Skulking and shirking are not even good for business.

We have disappointed all the world by staying out of the League of Nations. The sentiment is only too general that without the United States the League is too much like a bobtailed flush. So long as the entrance into the League looked like duty to the American people, the great majority of them wanted and expected to go in. Practically everyone was for the idea of the League. Out of a long, tiresome, political squabble came a state of mind in these States when the purpose of the League was lost to the recollection of many people, and the defects of the Treaty loomed up big, and weariness of the whole subject brought the country to a dull acquiescence in any result. But the result that actually came was no result at all; it was merely a postponement. It was not accomplishment, it was not a step forward; it was failure. We had seen our duty and we had not been allowed to do it. Out of the requirements of the Constitution and the misgivings or perversity of some minds in Washington, we had been trapped into dereliction. In the conference hopeful people see another chance for us a chance to get back where we belong, to do, not so much what other countries expect of us as what we have expected of ourselves. The conference is our hope. It is for us to get behind it; to insist that it shall not fail; so to place ourselves that if it falls, it shall fall on us.

We can do a great deal from the outside. The atmosphere the conference works in is very important. If we can create an atmosphere that will sustain its hope and encourage its best thoughts and best efforts, that will be a great service. It has a better chance than the Congress at Versailles because the war is far away and he consequences of it are better understood, and the immediate future can be much better cal culated. The conference ought to know what is the real condition of every country-whether it is going backward or

forward, how many of its people will starve to death this winter, what trade it has, what unemployment it has, what it can produce, and what it can do with it. There are facts of that nature available at Washington that were not available at Versailles. Moreover, there are sober second thoughts at the end of 1921 that were not available in the early months of 1919. At Paris, in spite of everything, much was accomplished, and an arrangement was contrived under which Europe was to go on and has gone on. If we had gone on with it, it would doubtless have worked better, but if any good has come out of our detachment from it, it is that by holding off we have delayed the medication of the world until its case was better understood and the doctors more competent to handle it.

But are the doctors now more competent than they ere Versailles? Has any great new mind come forward that seems to understand the case any better? Perhaps General Smuts might be so regarded. His influence has grown, but it was very considerable two years ago; but apart from him there is no new doctor, and Mr. Wilson, whose gifts were very highly regarded by very many people, has been laid off. We had better not look for any glorious results of that conference from the development of individual talent, for the talent is not in sight. We may more reasonably hope that the conference may prove to be the instrument through which the aspirations of the forward-looking people of the world may take form and go on.

All the forward-looking people should work together then to help that conference, and especially the religious people.

Everybody should get over the idea that religion is something apart from knowledge and not practical. Religion is not a thing apart. All knowledge belongs to it, and it belongs to knowledge, and is a supremely important branch of it. Scientists have fallen too much into the way of thinking of it as an eccentricity of the human mind

that is outside the precincts of science. Nonsense! Science is not so sacrosanct as all that. It is nothing but knowledge in the making the sum of what scholars and students think is true at a given time.

Its facts are unstable

and its conclusions constantly change as knowledge increases, but it has a good name and is respected because, though often stupid, it is usually honest, and seeks truth. The facts of religion of the Christian religion-belong to science as much as the facts of chemistry or physics. Those facts are not so much what the Bible records, as the observed effects of religion on human life. About the Bible stories there may be and always will be dispute, but about the effects of religion on contemporary life on character, on conduct, for health, for illumination -- something like certain conclusions should be reached.

Belief is a far Wyou believe may not all be true, but that you believe it is a fact. The effects of belief and of conduct affected by it are facts. If religion enlightens the mind; induces love, sanity, patience, forbearance; cures disease both mental and physical-all those things are facts which science, or the newspapers, or any observing person, may record and study. If religion is good for mankind and the world, especially in the present crisis, there must be and are accessible facts to prove it, and whenever they are observed with due intelligence it should be determinable what in current religion does good and what does evil. People work too much with theory in religion, and not enough with fact. They talk too much about what it claims to do and ought to do, and not enough about what it does. Science has quit that method. It tests every theory by fact and trusts no theory except as its facts support it. No doubt the weakness of religion in our day is that its facts have not sufficiently supported its theories and claims. Its great facts-its great results, are in the lives of men, and they may not have been good enough in our time to give

people the confidence in Christianity as a world saver that it deserves.

