132 / Early Missions, Charitable Work, YPM, and Higher Education

was stolen from him and he was, like other Negroes, without legal recourse. Negroes, Steiner observed, were in many cases still in virtual slavery.

Then there was the wide gulf between churches. "The moneyed must worship together and the poor must worship together." Monopolies, trusts, and political corruption combine to make serious tax inequalities, with the wealthy paying on an average one tenth as much as common people. Within five minutes' walk of the Chicago Post Office he had seen firsthand something of the filth of city slums. Men searching for food in garbage cans; immigrants sleeping on rags in squalid rooms; the high death rate of children under five-these were the scenes that moved Steiner.

Nothing stirred Steiner quite as much as the inequalities of his society, "the gulf between the rich and poor." The Apostolic Church could contain and retain "a rich Philemon and a runaway slave like Onesimus. . . . Such a thing is out of the question in many fashionable up-town congregations." He cites Josiah Strong's Our Country in which Strong deplores "the despotism of the many and the wretchedness of the poor." Steiner shows an acquaintance with George Herron's writings and the viewpoints of Washington Gladden-both of whom were influential in creating a social conscience in their day. Though the revivals of Charles Finney did not penetrate the Mennonite churches in Ohio and elsewhere in the first half of the nineteenth century, the influence of Finney did reach the Mennonites through Menno S. Steiner. Steiner studied theology at Oberlin College in 1891-92 and here he came to an admiration of the spirit and work of Charles G. Finney, Oberlin president from 1851 to 1866. He was especially impressed by the way in which Finney as a young man in the early nineteenth century forsook the legal profession and invested his life in the preaching of the gospel. Oberlin College by the time Steiner attended it had gained a reputation for innovations in coeducation, racial equality in admissions, and activity in behalf of Negro slaves in the Underground Railroad by which fugitive slaves escaped to their freedom in Canada.

Steiner's response to the social needs of his time was, however, different from certain of the above social thinkers. Like them he considered religion and home to be safeguards against such evils. But he considered the regeneration of the individual-saving individuals one by one-to be the best solution. He quoted with fa-