appropriate and unsentimental machinery should supply.
In medical philanthropy the new idea is that ideas have nothing to do with it. The good Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded man a tract or say anything to him about the religious views or motives of his benefactor. He was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. Let the chaplains depart from the hospitals.
And so also in social service. The legitimate work is to improve the culinary methods of the neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for living bodies and to assist in the burial of dead ones; but Christ must not be mentioned, and religious issues must not be raised.
These are extreme illustrations, but they are perfectly familiar, and the tendency they represent is indisputable. In this view our Lord, of course, was far astray when He talked to His disciples by Jacob's well about having meat to eat which they knew not. "Meat!" say our modern ethical materialists. "Meat is meat—beef or bread. It is not a metaphor. Meat that is a metaphor is a mockery." Well, it would be if it were offered for food to a hungry man, but it is not a mockery to the man who would go hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole modern question is not between those who would give real meat to the hungry and those
