and power as a public teacher, but also of the admiration, love, and confidence which his personality and unselfish aims inspire among those who can appreciate supreme devotion to the highest human service. It remains for me to give some estimate of Doctor Herron's character and work as formed from my four years of intimate acquaintance with him.

First of all, then, Doctor Herron is a preacher of righteousness-a rôle for which he has at least some preëminent qualifications. "Preaching," says George Macdonald, "is that rare speech of a man to his fellow-men whereby in their inmost hearts they know that he in his inmost heart believes." Measured by this standard Doctor Herron is a prince among preachers. No one who listens attentively and intelligently to his discourse can for a moment doubt that he in his inmost heart believes sincerely and profoundly in the divinity of the principles which he teaches and in their supreme importance to men in their individual and social relations. "Soul is kindled only by soul," says Carlyle; and "to 'teach' religion, the first thing needful, and also the last and only thing, is the finding of a man who has religion.” Those who imagine that Doctor Herron is a mere political or social reformer wholly mistake him. Primarily he is neither. He belongs to the intensely religious type of men. His socialism and radicalism-using these words in their best sense are the outgrowth of an intense religious feeling, a profound religious conviction, seeking to express itself in the actual terms of life. Next to the preeminent characters of the Old and New Testaments, the men who have most influenced his thought, as he himself would doubtless say, were John Calvin, who particularly influenced his earlier years, Cardinal Newman, the middle-age mystics, Frederick Maurice of England, Mazzini, and Elisha Mulford. Dr. Herron's work has been and is distinctly to take the religious consciousness, as it existed, for example, in the minds of such men as Edwards and Finney, and translate it into the social movement of our time.

Doctor Herron's experience in the earlier years of his ministry, as given by himself, exhibits the reality of a new birth-as it were, the recreating of a soul and sending it forward upon a new career and with unchanging purpose. Let no one think lightly of such a change as this until he has himself laid his whole being irrevocably upon the altar of a worthy consecration. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." The greatest thing a man can do, says an eminent writer, is to see something

and tell what he sees. The true religious teachers of mankind must be men of vision-seers. Upon this prime and essential quality of Doctor Herron's mind it is unnecessary to dwell as it is universally recognized by those who know him. His intellectual equipment is very strong. His reasoning powers are good and he delights in logical composition, with which he might be supposed to have but little sympathy. Hard reading has no terrors for him. He is the master of an almost faultless literary style. He has fine poetical gifts and tastes, and is a keen and admirable judge of human character. With quick intuition and great sensibility, with a nature loving and greatly desiring to be loved, he combines, as Doctor McLean has suggestively pointed out, the most heroic and manly qualities. He was born in the second year of the war, his father was a Union soldier, and in his earliest years of memory he must have been familar with the stories of the camp, the march, and the field of battle, while, as he has told us, Savonarola and Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner, were as household words, and their moral heroism became the model after which his own life was fashioned.

Six small volumes of Doctor Herron's discourses and lectures have been published. It would be interesting and profitable, if space permitted, to point out and by suitable extracts to illustrate the more significant points of his teaching found in these books. But it must suffice here to suggest that probably the two sermons that are in a subjective sense the most autobiographical, revealing his outlook from within, more than any others, are the chapters entitled "The Coming Crucifixion," in "The New Redemption," and "The Divine Method of Culture," in "The Call of the Cross"; while the whole philosophy on which he builds is best expressed, perhaps, in the first chapter of "The Christian Society." His indictment of the existing social order is well and somewhat elaborately given in "The Christian State" on pages 88 to 97; and his complaint against the church may be found in the chapter on that subject in the volume last named.

It is pleasant to know that Doctor Herron's books are having an increasing circulation at home and a very considerable influence abroad, particularly in England, India, and Japan. The author is in receipt of many letters from England. Some of the young men who are leaders in the native Japanese religious movement, which promises so much, are greatly taken with the view which Doctor Herron presents of Christ, and one of them has already determined

to take a year's study with him, although he has had, as I understand, two or three years' study in an American institution of learning and considerable experience as a pastor. Mr. Mozoomdar, of India, after reading one of Doctor Herron's books, writes in grateful recognition of its value, saying: "Noble ideas are spread throughout your book, and you press into the very core of the matter when you say that Christ is God's idea of man. Every one who can set us free from such a snare as the metaphysical Christ is a deliverer of the race, and your book brings a message of deliverance." Doctor Herron has recently prepared a new course of lectures which he will deliver in various cities during this winter and spring, and they will be afterwards issued as a book entitled "The Social Revelation of Religion." This book will probably express his matured thought more fully than anything he has yet given to the public.

