Hence the evangelist of to-day is more than a man who can popularly address a public audience, and by tales and tears arouse a weeping commotion.  The evangelist is a man of intellect and prayer, who can preach the gospel to a scientific age, and to a thinking coterie—­a coterie of college men and mechanics, of society women and servant-girls, of poets and of mine-diggers, of convicts and of reformers.  To-day calls for the utmost intellectual resources of the teacher of the truth, for a great imagination, great style, great sympathy with men, large learning, and unceasing prayer!

3.  His rule is over social ideals.  He must be a man of social insight.  The social spirit is abroad in the world, but it is woefully erratic and misguided.  Any one thinks he can be an altruist.  Why not?  Take a class in a college settlement, make some bibs for a day nursery, give tramps a C.O.S. card, with one’s compliments, and attend about six lectures a year on Philanthropy—­the lectures very good indeed.  One is then a full-fledged altruist, n’est-ce pas?

The philanthropy of to-day has a bewildering iridescence of aspect.  Each present impulse is reformatory.  Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all.  Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks.  Cranks attach themselves to any social movement, as a shaggy gown will gather burrs.  It is not all of philanthropy to classify degenerates, titter at ignorance, and to go a-peeping through the slums!  We have not yet realized the fulness of redemption.  Of what avail is it to save one street-Arab, or one Chinaman, if a million Arabs and Chinamen remain unsaved?  Redemption is a race-savior:  it seizes not only the individual, but his environment, his friends, and his future state.

The true minister is a reformer.  A reformer is one who re-crystallizes the social ideals of man, who breaks up idols and bad customs, and sweeps away abuses.  But we must first ask:  What is an idol?  What is a bad custom?  What is an abuse?  They are social standards which are out of harmony with true concepts of God, life, and duty.  Behind the work of the reformer is the dream of the reformer, the meditation of the mystic, the seer.  He must first have in mind a plain, clear conception of what the relation is of man to God, of what man’s environment should be, and of what the society of the Kingdom should be.  The reformer is one who changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal environment of his own thought.  When he breaks an idol, it is not the idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept of the community.  What he wishes in place of the idol is a right conception.  No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands.  But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, and the idols disappeared.

Hence the work of the reformer is deep and heart-searching work.  It means constant study of the spiritual needs of the age, continual insight into the material forces which are moulding the age-images, money, conquest, or whatever they may be.  He wishes to maintain a spiritual hold on civilization itself, so to transform the ideal within a man, a community, a nation, in regard to custom, observance, belief, that the outer rite shall follow.