avenue; there are a few poor churches, and small, for which no one
cares, and which offer no attractions to the over-flowing population
of Mott street. The spring and summer will soon come, and then these
great churches will be closed, their pew-owners distributed over lake
and mountain in all the different parts of the wide world. But the
"people" will be here. People who work in foundries and shops, who
live in tenement-houses; people who earn a hand-to-mouth living as
clerks, book-keepers, seamstresses and petty store-keepers; people who
have to stay in such homes as they can support because they cannot
afford to break them up and go elsewhere.

For these people and their children there is only the street. The
children occupy the street. For four or five months in the year they
make life hideous, especially on Sunday, by noise and exhibition of
vandalism that would disgrace the savages of any age or nation. The
police acknowledge themselves powerless to prevent it. It is simply
the exercise of undirected faculty which might be turned to account,
but which has only noise, confusion, and street warfare for its
opportunity for exercise.

There are possibilities in these congregations of the highways and
byways, and when we have our people's church or churches, open all the
year, and all the night as well as all the day, and the voices of the
angels for sweetness, singing love and peace on earth, in an anthem
that pierces the roof, and with the tones of a mighty organ to
emphasize to all the world its message, and it is not a question of
clothes, many people will be glad to listen, and will find an
influence in the music, in the willingness, in the free-heartedness,
in the sympathy, in the kindness, in the spirit of brotherhood, that
they would not get out of preaching nor dogma.