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percentage is not quite so bad. These facts and figures must speak to you them selves of the value and vital importance of the Sunday School. It seems strange that those who are continually talking prison reform do not begin with the Sunday School, and teach boys and girls the Way of Life, instead of spending so much money taking care of them after they have slipped aside from the Way, and sold their souls for less than a farthing. We laugh at the old colored parson who said,,“The ammonia of that rose certainly has a lugubrious effect on my old factory nerves, but it is too serious a matter to laugh about when we hear people use the word “evangelism,” and not be any nearer correct than the old parson was when he intended*to speak of the aroma of the rose. The word “evangelism” has been used so commonly by Christian workers of this generation, that it has come to mean almost everything or nothing. It has become the verbal football of the nation for the last decade. We have talked evangelism in the church, evangelism in the Christian Endeavor Society, evangelism in the Epworth League, evangelism in the Baptist Young People’s Union, evangelism in the Sunday School, evangelism in the foreign field. When the Church or Sunday School has wanted to start something new, they have labeled it “evangelism,” and gone ahead, and there has been no more evangel ism about a good many of the things so called than there is science in “Christian Science,” which takes your money for cur ing you of a disease; you haven’t got. Isn’t it scientific? You recover from a disease which you didn’t have, and they have your money, which you did have, and the chances are ninety-nine out of 100, that if you had regulated your diet or paid attention to the ordinary conditions of health, and had given nature a chance, you would have recovered your health, kept your money, and honored Jesus Christ, instead of drag ging His name in the dust and exalting Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy.
TALKING TO YOU But, you say,, he isn’t talking to me. The Sunday School to which I belong is of an evangelical denomination. Bless your soul, I presume; every one here is associated with an evangelical church, but “evangeli cal” is far from evangelistic. It may be true—it probably is true—that your church is thoroughly evangelical. Many of the ■evangelical churches are failing today m the very purpose for which God created them. To be sure they may have the truth, but their mission is not alone to have and to know the truth, so much as to preach it. It isn’t enough to be evangelical; we must be evangelistic. Evangelical is passive; evangelism is active. Praise God for our evangelical churches; yes, but take off your hat and shout for joy with all gladness, and make heaven and earth ring for our evangelistic churches. Evangelism in the Sunday School means not only that the preacher, superintendent, officers and teachers know Jesus Christ, but that they present Him to the boys and girls who come there on Sunday. Show me an evangelistic church, and I will know you have an evangelistic preacher. Let me hear your minister, and I will tell you what kind of church you have. If I can follow a shepherd for a day, and see what kind of pasture he selects for his sheep, I will tell you in what kind of condition his flock will be found. The preacher who believes in the Sunday School will have a Bible school; and the preacher who believes in and wants an evangelistic Sunday School will so lead and feed his people that he will soon have one. The average life of man is thirty-five years. Substract five years from that as the aver age age at which children first go to Sunday School, and it leaves us thirty years as the average church life of the church going man. Suppose our Sunday Schools should all be cut off tomorrow? Ten years from now, one-third of the congrega tion would be dead. Another third would have dropped out or moved away, and there would be but a handful of people left, if
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