dern moral lepers were compelled to cry, "Unclean,
unclean," before they approach innocent victims with their deadly
contagion!

About the vilest thing on earth is a human being whose character is so
tainted with impurity that he leaves the slimy trail of the serpent
wherever he goes.

There never was a more beautiful and pathetic prayer than that of the
poor soiled, broken-hearted Psalmist in his hour of shame, "Create in
me a clean heart." "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, who
shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure
heart." There are thousands of men who would cut off their right hands
to-day to be free from the stain, the poison, of impurity.

There can be no lasting greatness without purity. Vice honeycombs the
physical strength as well as destroys the moral fiber. Now and again
some man of note topples with a crash to sudden ruin. Yet the cause of
the moral collapse is not sudden. There has been a slow undermining of
virtue going on probably for years; then, in an hour when honor, truth,
or honesty is brought to a crucial test, the weakened character gives
way and there is an appalling commercial or social crash which often
finds an echo in the revolver shot of the suicide.

Tennyson shows the effect of Launcelot's guilty love for Guinevere, in
the great knight's conscious loss of power. His wrongful passion
indirectly brought about the death of fair Elaine. He himself at times
shrank from puny men wont to go down before the shadow of his spear.
Like a scarlet blot his sin stains all his greatness, and he muses on
it remorsefully:

"For what am I? What profits me my name
Of greatest knight? I fought for it and have it.
Pleasure to have it, none; to lose it pain;
Now grown a part of me: but what use in it?
To make men worse by making my sin known?
Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great?"

Later when the knights of the Round Table joined in the search for the
Holy Grail, that lost sacred vessel,

"The cup, the cup itself from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own,"

Launcelot was overtaken by his sin and failed ignominiously. Only
Galahad the Pure was permitted to see the cup unsurrounded by a
blinding glory, a fearful splendor of watching eyes and guarding shapes.

No one is quite the same in his own estimation when he has been once
guilty of contact with impurity. His self-respect has suffered a loss.
Something