he Bishop of London left the House of Lords without
voting, as the subject did not interest them; while in the lower House
Bright and Gladstone both voted against the Bill, Gladstone being the
only member who, when the Bill was passed by a bare majority, endeavored
to delay its coming into operation! I ask, Would such a state of things
be possible in these days? Am I not right in saying that new moral
forces and sensibilities have been born within us which make such a
state of things not only impossible, but simply incomprehensible?

Why then should we despair? What! Has God built up His everlasting
marble of broken shells, and will He not build up his temple of the
future out of these broken efforts of ours? Has He made His pure and
splendid diamond out of mere soot, and shall we refuse to see in the
blackest and foulest moral problem the possibilities of the diamond, of
a higher life worked out in the process of its solution, reflecting His
light and His love? Has He made His precious sapphire of the mere mud
that we tread under our feet, and, when we insist on our little sisters'
being no longer trodden like mud "under foot of vicious men," may they
not in the course of their redemption bring an added hue of heaven to
our life, an added purity to home and family, and behold, instead of the
old mud, a sapphire throne, and above it the likeness as of a divine
man?[45]

But to those who still hang back with a feeling of almost angry
repulsion from the whole subject which makes them refuse even to face
the perils and temptations of their own boys, I would address no hard
words, remembering but too well the terrible struggle it cost me to make
this my life work. Only I would remind them of that greatest act in all
history, by which the world was redeemed. The Cross to us is so
associated with the adoration of the ages, so glorified by art, and
music, and lofty thought, that we have ceased to realize what it was in
actual fact such as no painter has ever dared to portray it; the Cross,
not elevated as in sacred pictures, but huddled up with the jeering
crowd; the Cross with its ribald blasphemies, its shameful nakedness,
its coarse mockeries, its brutal long-drawn torture. Do you think it
cost the women of that day nothing to bear all this on their tender
hearts? Yet what was it that made men draw nearer and nearer, till the
women who at first "stood afar off, beholding these things," we are
told, at last "stood by the cr