in all that the world might stand
for of wealth and riches and power and attained ambitions, saying
the profit in the gain of a whole world would not equal the loss of
one soul, has been set aside.

Instead we have that modern and amazing evangel known as the "Social
Gospel."

Here for illustration are two old people living in a miserable cabin
in a reeking, malarial swamp with a dozen children drinking in the
poison of their environment. What folly to spend time and money on
the father or mother. How inefficient any effort to save the
children just one by one. Get to work at once and drain the swamp,
drive out the poisonous and infectious insects with which the place
is swarming, fill in the land with fine clean earth, plant flowers
and sow seeds of fruitful harvests, let the salt sea blow in and
breathe across the spot.

The old people may die, in all probability they will, but under
right and sanitary conditions the children will grow up into
vigorous elements of a strong and worthful society.

Why spend time, money, heart and enthusiasm in seeking to overcome
or straighten out and make correct the bent lives that have come
down to us through the unsanitary moral conditions of a previous
generation? We have had wretched laws, desperate customs, children
have grown up under them to become fathers and mothers of
generations no better than themselves.

It is neither economy of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach,
to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and
frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pass
into an environment worse than the one in which they are
endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise
thing--go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the
legislatures, get bills passed, laws made that will drive out the
false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it
will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves drunk,
steep themselves in drugs, smoke themselves yellow with tobacco,
yield to the fascination of gambling in any form. Let society be
cleaned from these evils and the result will be certain. A
generation that shall never see a saloon, a bottle of wine or
whiskey; a generation that will never know the meaning of rum and
tobacco and will never see a house of ill fame will be a generation
that must grow up in righteousness and truth. There will be no more
drunken brawls, no multiplied lawlessness, no dis