Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/815

Rh churches of the same strength, twenty-five supervisors, two hundred and fifty visitors. Each of these visitors was to have charge of ten families, and visit them monthly, that is to say, two hundred and fifty people were to be making friendly calls on half as many families as those canvassed in the federation’s recent study of about twenty-five blocks in New York city. Each supervisor was to have oversight of the work of visitors from each coöperating church, intermingling the denominations.

The super-ideality of this plan foredoomed it to failure. The congregation is rare in which one-tenth of the members are able or willing to give themselves to such work, a monthly visit on ten families. It is a plan made for a better army than Gideon’s. The spirit of social service is stronger in the land today than it was ten years ago, but it is doubtful whether the present decade will witness average churches with the percentage of available altruists needed to carry out such a crusading calling plan. It is too ideal also in intermingling denominational visitors. The first step to be taken would seem to be to induce the churches to regard a geographical area as a special responsibility, and many a church would undertake this if, as a church, it were held responsible for the area, when it might not be willing to share the responsibility with workers from other churches. Spiritual life is systole and diastole indeed, both organization and individual discharging both organic functions at times, but if the church is a divine organization, we must concede her arterialism and assume that individuals are venous.

So far as New York’s needs are concerned, however, the plan was subpractical also. In a tenement house of thirteen families, for instance, it would be absurd to leave the three families immediately under the roof to visitor B after visitor A had already reached the fourth floor. Visitor B, unless an extraordinary altruist and stair-sealer, would very soon overture visitor A to annex the attic. Would visitor A be willing so to extend exhausting work? Should the extension not be made in order to give unity to the work in that dwelling in matters sanitary and social? In a dwelling with twenty families, if one of visitor