re is the greatest peril of this age. We may find one here
and another there who, with atheism at his heart, is still upright in
life. But break down the belief in God, and what the morals of the
people shall be, let that nation answer which set upon her altars now
nearly a hundred years ago the image of the goddess of reason. Let
faith in God fall out of the young man's heart or the young woman's
heart, and with it all fear of God, and what shall you put in its
place? What instead of this shall keep them straight in their way?
shall hold them safe?

There is reputation. But this is a shifting authority. It changes with
conditions. It has no fixed standard. It depends on opinion. That
which makes the young in the most disastrous sense of the word
_unsafe_, may in no way interfere with their reputation--but quite
otherwise--with those among whom they live.

Then there is what some have called the enthusiasm of humanity. We
cannot form any estimate of this as a power over men, because we have
no sort of understanding what it means.

And there is civilization. Is it civilization which makes laws or
admits of laws and finds accommodating administrators of laws, under
the action of which the most sacred charge of a State--its helpless
and innocent childhood--is left a prey to vile associations of men and
women, from whose soul within them is obliterated all that was Divine,
and all which is not devilish?

Civilization goes on its soft way, and takes under its smiling
protection persons who walk upon the earth's higher places, and finds
for them kind excuse and screens them from harsh frown, as they pass
from their pleasures back to its silvery paths, leaving behind them as
the price of their pleasures misery and ruin of which we may not speak
in this place. No fouler crimes debased old Rome in its worst days
than the crimes which the civilization of England's metropolis
condones. But the heart of the people does not condone them: and if a
great voice does not say this, we shall wonder and be sorry. In the
mean while let the parents and guardians of the young, and let the
young themselves, shrink back from civilization as a guide to their
way and as a power for keeping them safe, in the place of the Living
God.

And our closing word shall be to the young. I said just now that the
world could not grow old. And because of the world having within it
the seeds of a ceaseless vitality, that is true. The world as it now
is c