chapels.  Of these, the “Cuyler Chapel,” built and supported entirely by our Young People’s Association, is a fair representative.  It has an excellent preacher, who visits the plain people in their homes; it has a well-equipped Sunday school—­prayer meetings, kindergarten—­its own Society of Christian Endeavor, and King’s Daughters, its penny savings bank and its temperance society—­in short, every appliance essential to a Christian church.  Many others of our strong Brooklyn churches are working precisely on the same practical, common-sense lines.  If all the wealthy churches in New York would illuminate the darker quarters of that city with a hundred well-manned light-houses, well provided with the soul-saving apparatus of the poor man’s Gospel they would do more to silence the cavils against Christianity, and more to bridge the chasm between the rich and the poor than by any of the superficial methods of the “Humanitarians.”  What a poor man wants is not only a clean shirt, a clean home, and a clean account on Saturday night; he wants a clean character and a clean soul for this world and the next.  Christianity makes a sad mistake if it is satisfied to give him a full stomach, and leave him with a starving soul.

In recent years we have heard much about the “Institutional Church” as the long sought panacea.  It is claimed by some persons that the churches cannot succeed unless they add to ordinary spiritual instrumentalities, various useful annexes, such as reading rooms, kindergartens, dispensaries, and certain social entertainments.  But it is a noteworthy fact that the chief pioneer in “Institutional” methods was the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and he was the prince of old-fashioned gospel preachers.  He never thought of his orphanage, and other benevolent adjuncts of the Metropolitan Tabernacle as substitutes for the sovereign purpose of his holy work, which was to convert the people to Jesus Christ.  He subordinated the physical, the mental, and the social to the spiritual; and rightly judged that making clean hearts was the best way to secure clean homes and clean lives.  I have no doubt that a very strong, well-manned and thoroughly spiritually managed church may wisely maintain as many adjuncts, such as reading-rooms, libraries, dispensaries, kindergartens and other humanitarian annexes as it has the means to support.  An illustration of this is seen in the successful and Heaven-blessed Bethany Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, founded and maintained and guided by that hundred-handed Briareus in the service of Christ—­my beloved friend, the Hon. John Wanamaker.  The aim of that great church and its well-known Sunday School, is to make people happy by making them better, and to save them for this world after saving them for another world.  When a church has the spiritual purposes and spiritual power of the London Tabernacle and the Bethany Church, and is guided by a Spurgeon or a Wanamaker, it may safely become “institutional.”  But some experiments that have been made to establish churches of that name in this country have not always been conspicuously successful.