be obedient to art laws that existed before ever the mountains were sculptured in forms of grandeur or the hills tapestried with velvet and embroidered with flowers-or he is no musician, no artist.

Have you ever played the game in which you spell out the word with a dozen letters each on a little card; then mix up and hand them to your friend, and he takes those letters, and out of them tries to spell the word that was in your mind before? So God plays with us. Each artist picks out a certain letter. Raphael puts his letter down, Thorwaldsen his, Church or Inness his; and so one artist after another, and one school after another, put their letters down; and when it is all down, and not before, we shall know what perfect beauty is. For beauty is the divine ideal, and all schools of artists are but spelling it out and every great artist is a revelation of God to this dull earth of ours.

So with music. Men debate with one another whether this, or that, or another music shall be the music of the future. Puerile debates ! God summons the artists, and they take their places-Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt—all one great orchestra; there is even a place for Berlioz, with his clanging cymbals and his kettledrum. And out of all their utterances the music that is in the heart of God speaks. Each musician interprets one throb of God's heart, and then he goes on his way; and we have learned one thought of God, and that is all.

The great statesman is one who sees divine law, because divine law is written in him. God has spoken something he could hear, and he has heard it, and then he contrives how to speak it unto men in laws; not in music, not with the brush and pencil, not with the spoken word, but in wroughtout institutions. We find out what laws are and proclaim them. Liberty, the permission of every man to do as he pleases! So the anarchist says; but the anarchist is mistaken. Liberty is taking away every obstacle that prevents men from doing the will of God. So far humanity has been struggling on to righteousness in spite of obstacles that men with their despotisms have put in the way. Whether the law be made by a single-headed despot called a Czar, or by a hydra-headed despot called Democracy, makes no difference if the law hampers and hinders free men, it is against the divine, because the divine is in man, and God is calling man, and

every man must be free to fly to God, and all men in one great flock, as the ducks fly south when the summer calls them from the winter-wrapped earth. That is liberty.

So the great prophet is one in whom God speaks, whether that prophet speaks in the Hebrew tongue or the English tongue, in the first century or the nineteenth century. If he be a prophet, he is a prophet of God, and God is speaking in him and through him. I do not mean that every teacher that lives is what we call a religious teacher, but I do mean that when we say "the divine Dante " or" the divine Shakespeare" we express a truth deeper than we are wont to think. The voice of Dante and the voice of Shakespeare are in very truth the divine voice speaking through human life. What is Wordsworth's message? God. God in the long panorama of nature. What is Browning's message? Browning, who lives not in the fields, nor by the brooks, but in the haunts of men and in the hearts of menwhat is his message? It is still the same message-God. God in Andrea del Sarto, the artist; God in Abt Vogler, the organist; God in St. John dying in the desert; God in Christmas epiphanics, whether in the crudities of the conventicle or in the ceremonials of St. Peter's; God in human hearts.

No prophet has the whole story to tell, any more than any artist or musician has the whole story to tell. Each man gives his message and goes his way. It is true now, and through all the ages will be true, that we prophesy in part, for we know in part. Augustine comes, and he has but one word to say-Law; but it is the law of God; Calvin has but one word-Sovereignty, but it is the sovereignty of God; Luther has but one word-Hope, but it is hope in God; Wesley has but one word-Liberty, but it is liberty in God; Henry Ward Beecher but one word -Love, but it is the love of God; Phillips Brooks but one word-Life, but it is the life of God. And whether it be Moses or Elijah or David or Isaiah or Paul or Calvin or Augustine or Luther or Wesley or Henry Ward Beecher, it is God that gives the message.

Among all the gifts God ever gives his children there is none like that of a great and good man; for in the great and good man a glimpse of God himself is given, and we learn what love is in its largeness and in its infinitude from the glimpse of love which these reflections, these satellites, of divinity give to us.

ber of deaths, no fewer than 3,691 were entered on the books of the Board of Health of New York as "due to accident and negligence." The criminal quality of the negligence here is shown in the toll that death took in children. Of the 461 persons burned to death in "small accidents " 130 were male and 107 female children under five, while 54 boys and 25 girls of that tender age were killed by vehicles in the streets.

But why do parents permit little children to play in crowded streets? The answer is, there are 50,000 black rooms-rooms that have neither direct light nor air-in New York in which families of three to eight persons live. Really, the streets are less dangerous! This is not parental negligence, but negligence on the part of the communityeriminal negligence !

The negligence which encourages the mature criminal and makes the new one is that which puts temptation in the way and gives opportunity—a combination peculiarly fertile of crime. Such negligence is just what the professional crook banks on, for he knows it better than any one else; and it is also the bait held out to the vast number of susceptible persons who have never yet done a technical wrong.

Let us briefly survey the field in which the seeds of our negligence fall. To begin with, take the professional crook, the finished product of the underworld. This gentleman is very lazy. He doesn't steal because he wants to steal, but because he doesn't want to work. He is not spurred on by a spirit of adventure, because there is nothing adventurous about him. He is the least imaginative, the cheapest, the most sordid creature to be found. Fiction-writers have tried to make the underworld picturesque. It is not So. Its people are uneducated-filthy in mind and person. Their talk is either shop or carousing, and is of the most brutal and vulgar kind. The thief would resent being called romantic. He would consider it a form of weakness, as he does chivalry. He prides himself on the very meanness of his acts. His ethics compared with those of the honest man are a minus quantity. He glories in living on women, and he cunningly boasts how he has sacrificed the one who has fed and protected him when the safety of his own skin demanded it. His rendezvous is the dive, where every one either flatters him or plays upon his fear.

