e degradation of women and children,
which she has too long accepted as a melancholy necessity of human
nature, may we not find in the course of that conflict that wholly new
powers and new principles are being evolved, and that the apparent
impossibilities of our nature are only its divine possibilities in
disguise? May we not work out the true principles, not now of our public
and political life, but of the home, of the family, of personal conduct
and character--all those great moral bases on which the whole social
structure rests for its stability? Granted that this is the deepest and
strongest of all our world evils, that which is the most firmly based on
the original forces of our nature, and of that part of our nature which
has shown the deepest disorder--does not all this point to some great
issue? That which has been sown in such deep dishonor, will it not be
raised in some glory that excelleth?

If God has suffered mighty empires and whole kingdoms to be wrecked on
this one evil; if He has made it throughout the Old Scriptures the
symbol of departure from Himself, and closely associated monogamic love
with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient
idolatries that the race which is impure spawns unclean idols and
Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man
that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man's life at
twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly
one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not
hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the passions of youth; if the
tender Father, "who sits by the death-bed of the little sparrow," has
not thought it too great a price to pay that countless women and
children should be sunk to hell without a chance in this life, in a
degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the
height of the sanctity of womanhood; do we think that all these
stupendous issues are for no end and to work out no purpose? Do we not
feel at once that we stand here at the very centre of the mighty forces
that are moulding men to nobler shape and higher use?

Here, at least, is a force, if we will only use it, so weighted with
public disaster, with national decay, with private misery, that it
insists on making itself felt if there be a spark of life left and the
nation has not become mere dead carcase for the vultures of God's
judgments to prey upon. Here alone is a pow