The Olneyville Times

The Duty of the Church to the Poor.

I do not hesitate to say that the development of the power of self help, self respect and self dependence can be and should be the work of the Christian church in all her branches. If Christianity cannot, to this extent, leaven the masses of the wage workers, it has failed, and, at least temporarily, must continue to fail. The wild ruin resulting from that failure may recall the church of Christ to a field that her faithless disobedience has led her for a time to abandon.

She believes in the value of man, for in him, be he never so fallen, she sees a spark of everlastingness. She professes to accept her Master's commands as divine laws binding on herself. His words and acts are perfectly plain: he never contemplated the abolition of all poverty, but he did distinctly command that men should, as they valued his gospel or professed obedience to himself, draw near to each other, forgetting and ignoring those things that for a short time made them to differ.

He declared that the innermost and eternal verities of our nature all men have in common, and that his followers were to make much of these, while they were to make less of their differences of possession and attainment. Weakness, failure, poverty were to draw us to our brother, not drive us from him, for in the prevalence of these drawing, uniting, loving forces over the sundering and disuniting forces lay the hope of our race-he called it the coming of the kingdom of the Son of Man.-Rev. Dr. W. S. Rainsford in Forum.