From the point of view of social economy, reduced to terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.
What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity?
Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds?
not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets?
The great mass of the people, packed in dreary tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness.

What would happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?
Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling, and misery.

At least we may infer as much from the success of the occasional experiments which have been tried.

We have a few examples to prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often been described.

It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented, the right is almost always preferred.
A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utter brutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated.
Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusade against organized vice.