The attentive student of Doctor Herron's books can hardly fail to notice what may be called the attitude of ardent expectation that pervades them and especially culminates, evidently unconsciously and without deliberate plan, at the close of nearly every one of his lectures. In the last two or three pages of each chapter it appears as a refrain in the eager anticipation of some great event, which will exert its transforming influence upon the world. The language and form of expression are varied, but the bright light of a great hope illumines them all, and they are frequently carried to a plane of noble and inspiring eloquence. Says Doctor Herron in one of these passages:

We are in the beginnings of a new redemption of the earth through the application of Christianity to life. Society is being sprinkled with the blood of Jesus. The redemptive is displacing the police conception of justice. Industry is on its way to Damascus. The Spirit of Christ is coming to anoint the factory, the mine, the railroad, to preach good tidings to the poor, and set at liberty them that are bruised. Every school of thought is feeling the pressure of a new and universal dispensation of moral energy. From Westminster Abbey to the forests of Africa, from the Roman Vatican to the mining camps of western America, men are feeling the pain and expectation of a new social order. "We have arrived," as Mazzini once said, "at one of those supreme moments in which one world is destroyed, and another is created." Though what it shall be does not yet appear, we who know in whom we have believed are sure that the juster order, the changed world, will be like Him; that it will not be a world of fragments, of individuals, of divisions, but of members of the body of Christ.

GOVERNMENT BY BREWERY.

BY PRES. GEORGE A. GATES OF IOWA COLLEGE.

Dear Sir: Please note and return the inclosed papers. The action of our employee at is, as you see, seriously affecting our business. The Brewing Companies are particularly touchy in regard to this matter.

We do not care to interfere with the private opinions of our employees, but in a case of this kind, where the Company's interests are affected, the employee should be given to understand that he is expected not to be specially active and obnoxious.

I do not know in what capacity Mr. is employed, but desire that you see him and explain our wishes to him, and request him to cease his activity in this matter.

Yours truly,

General Superintendent.

In a certain Wisconsin town of about two thousand people Mr. is an employee of the Railway. He is also a member of the city council, and voted for an anti-screen petition which was signed corporately by four churches and two temperance organizations, and later by a large number of individuals. He did not circulate the petition. Being on the ordinance committee he voted in favor of recommending to the council the passage of such an ordinance. He also voted with others in the council making a majority in favor of such an ordinance, and the screens of the saloons came down and have been down since that time. The Milwaukee brewing interests at once sent their representative to the town, who secured from the saloon people and their supporters many signatures to a petition addressed to the railroad company requesting the removal of Mr.

The only astonishing thing about this document is that it should have got away. How the leakage occurred is unknown to me. But it seems to me worthy of serious thought. Let us see. In other words, every one of the nearly a million of railway employees in America is enjoined from taking part in the community in which he is a citizen, in movements which not only tend toward sup

pressing but even tend toward regulating the saloon business. How generous, that an employee may hold any opinion he choses, but instant decapitation awaits any expression by word or act of such an opinion! Why, I would almost be willing to have the devil a member of my household under those conditions.

This is the method of government in Russia and Turkey, but in those countries the conditions are better than these; for there it is an open ukase or firman, read and known of all men. The people can rise up and cut off Charles the First's head, for the head is visible and, when enough of the people desire it, accessible. But "our business" is private; only by some accident can a document like the above be published.

Let there be no misunderstanding. I am heaping no objurgations on the railroad companies nor on the brewers. Were this article dealing in personalities instead of discussing principles, names and places would appear in the blank spaces of the above letter. The purpose in calling attention to this matter goes very much beyond any personal criticism. This is simply one striking illustration of the general condition of American democratic life in the stage of development at which we now are. To understand the importance of the matter it is necessary to reflect how significant a place the railroad interests of the country occupy, especially in the great agricultural domains of the West where this correspondence took place.

The civilization of these vast prairies is a railroad civilization, and during the last twenty-five years it has been largely created by the railroads. They push ahead, open up the country, invite and cultivate settlement. In thousands of small towns the railroad factor is a very prominent one. For instance, it is a fact hardly doubted by anyone fairly informed that in the strongly Republican state of Iowa, Governor Boies, a Democrat, was elected by the railroad vote. Governor Larrabee, his opponent, had written a book sharply criticising railroad managements. That vote numbers anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five thou sand, directly or indirectly controlled by the railroads. That is enough in most years to constitute the balance of power. If the railroad vote did not determine the election above referred to, then one of the most prominent railroad men of the country is mistaken, for he said to me, "We railroads determined that election."

Then, too, the saloon problem is one of the very largest in all parts of the country. It is more or less in the politics