Behold also, how a giant may be slain of a woman.  Delilah started the train of circumstances that pulled down the temple of Dagon about Samson’s ears.  And tens of thousands of giants have gone down to death and hell through the same impure fascinations.  It seems to me that it is high time that pulpit and platform and printing-press speak out against the impurities of modern society.  Fastidiousness and Prudery say:  “Better not speak—­you will rouse up adverse criticism; you will make worse what you want to make better; better deal in glittering generalities; the subject is too delicate for polite ears.”  But there comes a voice from heaven overpowering the mincing sentimentalities of the day, saying:  “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions and the house of Jacob their sins.”

The trouble is that when people write or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive.  Lord Byron in “Don Juan” adorns this crime until it smiles like a May queen.  Michelet, the great French writer, covers it up with bewitching rhetoric until it glows like the rising sun, when it ought to be made loathsome as a small-pox hospital.  There are to-day influences abroad which, if unresisted by the pulpit and the printing-press, will turn New York and Brooklyn into Sodom and Gomorrah, fit only for the storm of fire and brimstone that whelmed the cities of the plain.

You who are seated in your Christian homes, compassed by moral and religious restraints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds you on the north and the south and the east and the west.  While I speak there are tens of thousands of men and women going over the awful plunge of an impure life; and while I cry to God for mercy upon their souls, I call upon you to marshal in the defense of your homes, your Church and your nation.  There is a banqueting hall that you have never heard described.  You know all about the feast of Ahasuerus, where a thousand lords sat.  You know all about Belshazzar’s carousal, where the blood of the murdered king spurted into the faces of the banqueters.  You may know of the scene of riot and wassail, when there was set before Esopus one dish of food that cost $400,000.  But I speak now of a different banqueting hall.  Its roof is fretted with fire.  Its floor is tesselated with fire.  Its chalices are chased with fire.  Its song is a song of fire.  Its walls are buttresses of fire.  Solomon refers to it when he says:  “Her guests are in the depths of hell.”