who shall constitute a portion of
the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon
Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is
impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is
right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard
of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being
men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the
same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not
condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth. What I am
hoping for is that these seventy years have just been a running start,
and that now there will be a great rush of Christian principle upon the
strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world. Those strongholds are not
as strong as they look. Almost every vicious man is afraid of society,
and if you once open the door where he is, he will run. All you have to
do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.

May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has
just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading
nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that
whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year
before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has
shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that
after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was
wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the
world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want
to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to
let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there.
So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as
the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral
light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who
likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what
is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by
disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses
it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and
make it better.

That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can
do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can
guide the feet of those who are