lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands, and
call them, contemptuously, "old maids"--a miserable relic of heathenism
or Protestantism, neither of which have anything to hold out to old
maids. But Jesus Christ has provided for them better than you are able
to understand.

The Father of our country, then, was right when he said, in his farewell
address to the American nation, that religion and morality are the
"props" of society, and the "pillars" of the State. Let us, then, rest
assured that the best way to check the torrent of infidelity and
immorality, to avert impending evils, to prepare the golden age of our
Republic, is to infuse good morals by the most powerful of all
means--_Christian Education_.

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Prof. Aggassiz.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DENOMINATIONAL SYSTEM ALONE SATISFIES THE WANTS OF ALL, AND CAN SAVE
THE REPUBLIC.

We live in a time of great activity and change, and intense worldliness.
"Men run to and fro and knowledge is increased." Would that we could
feel that there is an increase also in integrity and virtue, and respect
for Religion. We all know that it is not so. So far as we can form
accurate ideas of the social and religious condition of men at any
particular period in the world's history, we may doubt whether the words
of the Apostle St. Paul, describing what shall come to pass in what he
calls "the last days," ever touched any people so closely as they do
those of our times and country. "Men," he says, "shall be lovers of
themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to
parents, ungrateful, wicked, without affection, without peace,
slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness, traitors,
stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God."
Well may the Apostle speak of such times as "dangerous times." When the
moral atmosphere we breathe is so full of what the Scriptures call "the
spirit of this world," we can only hope to escape its corrupting
influences by doing all in our power to diffuse Christian principles
among the rising generation, by means of truly Christian schools.

The arrangements can be made without disturbing the general system. It
is this: "Let the State aid, but not direct, a system of plain English
education, confined to all those whose circumstances are limited, or who
are left destitute, or orphans. Let all religious denominations, when
they desire it, have the privilege of conducti