So much the more valuable, now, are all facts which make for confidence in religion, and in its power to rescue the world from its present plight. The very pith and essence of religion is the belief in an invisible world to which our visible and material world is related by the closest ties, and out of which it is possible to get help in the solution of our earthly problems. That is the sort of help we need for the Washington conference, and the call for universal prayer at the opening of it was an instinctive recognition that that help is needed. We want spiritual assistance. So much anybody of intelligence will admit. Anybody who thinks will concede that materialism has made a mess of the job of managing this world and that we need an infusion of what might be called spiritualism into the management, if we are to salvage what is left. But where do they expect to get their spiritualism— their spirituality? Is it a product of the material and visible world that they are so concerned about? No; it isn't! It is a product of the spiritual and invisible world, about which so many good and valuable people have only vague and timorous ideas, and no belief positive enough to accomplish what they would. They want spirituality-something to temper the selfishness of men, but the price of it is belief—an urgent, practical belief in a spiritual and invisible source of the spirituality that they want, and they cannot pay that price. They have not got it.

But there are those who have it, and they are, as usual, the hope of the world, and should be the best helpers of the conference. It is they, perhaps, who can furnish its inspiration. Our life here is largely an exercise in dealing with material things, and to do that successfully, even with all the spiritual assistance we can get, takes all our brains and much knowledge. The conference has predominantly to deal with material things, and

we all have confidence that its membership includes possessors of all the knowledge and experience necessary to that duty. The office of people, in the churches or out, whose belief is vivid and practiced enough to get help out of the invisible world, is to bring the conference that help. It will surely need it; it is likely to win or lose according as it gets it or not; and, since the world has need that the conference should win something effectual, let all helpers help with all they know and all they

can.

Miss Jane Addams went to the League sittings at Geneva and reported when she came away that the League needed humanizing. So will the conference need humanizing, and it is the office of all of us of the mass of interested people-to humanize it every day all we can. If it is to be a success, it must be a popular success. It cannot be a success of specialists. Whatever it achieves that is good must in the main be an achievement of human hearts. We may best keep Christmas this year by "rooting" for that conference, sustaining it, feeling its importance, helping it by mind, by will, by soul, by speech, and written word in so far as we can. There is a great chance for it, and, gracious! what a need! What difficulties confront itJapan sensitive, aspiring, only a couple of generations from feudalism, instructed mainly in those methods of the Western civilization that were finally scrapped, we all hope, by the war. How will the conference think with Japan, feel with Japan, give Japan a fair deal, and yet do its duty not only by Europe and America, but by Asia? Japan is difficult, but, after all, Japan is human and the conference must be humanized enough to find her humanity. Everything that conference must do is difficult. France is difficult, and Germany, and all middle Europe, and the limitation of armament, and perhaps there will even be something to say about Ireland. Its dance is an egg dance. The more reason why we

should all help it by all the means we can, mental and spiritual, hand and voice and printed word.

Our best hopes for the conference and for any radical improvement in the methods of conducting human life on this planet are, frankly, religious hopes, based on the birth we celebrate at Christmas, and the ministry and the teachings that followed. If there is not enough in Christianity to save our present edifice of civilization-enough wisdom, enough illumination, enough power -then the outlook is far from bright, for other means have been tried repeatedly in past ages, and there are only ruins to show for the civilizations they could not save.

No, not ruins only; but besides them an imperfect record of experiences. We know, in a way, the course those earlier civilizations ran and through what processes they crumbled. In that knowledge we ought to be wiser than our fathers, and there is hope that we are. Besides all the pages of history, we have vividly before our eyes the spectacle of a war surpassing in destructiveness any that we have record of, and proceeding out of very much such circumstances and rivalries as those that destroyed in turn the civilizations that preceded ours. We know more clearly and more generally than was ever known before what lies ahead for us and all we have, if we cannot mend the ways of human life. We see limitless knowledge within our grasp if civilization can hold together long enough for us to attain it. We see destruction awaiting the present works of man if that growing knowledge takes destructive forms. We know what our case is and some of us know there is a cure for it. In the Washington conference there is a means to make that cure practically operative. It belongs to us to feel then that all that we can do to make that conference successful is done to save our civilization from what befell Egypt, Assyria, the Roman Empire, and all the rest.