the sacredness of freedom,—­those great principles on which the whole of our public and political life are founded.  And I make bold to say that these principles were gained as a heritage for all time, not by the preaching of abstract justice, not by any consideration of the moral beauty of liberty, but mainly by a remorseful passion over the wrongs and the degradation of the slave.  These great principles were sown in weakness and dishonor, to be raised in honor and in the power of an endless life.

When, therefore, the Church of the living God awakes, as she is just beginning to do, and closes in a life and death struggle with this far deeper and more pervasive evil of the degradation of women and children, which she has too long accepted as a melancholy necessity of human nature, may we not find in the course of that conflict that wholly new powers and new principles are being evolved, and that the apparent impossibilities of our nature are only its divine possibilities in disguise?  May we not work out the true principles, not now of our public and political life, but of the home, of the family, of personal conduct and character—­all those great moral bases on which the whole social structure rests for its stability?  Granted that this is the deepest and strongest of all our world evils, that which is the most firmly based on the original forces of our nature, and of that part of our nature which has shown the deepest disorder—­does not all this point to some great issue?  That which has been sown in such deep dishonor, will it not be raised in some glory that excelleth?

If God has suffered mighty empires and whole kingdoms to be wrecked on this one evil; if He has made it throughout the Old Scriptures the symbol of departure from Himself, and closely associated monogamic love with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient idolatries that the race which is impure spawns unclean idols and Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man’s life at twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the passions of youth; if the tender Father, “who sits by the death-bed of the little sparrow,” has not thought it too great a price to pay that countless women and children should be sunk to hell without a chance in this life, in a degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the height of the sanctity of womanhood; do we think that all these stupendous issues are for no end and to work out no purpose?  Do we not feel at once that we stand here at the very centre of the mighty forces that are moulding men to nobler shape and higher use?