me religion. And
this decay, while traceable in some measure to the madness for money
and pleasure among men, is traceable even more to this same madness
among women. The woman of to-day is in a state of transition. She has
not yet fully found herself. There has come to her a new sense of
freedom, and this freedom has not made her better. She has become in
considerable measure an imitator of man. And sad to say, she imitates
his vices instead of his virtues. She often patterns after what is
worst in him instead of what is best.

I am told that in the Woman's Club of this city the handsomest room in
the building is the smoking room. Now, a woman has a right to smoke.
Who says that she has not? A woman has a right to swear, and that
right she is exercising with growing frequency. I am not going to deny
her right to do that. But what I do say is this, that I have
absolutely no hope for the rearing of a right generation at the hands
of a flippant cigarette-smoking mother. The child of such a mother is,
in my candid opinion, half damned in its birth. Remember, the mother
of Moses was a pious mother. If she had not been I am persuaded that
the Moses who has been one of the supreme makers of history, might
never have been known.

Now, what was this woman's task? Hear it. I take these words as
embodying not the will of the princess, but the will of God, "Take this
child and nurse him for me and I will give thee thy wages." This
mother was not to govern the world. She was not to lecture in the
interest of suffrage. I have nothing to say against the woman who does
so. She was not to be the center of a social set. She was not to turn
her child over to some colored woman while she went gadding about to
every sort of club. She had just one supreme job. She had one highest
and holiest of all tasks. It was for that cause that she came into the
world. She was to train her child for God. And whoever we are and
whatever may be our abilities, we can have no higher task than this.
The training of a child to-day is the biggest big job under the stars.
He is the center of all our hopes and possibilities.

Did you ever read the story of the "Little Palace Beautiful"? In the
Little Palace Beautiful there are four rooms. The first is a room
called Fancy. In this room looking out toward the south sleeps a
little child, a beautiful baby. It is the Child-that-Never-Was. It
was longed for, hoped for, dreamed of, bu