THE WAY OF SALVATION.
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more he builds the more he will have to build. The philanthropic may make giving a science and cover the whole country with a net work of associated charities; the kind-hearted may build news boys' lodgings and industrial homes, and it will all be only so many plasters on ulcerous sores that came from a disease within. We may just as well face the inevitable truth that the vice and poverty and ignorance and wretchedness of this country are gaining on its honesty and intelligence and general prosperity, and getting the better of them. Look at the cities and see those waves of poverty and misery and vice lapping out from their centres, swallowing up street after street, driving decency and prosperity farther and farther out. And before this incoming tide stand the tenderhearted hoping to keep it back with model tenement houses and systems of charity and State gifts! The model tenement is King Canute with his sceptre and his courtiers, sure to be swallowed up himself if he stands his ground; and systematized charity and industrial education nothing but Mrs. Partington with her mop, trying to sweep back the Atlantic. If our system of alleged civilization could have fair trial under the sun it has had it in America. But what is its result? Forces gathering for conflict. Those who have tasted only the first sweets of liberty and education and prosperity, and who want their children to have better than they have had, but who feel the lines drawing closer and closer around them, will not quietly see these great goods slipping away from them. The battle of the bread-winners is already begun. Labor is arrayed against capital, State charities against individual effort, monopolies against the people, hoards of wealth against vacuous property, lessening liberties against the demands of perfect freedom. Such complex lines of contest must finally resolve themselves into two great armies, one fighting for the old and the other demanding an entirely new order of things.
And the only course that can save us from that contest is to take the path of
tolerance. A hundred new isms offer themselves for the bettering of things. Let us be tolerant in hearing what they have to say. The wildest one of them all may have in it the germ of truth for which the world is sick. Poor, stubborn, misguided, perverse old world, it has always railed at every healing minister. Men invariably flout and jeer at and stand out against every new idea. They stick to the old, wornout and disproved principles and institutions, and refuse every new and untried helping hand until forced to take it. We have only to look back into any age of the world's history to see it fighting against ideas, theories, principles that it soon after accepted and found beneficial. But, notwithstanding all this, refusing to profit by past experience, in this year of grace, 1884, we, all of us, are acting over again the same old tragical farce. We are clinging to our old ideas and principles, declaring that they are the best the world knows anything about, and valiantly trying to whistle down the wind every new theory that bears in it any promise of relief. We will stand out against them all, ridicule them and persecute with our tongues those who believe in them. But by and by the very power of truth contained in some one of them will compel its acceptance, and the world will discover that that is exactly what it has needed for so long. Now, why not receive these isms more tolerantly, discuss them more largely, and see what benefit they possibly carry for this misguided world? If we hold out against them, as sure as the world moves there is going to be sharp collision between these new theories and the results of our present system, a collision that may end in battle and blood-shed. But we may forestall it by tolerant hearing of what they have to say, or even trial of what they wish. It is a choice between certain misfortune and possible good.
And so the plea I would make to-day is for more and larger tolerance,more and larger liberty of belief, of discussion, of trial, of action. The world stands to-day in more need of tolerance than of any other