2.  The Church needs a more business-like organization and way of work.  It needs a more military spirit and discipline.  The Church is diffuse and loosely strung.  There are in the United States alone about two hundred and fifty-six kinds of religious bodies.  There is no centralized interest or work; there is no economic adjustment of funds; there is no internal agreement as to practical methods.  The result is a most wasteful expenditure of force.  Movements are not only duplicated, but reproduced a hundred times in miniature, in one denomination after another; special talent is restricted to a narrow field; buildings and church-plants are multiplied, but lie largely disused; sects and communities are at loggerheads on unessential points; all this—­and the world is not being saved!  The Church fails to see openings for aggressive work; it fails to seize strategic points; it does not carry a well-knit local organization, with a husbanding of economic force; it does not front the world in dead-earnest; it is not proud and honorable in meeting its local debts; it loses progressive force, from lack of knowledge as to how to judge men, and train them, and set them to work.

It also lacks greatly in office-force and in supplies.  The gospel itself is without price, but in the nature of things it cannot be proclaimed, nor church-work efficiently carried on, without financial outlay.  There should be a more adequate equipment for this work.  All other enterprises need, without question, stationery, stenographers, literature for distribution, office-rooms, office-hours, and a general arrangement looking toward enlargement and progress.  A busy pastor should have an office-equipment just as much as a business man, and it should be supported, as a business office is, out of the funds of the business organization, i.e. the local church.

There should be, first of all, a united spirit, and a general reorganization throughout the whole of evangelical Christendom, not necessarily destroying denominational lines, with a view to quick mobilization of energy in any direction most needed.  What would a general do, who, in looking over his troops, should find two hundred and fifty-six provincial armies, not at ease or at peace with each other, and yet expected to make war upon a common foe?  Shall we not endeavor to share in some broadly planned, magnificently executed scheme of world-advance?

The Church has reached a point where a vast constructive work is to be done.  Its scattered parts must be knit into a powerful and aggressive whole, to turn a solid front upon the evil of the world.  The times are ripe for a successor of Peter the Hermit, of Luther, Knox, Calvin, Zwingli, Savonarola, Whitefield, Finney, Moody.  Whether a great preacher, theologian, or evangelist, he will certainly be a business man, a man of vast energy and executive capacity, who shall perform this miracle of organization of which many dream, and who shall set the progress of the Church for a full century to come!