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might not adopt them myself—they need not go to worship there or subscribe to the Institution. They are not asked to do either. All they are asked to do is not to hinder others and discourage a good work. Dr. Blunt has remarked that "we are not in Ireland." I, for the moment, almost thought we were, because it seemed to me that the letter read by Mr. Blunt savoured very much of what is called "boycotting." The proposal to boycott this Institution is one I am not in the least inclined to support. I have very little more to say than to express my hearty thankfulness for the work I have been permitted to see. I have gone over this Institution, and have seen excellent and devout women engaged in this work; and in the short time I have seen them I have seen them with a feeling of admiration and thankfulness, and I am happy to tender to them my public support. I feel most deeply that the work they are engaged in—and you who are outside are helping them to engage in—is a pre-eminently Christian work. It is a work carried on in the spirit of Christ our Lord and Master. I think the work of this Refuge is pre-eminently the work of His disciples and of His Church. I was very much struck by the fact mentioned by Dr. Blunt—a very sad and terrible fact—that some of those who sin and fall are harshly treated in their own homes, and driven away by the contempt and reproach of their neighbours, and are obliged to take refuge in distant places, where they plunge deeper into vice. It is a sad fact, and yet it is an inevitable fact, that stern, repulsive aspect which society presents to this vice comes from the instinct of self-preservation—comes from a latent consciousness that merely human society has no power, that it cannot have the courage, to deal with full forgiveness and full reconciliation with vice. Society—merely human society—is not enough to do that. It must protect itself, and in the instinct of self-protection merely human society repels the lost and the outcast. And it is compelled to do so. The very tenderest and most loving parent dare not give the same place in the home, and by the hearth, to the lost and the outcast, that he does to the pure and sinless. It is a terrible, but necessary, aspect of human society, when it presents its abhorence and repulsion to vice. But there is a society which is not merely human—there is a society that is divine. There is a society that is filled with divine might, and self-sacrifice, and the power of regeneration. That society is the society that Christ came to found upon earth; and what the State cannot do by its laws—what society dare not do by its
