old order of our own, it may be, nay, it will be, wholly for good.  Let us remember that the two most conservative organic forms, the two that have most resisted progressive evolution, are the donkey and the goose.  To ignore the new order, to cling to the old views and methods, is to court moral extinction as a living force.  As well think to find safety in escaping from the advance of an express engine by adopting the stately pace of our grandmothers, which was perfectly adapted for getting out of the way of a lumbering stage-coach.  May not He

    “Whose large plan ripens slowly to a whole”

be working out a progressive ideal such as we trace in the great spiritual records of our race?  The Bible, thank God! neither begins nor ends with sin; but it begins with a sinless garden, it ends with a strong city of God, with evil known and recognized, but cast out beyond its walls.  May He not be leading us to form a wiser, deeper, stronger ideal; to aim for our girls not so much at Innocence, with her fading wreath of flowers—­fading, as, alas! they must ever fade in a world like this—­but to aim at Virtue, with her victor’s crown of gold, tried in the fire?  May it not be that His divine providence is constraining us to take as our ideal for our womanhood, not the old sheltered garden, but a strong city of God, having foundations, whose very gates are made of pearl, through which nothing that defileth is suffered to enter, and whose common ways are paved with pure gold, gold of no earthly temper, but pure and clear as crystal;—­a city of refuge for all who are oppressed with wrong, and from which all foul forms of evil are banned by the one word “Without”?  Sure I am that if we will accept this deeper and larger ideal, and endeavor, however imperfectly, to work it out on the earth, in the midst of it, as in the old garden ideal, will be found the tree of life; but then its very leaves will be for the healing of the nations.

But whether you go with me as far as this or not, I think you will agree with me that we must not leave our girls to their own crude notions on the deepest matters of life.  Still less must we leave them to get their teaching on marriage and matters of sex from some modern novels, which I can only characterize as tuberculosis of the moral sense, but from which, as I have already pointed out, we cannot always guard them.  We must give them direct teaching of some kind.

First, I think our girls, as well as our boys, need far more direct teaching than has been customary as to the sanctity of the body.  This is especially true of girls who are sent to boarding-schools, as some of the moral evils of boys’ schools are not, I am sorry to say, altogether unknown in girls’ schools, though, as far as I can ascertain, the evil is much less in extent, and in some is non-existent.  Still, all girls need to be taught that the body is the temple of the Lord and Giver of life, and that from the crown of their heads to the sole of their feet those bodies belong to Christ.