to keep them friendly to us, and interested in the Church. What would we do without them?"
"I want to keep them interested in the Church and friendly to us, and I believe I shall. But the Church should not be exclusively for them. They are already receiving all of the benefits which the Church has to offer, while outside there is a great multitude of the Churchless who are spiritually starving and dying for want of just such aid as I am forbidden by these vestrymen to hold out to them. I must choose my own path, and I believe my paramount duty is not to the comfortably situated within the Church but to the physically and spiritually poor without it."
"I know, Robert, but couldn't we visit the poor, and supply their needs, and be kind and charitable to them in every way, and try to get them to the services and into the Church without taking them in as our social equals?"
"No, Alice; that method has been tried for ages, and the working classes are drifting farther and in larger numbers away from us. If we want them in the Church we must welcome them there as our equals. There's no other way to get them or to keep them. And there must be not only social equality in the Church, there must be a fair measure of economic equality outside. Our wealthy churchmen must set the first example of economic justice, and cease piling up great individual fortunes at the expense of the men who labor. I tell you this control of the wealth of the world by a few, and this control of the Church by those wealthy few, is so unjust and so unchristian that"
"Oh, Robert, don't! I can't understand those arguments; I never could. I'll admit that you are right. But what worries me is what our relations are going to be with these people who are so opposed to us, and who have been our good friends."
"We shall still be friendly to them."
"But what if they won't be friendly to us?"
