The Church and Working Men
OF late the church and the working men have been coming together, not by the working men joining the church, but by what is known as a rapprochement between the two. The Literary Digest observes that attention was recently called to this fact by the setting apart of Sunday, September 3, for sermons on the labor question from Presbyterian pulpits throughout the country. The Presbyterian Board of Home Missions has recently created a new department of its work called the Department of Church and Labor, for the purpose of making a systematic study of the labor problem in this country, and to supply the church with information regarding the aims of organized labor, and inform working men concerning the mission of the church. Of the work of this new department which serves as a connecting link between the working men and the Presbyterian Church, it is stated:— Most helpful and encouraging of all the plans devised by Mr. Stelzle [head of the department], and one which has been working long enough to prove its worth, is that which already has brought so many clergymen into trades-union meetings as delegates from ministers’ associations or presbyteries, and has brought representatives of trades-unions into the ministers’ associations in a like capacity. These delegates have all of its privileges save that of voting. They co-operate in bringing about municipal reform and eradication of social evils, and they establish cordial relations between the institutions they represent. This plan is in operation now in about fifty cities. Within a year past, we are further informed, special interest in the problems of labor has been manifested by the Protestant Episcopal and the Congregational Churches in this country, and in England by the Methodist Church. This is a movement within which great possibilities may lie concealed. It will bear watching. The enforcement of the edict that no man may buy or sell save such as have upon them the mark of the “beast” power described in the book of Revelation, is to come through some form of rapprochement between the church and the forces of labor.