The crook has three things to think of:

to keep out of jail, to get the goods, and to dispose of them. To these he devotes all his waking thoughts when he is sober, and the public by its negligence does its best to promote his efforts. In the getting of the goods and disposing of them he becomes a specialist. He can shift from one branch to another as exigency demands. But each has to be learned; there's a difference between stealing and getting rid of diamonds and doing the same with silks. The crook is as dishonest with himself as he is with others. If he could reason sanely, he wouldn't be a crook. He refuses to realize the enormous odds that are piling up against him as his career progresses. He holds the belief that he can keep on getting something for nothing, and continue to get away with it, which is proof of a crank in the brain. People often say, "If he'd only devote to legitimate work the time and energy that he devotes to crime, what a success he'd make of it !" I doubt it. The men who are qualified for great work generally do it. People also talk about honor among thieves. among thieves for honor?

But why go I've never found

any there. The idea is a paradox.

Therefore, why tempt a man of this kind? The sight of a fat pocketbook is apt to awaken envy in the most honest of us. But the majority of us have too good a mental, if not a moral, balance to entertain anything but a "proper and legal" means of separating the owner from his wad. The gentleman of the underworld is impatient of the surer and safer method of the business man. He must have results-drastically got if need be— but results. He is obsessed by opportunity. If the man with the fat wallet gets away, he may never see him again. The obsession is fatal. The man with the fat wallet sticks it in his hip pocket and proceeds to board a Thirty-fourth Street car at the corner of one of the busy avenues. Ever since he was a little boy the business man has read of money being taken from the hip pocket-but the lightning will never strike him, of course not! And the crook knows just how he feels. The clean-cut, stern-faced Central Office man in the crowd knows that ninety-five per cent of the money lost by men is taken from their hip pockets while they are using both hands to board a car or hanging onto a strap with one hand and holding up a newspaper with the other. That's why he—the Central Office man-is in that particular crowd. The crook can't take his eyes from the wallet-his

fingers itch for it. He approaches the victim, pushing through the crowd; he reaches for the wad-and the law gets him. The owner of the fat wallet thanks the detective for saving his money, thanks him for his warning to keep it in a safer place, and then absentmindedly again sticks it into his hip pocket, conspicuously ready for the next crook to pluck.

When the mature crook is gone, we must have somebody to take his place-there is danger of his race dying out. To be sure, he has children of his own, and these he trains in the ways of crookedness. Yet even they will not supply the deficit that death and the law are making in his ranks. But negligence is sowing the seed in other soil constantly. And this soil is very fertile.

As to the potential crook, he is everywhere; no class of society is free from him. But he obtains in largest numbers among the hungry thousands, ill-clad, half-starved people, people who have but a mild solution of garbage in their veins instead of red blood, which makes for small moral stamina. Instead of protecting such as these for their own sakes and for the sake of the community, we are constantly tempting them to do wrong. Rather than making crime difficult and dangerous, we are making it easy and safe.

In one year 14,657 children were arraigned in the juvenile courts of Greater New York. Many of these youngsters were arrested for trivial offenses, playing ball in the streets and the like, but 1,124 were charged with larceny as a misdemeanor, 302 were charged with larceny as a felony, and two were charged with manslaughter. In 3,827 cases cases the the parents were charged with improper guardianship. It is estimated by those who make a study of juvenile delinquency that 60 per cent of the whole trouble was due to parental negligence. There are three delinquents in the Child's Court-the child, the parent, and the community. When one thinks of those 50,000 black rooms" in which families work, where in some cases five persons get only ten cents for every 720 roses bound into garlands by them, where they all eat and sleep, where moral and physical disease is bred, it is easy to pass the blame on to the community. Really, it is amazing, considering the negligence on the part of the public, not that there are so many criminals, but that there are so few !

In the matter of promoting crime through negligence women are by a long way the

worst offenders. The manager of one of the great department stores of New York re cently told me that he considered female customers careless in the ratio of ten to one. In this store an average of twenty-five articles, of greater or smaller value, and one purse, containing money from small change up to hundreds of dollars, are found every day. The character of the articles abandoned often indicated, the manager said, the most inconceivable thoughtlessness. One day a young woman brought in a very small child and became so engrossed in shopping that the baby strayed from her side and was gone two hours before she missed it. Then a search was instituted, and the little one was found in the "lost articles" department. Another manager said that he considered the negligence of the women shoppers a menace to the morality of cash-girls, and that he had found that some of his younger saleswomen had become thieves and shoplifters from observing how easy it was to "get the goods." In commenting on the amazing negligence of people he cited the case of a young woman who had left a bank book containing four one-hundred-dollar bills on a counter. Her address being in the book, they got her on the 'phone and learned that she had that day withdrawn the money to pay for an operation and hospital expenses. It is quite likely that the anticipation of the dreaded event had driven everything else from her head. But even the shock of losing the money failed to make the young woman careful. She sent a colored telephone boy to the store for the money without any letter or means of identification-simply his word. The manager refused to turn the bank book and its contents over to the boy, on the ground that he might have overheard the talk over the 'phone and come there on his own hook to get the money and run away. The young woman was very angry. She thought the manager's attitude very unreasonable, and told him so in forcible language over the 'phone.

A vicious quality creeps into negligence often in the form of a disposition carelessly to blame others, regardless of consequences. Not long ago a lady dropped a $10,000 pearl necklace on the floor of one of our great shops. It was picked up by a floor-walker and turned over to the proprietor, who watched the papers carefully. Presently, as expected, the loss was advertised and the store people communicated with the owner of the necklace, who chanced to be a Chicago