lot's palace
opens wide its doors. The public ball room displays its fascinations.
Dissipation draws round itself the attractions of wealth and taste and
fashion, and in its splendid club rooms secures for itself the pleasures
which expediency forbids it to seek more publicly. Vice literally flaunts
its banners in the face of the public. But a few days since I saw from my
window a banner carried through the streets, blazoned with the name and
attractions of one of the vilest fashionable groggeries in the city, and
preceded by the music of a drum and fife. The snug retreat, known only to
the initiated few, where licentiousness and drunkenness are secluded, and
thousands lost and won, was never more popular than now. Practiced decoys
lie in wait for the daughters of our families, and the whirl of general
society in which so many of them, at a tender age, are madly revolving
night after night, is no poor preparation for the fatal success of these
wiles. Young girls, who come from quiet country homes to seek employment,
cast adrift on these surging tides of life without a friend or an adviser,
readily fall victims to the wiles of young seducers whose social position
ensures their security. In a certain city, I was informed not long since,
of one keeper of a fashionable brothel who had removed her trade, because
it was too largely usurped by victims of this class to render it any
longer profitable. Young men, too, are coming to the cities in crowds, to
engage in business or study. They must have society and recreation; and
the votaries of vice are sparing neither pains nor expense to give them
abundance of both, fraught with ruin to soul and body.

Without going outside of our special sphere as pastors, viewing this
subject solely with reference to the youth of our congregations, as, in
common with others subjected to these and other temptations, _what ought
to be our influence in arresting and counteracting these evils_?

It ought to be second to none but parental influence. If the name pastor
mean anything, our position as the chosen religious teachers of
congregations ought to give us free access to every household in our
flocks, and the strongest influence over the youth whose moral training we
directly or indirectly shape. We ought to be not only _respected_ and
_reverenced_, but so loved as to be the familiar advisers and confidants
of the youth of our charges. Our word ought, next to the parents', to have
weight in tu