em with a deep feeling of their loneliness and desolation.
And yet they would have "chaffed" him in five minutes after, if they had
had the opportunity. They seem to have children's receptivity; they are
not by nature skeptical. They unconsciously believe in supernatural
powers, or in one eternal Power. Their conscience can be reached; the
imagination is, to a certain degree, lively; they are peculiarly open to
Religion. And yet their "moral" position is a most perplexing one. The
speaker in one of our Boys' Lodging-houses, who addresses them, knows
that this may be the last and only time, for years, that many of the
wild audience will listen to religious truth. To-morrow a considerable
portion will be scattered, no one knows where. To-morrow, perhaps
to-night, temptation will come in like a flood. In a few hours, it may
be, the street-boy will stand where he must decide whether he will be a
thief or an honest lad; a rogue or an industrious worker; the companion
of burglars and murderers, or the friend of the virtuous. Temptations to
lying, to deceit, to theft, robbery, lust, and murder will soon hunt him
like a pack of wolves. His child's nature is each day under the strain
of a man's temptations. Poverty, hunger, and friendlessness add to his
exposed condition, while, in all probability, he inherits a tendency to
indulgence or crime.

The problem is to guard such a human being, so exposed, against powerful
temptations; to raise him above them; to melt his bad habits and
inherited faults in some new and grand emotion; to create within him a
force which is stronger than, and utterly opposed to, the selfish greed
for money, or the attractions of criminal indulgence, or the rush of
passion, or the fire of anger. The object is to implant in his breast
such a power as Plato dreamed of--the Love of some perfect Friend, whose
character by sympathy shall purify his, whose feeling is believed to go
with the fortunes of the one forgotten by all others, and who has the
power of cleansing from wrong and saving from sin.

The experience of twenty years' labor shows us that what are called
"moral influences" are not sufficient to solve this problem, or meet
this want among the children of the street. It is, of course, well at
times to present the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice; to show
that honesty brings rewards, and falsehood pains, and to sketch the
course of the moral poor whom fortune has rewarded. But these
conside