the whole neighborhood the fact that the church is interested in the people’s physical well-being. There is a committee on public schools which will undoubtedly urge the extension to the locality of the kindergarten system of the city. Similarly, according to the needs of the various localities of New York, and of other cities in which such a coöperative parish system is instituted, the churches should have their committees on various social interests, and a regular meeting of the church representatives should discuss methods of work as adapted, not to the Christian world in general, but to that particular locality.
Thus, in addition to the desultory, however beneficial, work now carried on by the Protestant churches in cities, the Federation of Churches and Christian Workers in New York City proposes to add a definite, special, evangelical and sociological work.
It is useless for Protestantism to attempt to institute a parish system along the lines of Roman Catholicism. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the Roman Catholic parish system threatens with excommunication anyone living within definite parish limits who attends a church without them. Quantities of Roman Catholics hire pews across the parish boundary lines. The parish plan for which the writer pleads does not contemplate the limitation of the attendance of the people of any Protestant denomination to a Protestant church of that especial neighborhood. Individuation is one of the best outcomes of Protestantism, and it cannot be conserved by forcing a man with a Doric soul to worship in a Gothic church, or a man with a mystical temperament to attend the ministrations of a preacher preaching always from the book of Numbers. If, however, the duty of the church to minister to those who support her is conceded and conserved, cannot, at the same time, a ministry to the city and to humanity—a common duty of Doric and Gothic churches—be conjointly carried on? If the consequence of ministry to individuals, without ministry to neighborhood, is such a statistical showing as the recent canvass of the federation shows in New York, can a better plan than a coöperative parish system be
