Here are monstrous evils and vices in society.  Let intemperance be the type of them all, because so many of the others are its children.  Drunkenness ruins more homes and wrecks more lives than war.  How shall we oppose it?  I do not say that we shall not pass resolutions and make laws against it.  But I do say that we can never really conquer the evil in this way.  I hold with Phillips Brooks that “all prohibitory measures are negative.  That they have their uses no one can doubt.  That they have their limits is just as clear.”

The stronghold of intemperance lies in the vacancy and despair of men’s minds.  The way to attack it is to make the sober life beautiful and happy and full of interest.  Teach your boys how to work, how to read, how to play, you fathers, before you send them to college, if you want to guard them against the temptations of strong drink and the many shames and sorrows that go with it.  Make the life of your community cheerful and pleasant and interesting, you reformers, provide men with recreation which will not harm them, if you want to take away the power of the gilded saloon and the grimy boozing-ken.  Parks and play-grounds, libraries and music-rooms, clean homes and cheerful churches,—­these are the efficient foes of intemperance.  And the same thing is true of gambling and lubricity and all the other vices which drag men down by the lower side of their nature because the higher side has nothing to cling to, nothing to sustain it and hold it up.

What are you going to do, my brother-men, for this higher side of human life?  What contribution are you going to make of your strength, your time, your influence, your money, your self, to make a cleaner, fuller, happier, larger, nobler life possible for some of your fellow-men?  I do not ask how you are going to do it.  You may do it in business, in the law, in medicine, in the ministry, in teaching, in literature.  But this is the question:  What are you going to give personally to make the human life of the place where you do your work, purer, stronger, brighter, better, and more worth living?  That will be your best part in the warfare against vice and crime.

The positive method is the only efficient way to combat intellectual error and spiritual evil.  False doctrines are never argued out of the world.  They are pushed back by the incoming of the truth as the darkness is pushed back by the dawn.  Phillips Brooks was right.  It is not worth while to cross the street to break a man’s idol.  It is worth while to cross the ocean to tell him about God.  The skilful fencer who attacks your doubts and drives you from corner to corner of unbelief and leaves you at last in doubt whether you doubt or not, does you a certain service.  He gives you exercise, takes the conceit out of you.  But the man who lays hold of the real faith that is hidden underneath your doubt,—­the silent longing for God and goodness, the secret attraction that draws your heart toward Jesus Christ as the only one who has the words of everlasting life,—­the man who takes hold of this buried faith and quickens it and makes you dare to try to live by it,—­ah, that is the man who helps you indeed.  My brothers, if any of you are going to be preachers remember this.  What we men need is not so much an answer to our doubts, as more nourishment for our faith.