of diminishing, the evils we would cure. The
reformers started wrong. They would reform the Church by placing her
under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they
did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it
farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life,
without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even
a God. So, in the question of education, the upholders of the Public
School system have pushed the false principle "that all individual,
domestic, social, and political evils are due to ignorance, and can only
be prevented by high intellectual culture," till they have nearly taught
away all religious belief and morality, have well-nigh abolished the
family which is the social unit, and find that the evils they pretended
to prevent, and the wrongs they sought to redress, are fast increasing.

We must, then, proceed on a true principle in trying to remedy the
profligacy that disgraces so many of our crowded centres, and the
demoralization that is fast gangrening even our rural districts.

One thousand eight hundred and forty-odd years ago, you might have
observed a poor, meanly-clad wanderer, wending his steps on the Appian
way to the Capitol of the world,--the wealthy, magnificent, and ungodly
city of Rome. He has passed its gates, and threads his way unobserved
through its populous streets. On every side he beholds gorgeous palaces
raised at the expense of downtrodden nationalities; stately temples
dedicated to as many false gods as nations were congregated in Rome;
public baths and amphitheatres devoted to pleasure and to cruelty;
statues, monuments, and triumphal arches raised to the memory of
blood-thirsty tyrants. He passes warriors and senators, beggars and
cripples, effeminate and dissolute women, gladiators and slaves,
merchants and statesmen, orators and philosophers;--all classes, all
ranks, all conditions of men of every language and color under the sun.
Everywhere he sees a maddening race for pleasure; everywhere the impress
of luxury, everywhere the full growth of crime, side by side with
indescribable suffering, diabolical cruelty and barbarity. And this
poor, meanly-clad wanderer was St. Peter. Oh! how the noble heart of the
fisherman of Galilee must have bled, when he observed the empire of
Satan so supreme--when he witnessed the shocking licentiousness of the
temple and the homestead; when he saw the fearful