Have the Poor the Gospel?
WALK along Fifth Avenue in New York City any pleasant Sunday morning. The avenue is thronged with wealthy people going to church in their carriages or on foot. There are churches on almost every corner. Every religious faith is represented, from the Jewish to the Roman Catholic. No element is wanting to attract a congregation: luxurious seats, elegant architecture, a skillful organist, a well-trained professional choir, a polished and perhaps eloquent pulpit orator, and “the best society.” Take a walk the next Sunday in the Ninth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, or Eleventh Ward, the first tier of wards south of Fourteenth Street and extending from the East to the North River. The streets are also full of men and women and children, if the day is fair and not too cold. But they are not going to church, and there are no churches to go to. Look at this table, and consider its moral significance. The churches enumerated are Protestant churches; every chapel and mission is included:— Ninth Ward—population, 54,596; churches, 24. Fifteenth Ward—population, 31,882; churches, 15. Seventeenth Ward—population, 104,837; churches, 16. Eleventh Ward—population, 68,778; churches, 12. In Boston, churches are multiplied in the Back Bay, but the North End is churchless. Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago—all repeat in slightly different forms the same story. Five hundred persons to every Protestant church in New Hampshire! Five thousand persons to every Protestant church in downtown New York! Every Sunday the ministers in these up-town churches have been ringing the changes on one text: “Follow me.” Why not devote one Sunday to following Him? If they are faithful to their commission, their unvaried teaching, in all variations of form, has been “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” What did Christ command his disciples if not to go out from their physical and social and spiritual luxury, to seek and to save that which is lost? To dress in our Sunday best, go to our luxuriously equipped churches, greet our set, be lulled to spiritual somnolence by sweet music, or stirred to spiritual sentiments by eloquent discourse—is this to follow Him whose heart was stirred within him with compassion when he saw the multitude as sheep without a shepherd, and who left the synagogues to find them in the streets and the fields? What would Christ do if he were to come again on earth and visit Boston or New York or Chicago? We will not undertake to answer that question. But what he did do when he was here before was to say to his disciples, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men; and they followed him out of the synagogue into the places where men were.—Christian Union.