact that in practically every part of Christendom the overwhelming majority of the population is alienated from Christianity as represented by the churches. In our own country nearly seventy-five per cent. of the adult population remains permanently out of touch with organised religion. Broadly speaking, it is true that only a section of the middle class ever attends church at all; the workers, as a body, absent themselves; the professional and upper classes do the same. Not so very long ago, attendance at church was held to be a social necessity, a sort of hall mark of respectability; it is not so now. A professional or business man can be just as sure of success without churchgoing as he can with it; no stigma attaches to abstention. The artisan class not only remains aloof from, but even contemptuous of, churches and preachers; no appeal ever produces so much as a ripple on the surface of their indifference. As soon as the children in our Sunday schools reach adolescence they become lost to religious influences, or, at any rate, the male portion of them drifts away. In any ordinary church service women form the overwhelming majority of the worshippers. There are several ways of accounting for this, chief among which is the fact that for the most part women have not yet come to feel, as men must feel, the dissonance between pulpit Christianity and prevailing economic conditions in the modern world. But women are coming to take their place in business and in the professions; and the more this tendency develops, the more certain is it that women will stay away from church as men are doing. Of course it is obvious that, even already, the women who compose the congregations in most places of worship are but a small minority of their sex. On the Continent this falling away of the people from the churches is more marked than in this country. Educated Germans frequently express their astonishment on coming to England at the fact that so many people go to church. This is a phenomenon to which they are quite unaccustomed at home, and the reason for the difference is fairly simple. In this country the social life of the lower middle classes centres to a considerable extent around the church. The church is the club or public-house, the place to which people must go in order to meet one another and enjoy one another's company. In Germany this is not so; the ordinary centre of |