age?  Many of them under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under thirteen.  Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs Prison in New York and look for yourselves.  Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them as soon as they got out of the cradle.  “O,” says some one, “I am a business man, and I have no time to examine what my children read.  I have no time to inspect the books that come into my household.”  If your children were threatened with typhoid fever would you have time to go for the doctor?  Would you have time to watch the progress of the disease?  Would you have time for the funeral?  In the presence of my God, I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and that unless this thing be stopped, it will be to them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul, three funerals in one day.

Against every bad pamphlet send a good pamphlet; against every unclean picture send an innocent picture; against every scurrilous song send a Christian song; against every bad book send a good book.  The good literature, the Christian literature, in its championship for God and the truth, will bring down the evil literature in its championship for the devil.  I feel tingling to the tips of my fingers, and through all the nerves of my body, and all the depths of my soul, the certainty of our triumph.  Cheer up!  O men and women who are toiling for the purification of society.  Toil with your faces in the sunlight.  If God be for us, who can be against us?

      Ye workers in the light,
      There is a grand to-morrow,
    After the long and gloomy night,
     After the pain and sorrow

      The purposes of God
      Do not forever linger;
    With peace and consolation shod,
      Do ye not see the finger

      Which points the way of life
      To all down in the valley? 
    Then gird ye, gird ye for the strife;
      Against the darkness rally.

      The victory is yours,
      And ye are God’s forever;
    For all things He for you secures
      Through brave and right endeavor.

* * * * *

XX.

SATISFIED

AND OTHER POEMS.

    Sleeping, waking, on we glide,
     Dreamful, and unsatisfied,

     In the heart a vague surprise,
     Master of the thoughtful eyes.

     What though Spring is in the air,
     And the world is bright and fair?

     Something hidden from the sight
     Dashes fullness of delight.

     Soothed are we in duty done,
     And in something new begun,

     Like a kissed and flattered child
     To denial reconciled;

     Yet the something unattained
     Keeps us like Prometheus chained,