For Sailors' Souls

It was a new blossom on an old religious plant which Bishop William Thomas Manning blessed in Manhattan last week when he dedicated the Chapel of our Savior in a 13-story annex of the Seamen's Church Institute (founded 1843). The whole annex will be dedicated next autumn. Then the institute will be using structures which cost $5,000,000.* It is 75% selfsupporting. Voluntary subscriptions make up the rest. It is organizations like Seamen's Church Institute which get the money collected after the "ship's concert" on ocean liners.

Prime purpose of the institute--like that of the Seaman's Society of London whose patron is sea-minded King George and at whose annual banquet last fortnight the Prince of Wales presided--is to keep sailors from losing touch with religion. But the large part of its work has become to provide a moral hotel (1,500 rooms and beds) and amusement place (10,000 visitors daily) for seamen ashore, to help them in physical need, to locate them for worried families.

* A much richer New York institution for sailors is Sailors' Snug Harbor, old men's home on Staten Island. It leases part of its Manhattan land to Wanamaker's department store for almost $1,100,000 yearly.

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