cy, the
proper agency, and the only agency to save and restrain and protect them.
You cannot shirk it, especially as city churches. Into these centres of
trade and education God pours the young men, and he asks you and me this
morning if we are ready for them; if, while business and education are
multiplying their facilities, the gospel of Christ, represented by the
churches, is multiplying its facilities to make the city the _best place_
for the education of young men in virtue. He asks these churches if there
is nothing significant, no message to her in the concentration of the mass
of our young men and the mass of Christian culture, organized power, and
wealth, at one point? Have these things no relation to each other? Yes,
brethren, they have. There is no evading it. The finger of Providence
points unswervingly to these city churches as the great sources of
Christian influence upon young men. Let us not fail to hear these voices.
The ten thousand appliances of vice, confronting the church with brazen
defiance, or with devilish ingenuity and secresy sapping the foundations
of manly honor and integrity, call to us, deal gently with the young man.
Fathers and mothers, the yearnings of whose hearts you read full easily in
your love for your own sons, whose happiness, whose very lives are bound
up in the honor and prosperity of these sons and brothers, call to us from
their distant homes in quiet villages, and on the open farm lands, call to
us with agonizing earnestness--deal gently for our sakes with the young
man. Our community, our country, calls to us. Oh, when I look upon society
and see what characters ride rampant there, when I look at government and
see the awful corruption festering there, when I see how men in power,
from the chief magistrate of the nation down to the humblest postmaster,
will sell their souls for party, and betray their country to its enemies
through lust of power, or something else, God knows what; when I see
drunkenness holding high carnival in the nation's capitol, reeling in the
seat of the President, and retailing its maudlin declamation before a
sickened country from Washington to Chicago, I can only turn to God and
the future. Our only hope is in the work of the Christian church through
all its agencies, social, ecclesiastical and educational, moulding out of
the glorious material so abundantly at its disposal, a band of men who
shall convert the seats of power into seats of righteousness