demned." Matt. 12: 34, 36, 37. In these three brief sentences, Christ
presents the whole moral aspect of the subject of this paragraph. To
any one who will ponder well his weighty words, no further remark is
necessary. Let filthy talkers but consider for a moment what a multitude
of "idle," unclean words are waiting for account in the final day; and
then let them consider what a load of condemnation must roll upon their
guilty souls when strict justice is meted out to every one before the
bar of Omnipotence, and in the face of all the world--of all the
universe.

The almost universal habit among boys and young men of relating filthy
stories, indulging in foul jokes, making indecent allusions, and
subjecting to lewd criticism every passing female, is a most abominable
sin. Such habits crush out pure thoughts; they annihilate respect for
virtue; they make the mind a quagmire of obscenity; they lead to overt
acts of lewdness.

But boys and youths are not alone in this. More often than otherwise,
they gain from older ones the phraseology of vice. And if the sin is
loathsome in such youthful transgressors, what detestable enormity
must characterize it in the old.

And women, too, are not without their share in this accursed thing,
this ghost of vice, which haunts the sewing-circle and the parlor as
well as the club-room. They do not, of course, often descend to those
black depths of vulgarity to which the coarser sex will go, but couch
in finer terms the same foul thoughts, and hide in loose insinuations
more smut than words could well express. Women who think themselves
rare paragons of virtue can find no greater pleasure than in the
discussion of the latest scandal, speculations about the chastity of
Mrs. A. or Mr. B., and gossip about the "fall" of this man's daughter
or the amorous adventures of that woman's son.

Masculine purity loves to regard woman as chaste in mind as well as
in body, to surround her with conceptions of purity and impregnable
virtue; but the conclusion is irresistible that those who can gloat
over others' lapses from virtue, and find delight in such questionable
entertainments as the most recent case of seduction, or the newest
scandal, have need to purify their hearts and re-enforce their waning
chastity. Nevertheless, a writer says, and perhaps truly, that "the
women comprise about all the real virtue there is in the world."
Certainly if they were one-half as bad as the masculine portion of
h