Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology.  I stood one night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon the sweltering mass that covered the roofs, fire escapes and sidewalks.  The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children panting for breath.  Down on the crowded streets thousands of little children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions.  Crowded baby-carriages lined the sidewalks.  The stoops, too, were crowded.  What a mass of humans!  What a ganglia of living wires!  As I looked on this vast multitude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its grip.  Most of these people belonged to another race.  And I stood at that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this multitude was inevitably doomed!  Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal:  doomed to hell!

I am unable to analyze the quick currents of thought that went through my mind at that instant.  I cannot explain how the change came.  I know that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men, that I said to my soul:  “Soul, if this multitude is doomed to hell, be brave; gird up your loins and go with them!”

In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born of the herding of men and women like cattle.  I made some feeble attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the facts, and my investigation led me to this result—­a result that the lapse of years has not altered; that the private ownership of tenements—­the private profits in housing—­was not only the mother of the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that endanger health.  It led me to the belief also that the struggle for bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave little time for soul health or mental health!  It was a source of continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were as good as they were, or as healthy as they were.  It did not seem reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the tenements.  Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income—­and to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and sacrifices.  It was part of the great game of business, the game of “live I, die you!”

The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there, because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them.  And there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are supported by the people—­the very people who perpetuate the evils against which prophet, priest and pastor ought to cry out continually.  The protest against such conditions is a negligible quantity.