But she deliberated, yielded, and fell, and the world is still full of the resounding echoes of that fall.  The race fell with her.  That fact teaches its lesson.  Some one falls with every ruined soul.  We lift up or drag down those associated with us.  “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself;” an influence goes out from us, which is a felt power in the world either for or against God and humanity.

Consider the effects of the temptation. 1.  It caused Eve to become to Adam an agent of Satan.  Tempted herself, she became a tempter.  Ruined in her nature by this exclusion of God, and by this welcome of Satan, she seeks to ruin her companion.  This principle rules now.  The carnal heart is at enmity with God, the converted heart is in union with God.  Here is a significant fact.  A man loves to have woman pure, if he is impure.  Temperate, if he is intemperate.  Holy and Christian, if he is the opposite in every particular.  Not so a woman.  Intemperate herself, she seeks to induce others to be like her.  Here is the peril of society.  If our fashionable women love wine, they become emissaries of the wicked one to a fearful extent.  It is almost an impossibility for the tempted to withstand their wiles.  In fashionable, perhaps, more than in the other grades of life, woman as a leader in intemperance, in extravagance, and in opposition to Christ, is to be feared.  Her power is fearful to contemplate.  The Secretary of the Treasury declares that the national debt is increased, and threatens to increase, unless the fashionable world shall declare against the, importation of that which costs gold, but which fails to contribute to the prosperity of the community.  This is by no means wholly chargeable to women.  Men share in the blame.  A sadder fact is the expressed dissatisfaction with woman’s work and with woman’s sphere.  The home of the olden time is passing out of mind, and in its place is the fashionable boarding-house.  The skilled housewife is felt to be unappreciated.  Men, they tell us, prefer a pretty face to a noble heart, a delicate to a skilled hand, a girl who can play the piano rather than one who can cook a dinner, a pretty doll instead of a glorious woman capable of keeping the house, and of guiding the man with womanly strength.  Ah, it is a mistake.  America is the land of homes.  Our undeveloped territory offers to every man a farm.  Men and women need not to be cooped up in garrets or shut up in cellars, if they will but possess the spirit of those who sought in this Western world a home, and who, as they toiled with the axe, the plough, and the loom,

  “Shook the depths of the forest gloom
  With their hymns of lofty cheer.”