er strong enough to compel us
to simplify our life and restore its old divine order of marriage and
hard work, of "plain living and high thinking," which luxury and
self-ease are fast undermining. Here, in the slain of the daughters of
our people, is a stinging wrong that will goad us into seeing that the
people are so housed that a human life is possible to them. Here, if
anywhere, is a passion of conscience, and pity, and duty, and interest
combined, strong enough, a heaped-up weight of evil heavy enough, to
raise us to a self-giving manhood and a self-reverencing womanhood.

And from this secret place of thunder is not God now calling His chosen
ones to come forward and be fellow-workers with Him? And when that call
is obeyed, when, to summarize what I have already said, the wrongs and
degradation of women and hapless children take hold of men, as, thank
God, they are beginning to take hold, with a remorseful passion, that
passion for the weak, the wronged, and the defenceless, which surely is
the divine in flower in a human soul; when women rise up in a wild
revolt against

"The law that now is paramount,
The common law by which the poor and weak
Are trampled under foot of vicious men,
And loathed forever after by the good";

when the Christian Church at length hears the persistent interrogation
of her Lord, "Seest thou this woman?" and makes answer, "Yea, Lord, I
see that she is young, and poor, and outcast, and degraded," and speaks
to young men with something of the passion of the true Man--"It were
better for you that a millstone were hanged about your neck and you cast
into the depths of the sea, than that you should cause one of these
little ones to stumble"; when the fact that a foolish, giddy girl's feet
have slipped and fallen is no longer the signal for every man to look
upon her as fair game, and to trample her deeper into the mire, but the
signal to every man calling himself a man to hasten to her side, to
raise her up again and restore her to her lost womanhood; when boys are
taught from their earliest years that if they would have a clear brain,
a firm nerve, and a strong muscle, they must be pure, and purity is
looked upon as manly, at least, as much as truth and courage; when women
are no longer so lost to the dignity of their own womanhood as to make
companions of the very men who insult and degrade it; when the woman
requires the man to come to her in holy marriage in the