ease the pain of the sick? Out of your rectitude went there any virtue for the healing of those who were sick of soul?"

Can we stand that test? Are we personally related to these pathetic groups in our own community-the dependent, the defective, the delinquent? We may say, "Lord, I have given my money to missions; I have supported the church; I served on a charity board." Yes, but have we put our lives into actual contact with other lives who need us?

STUDY FOR THE WEEK

Never since the world began have there been such organized movements to care for the weaker groups in human society. But while this gain is being achieved, new forces for destruction have begun to operate.

Our modern industrial system is crushing down great heaps of human wreckage. Because of the Great War the coming generation faces such a mass of human misery as the world has never met before. Society has not only been wasting its human resources, but it has been multiplying the power of the world-old evils of disease and poverty and crime. These evils are contagious. They have power to breed and perpetuate themselves. There will be no easy way out by doles of relief, or opportunist programs. The mounting mass of degeneracy will test the strength of our Western civilization to the bottom.

I

In every community the poor in their weakness challenge the comfortable in their strength. There is no rural district so remote, no suburban community so refined and prosperous that it has not at least a margin of poverty around its edges. It is not simply the destitute, those in the extreme of poverty, who claim our concern. We have learned how to take care of them. Our community would be considered pagan if it had not established some organized method of relief work, Drivate and public. While we do not let the poor starve or

die outright for lack of bread, while we do not "sell the needy for a pair of shoes," there is still ever present with us a vast group that lives upon the poverty line.

In India millions lie down hungry every night of the year. "If the modern American almshouses were to be erected in China and thrown open to all who would come," says an authority, "two-thirds of the population would be at their doors, because what they would receive there would be so much better than what they had lived on all of their lives." When constantly recurring famine sweeps these lands, this perpetual poverty is enlarged into wholesale starvation and death.

Even in our prosperous United States at least one-tenth of the population is not adequately fed, clothed, nor sheltered according to the lowest standards. They live on the run-down farms, in the hovels of small towns, in the dark rooms of the cities, in the shacks and shanties on the edges of the suburbs. The ills of the industrial order heap up on their lives. The competitive system ruthlessly casts aside their inefficiency. Greed strengthens itself out of their necessities. They must pay the high cost of American living with all its inclusion of swollen profits. Everywhere the poor live with the fear of hunger in their eyes, with the shadow of want upon their doorsteps, with dread in their souls of what poverty may finally do to the morals of their children. Prosperity even in prosperous times is an idle word to them. They live from hand to mouth. Any of the ordinary emergencies of life, such as unemployment, sickness, or a funeral, would throw them down below the poverty line, and change them into dependents and paupers.

While relief work will not avail to remove poverty as a social fact, there is no solution which omits personal service and contact. There is no way up from the bottom except by the leaven of life from another level. Merely to leave a basket on the doorstep is to leave hunger in the house when the basket is empty. To develop a program that will secure economic efficiency for the whole family is a slower, longer task.

Relief work, public and private, has to be humanized by the personal service of the volunteer. A college graduate of large wealth and business connections recently withdrew entirely from business to accept the supervision of the institutions of his county dealing with the poor, and has revolutionized them. Do such possibilities put a new meaning into politics and a new responsibility upon the voter?

It is disheartening to pull some families up above the poverty line, only to see others step in to take their place. Intelligent relief work leads inevitably to preventive philanthropy. The mayor in a great inland Chinese city of 500,000 was following the lead of this modern philanthropy in his attack upon the beggar problem. He not only made the licensed trade of begging unlawful, but through industrial orphanages for the beggars' children and industrial training for the beggars themselves, sought to make these outcasts of society self-supporting and self-respecting citizens. "The dominant idea of modern philanthropy," says Dr. Edward T. Devine, "is embodied in a determination to seek out and to strike effectively at those organized forces of evil, at those particular causes of dependence, and intolerable living conditions, which are beyond the control of the individuals whom they injure and whom they too often destroy."

The prevention of poverty is not alone the dream of the idealists-it is also the sober demand of the scientists. They declare that poverty now exists only because men are willing it should exist, because of defective distribution, and not because of any basic economic deficit. What obligation does this place upon those who share in the social surplus? How far is the question of justice in the distribution of wealth a world question to be thought out in the Orient as well as in the Occident? How can the missionary help to work it out?

II

In one hospital in China, founded and maintained by American university men, twenty-five thousand out-patients were

treated in a single year. This is but one of seven hundred mission hospitals in various lands. The missionaries have carried modern medicine and surgery to Japan, Korea, China, Siam, India, Persia, Turkey, and Africa. Christianity thus inspires the care of the sick through countless institutions and personal services.

Alongside of this vast work of Christian compassion there still stands, however, the grim fact of the extent of preventable disease. More than six hundred thousand lives are needlessly sacrificed every year in the United States from diseases which modern science knows how to prevent! There is no way to compute the doubtless vastly larger proportion of needless deaths occurring annually in those lands where medical science is in its infancy. The economic waste has been computed into the millions, but who shall estimate the loss to community life? A college community recently lost from typhoid fever one of its strongest professors-a man whose influence on many generations of college men and women was incalculable. That community had knowledge enough and money enough to protect itself against typhoid, but it did not have religion enough to tackle the job. The burden of preventable sickness always falls most heavily upon the poor. Low vitality sucks in disease like a sponge. Comparative mortality figures of the wards of our cities reveal the mass selfishness of the well-to-do, the educated and efficient groups. They know how to protect themselves and their families by personal and family hygiene. But the poor are the ignorant, and they are left comparatively helpless in their weakness. Their chief protection must be through measures of public health, the enforcement of sanitation and the improvement of housing. By the same token the mass selfishness of the nations possessing medical knowledge stands revealed. The answer for the backward peoples is the same as that for the backward wards of a city.

But the community is wasting its money in medical care if it does not also provide for disease prevention. In one city, where the spirit of Christian compassion has erected a great

tuberculosis sanitarium, there is a long waiting list.

No patient can be kept longer than ninety days. Only the simplest cases can be taken, and they must be discharged when only partially cured. Yet the prevailing cause of tuberculosis in that city is dry grinding in the metal trades, for it is a metal manufacturing center. Without adequate measures of prevention to remove that cause, the community is needlessly wasting its money, its scientific skill and Christian compassion. In many lands medical missionaries have pioneered in stamping out plagues and epidemics. Smallpox went unchecked until they introduced vaccination into Siam. Christian doctors were leaders in the fight against the terrible pneumonic plague in north China.

The public health movement must be recognized as a missionary enterprise. Is it not the lineal successor of the sanitary and hygienic legislation of the Old Testament and of Jesus' work in banishing the shadow of death from the homes of the people? It develops sacrificial service. It has its roll call of heroes and martyrs—the investigators who have contracted the diseases whose origins they were seeking; the field men of our public health service who have caught the contagion they were fighting; the "doctors courageous" who gave their lives for typhus-stricken Serbia; the heroic medical missionaries who have fallen on the frontiers of the kingdom. Here is a religious community enterprise if ever there was one. Who will show the communities in which we are to live the religious value of pure water, of proper sewage disposal, of adequate quarantine and medical inspection in the schools? Ought the community's treatment, both of the sick and of disease, ultimately to be on the same basis as medical missions? How can this be made possible?

III

There is no community without its moral offenders, those whom we so glibly call "criminals." Sinning and sinned against, they are outlaws of our community life. Their hand is raised against every man and sometimes every man's hand