SPIRITUAL LOVE WILL REFINE THE WORLD.

We can prevent more easily than cure social mistakes. And this we can now begin to do by creating a new public sentiment, and by teaching our young men to grow up in harmony with the laws of their entire nature, and our young women to venerate principles, physical and spiritual, overcoming disease with health, deformity with beauty, ignorance with wisdom.

Some defects can be cured only by the restraining influence of custom. Soul-dwarfing, spirit-subjugating evils, such as now afflict the world, can never be talked down, they must be written down, worked down and put down. Men will not attain to a virtue by being told that it is a virtue; they must see the good that is in it.

Whoever reforms an individual, helps to reform society. Ministers should teach rather than preach, and get society on a higher basis. Our present civilization is savagism compared to that which should exist.

Man is by nature a lover of science, which means knowledge of facts and forces; and art, also, which is skill, and the voluntary control of forces. But the true glory of man is the supremacy of his spiritual nature. His art, science, philosophy, literature, are nothing unless they spring out of the spiritual fountain. Social disease can never be cured so long as it exists in individuals. Before we can correct any defect, we must know exactly in what that defect consists, must know the precise faculty which is too strong, or too weak, or wrongly exercised.

We shall have need to consider four things in order to describe human action. One is the constitution and tendencies inherited from parents; the second is family and social influences; the third is formal teaching in schools and colleges commonly called education; the fourth is that inscru

table will-power that belongs to every rational and accountable being, through which to modify and control results, whatever the original constitution or social influence, or positive instruction that may have been given.

Let the parents see that they transmit only good qualities and tendencies to their children, and healthy bodies as well, or they will enter upon life under conditions far less favorable than they would otherwise, and these tendencies may not be overcome. God has established the law of heredity, by which the parents become responsible for the constitution of the child as it is born into life; and has He not established a law of social heredity, by which the family becomes responsible for what the youth shall be at his second birth into society? Let the spirit of a family be one of industry, economy, kindness, cheerfulness, temperance, purity, liberality and morality, and the child will be actuated by the animus—the general spirit of the family. From such a family, the child will be almost sure neither to be a promoter of discord, nor to fall into bad habits. Parents are willing to pay money for their children, but parental faithfulness is the gift of God, and cannot be purchased with money. Let parents be what they should be, and the community will be what it should be. Society must see and actually enjoy a nobler type of home before it can be blessed with a nobler type of manhood.

The world is overwhelmed with the dead weights of selfishness and passion, by which the exalted and ennobling aims of life are shorn of the wings of progressive flight. As progression implies imperfection to be overcome, and all progress brings an immediate and glorious satisfaction, then let us begin, for there is a great individual work to be done. The death-screen which is before us is as certain to fix upon each the effects of bad habits and mental conditions, as that to-morrow will be the natural result of the cause and

condition of to-day. The science of life commences here, and it demands purity of life, chastity of thought, and the ascendency of all the noble qualities of human nature.

Many are born with no fine sense of virtue. Mankind cannot be too compassionate with man; they are just what circumstances have made them, including heredity. They are weak or strong, brilliant or stupid, intellectual or animal, moral or immoral, to the extent that they have been made so by their conditions and progenitors. It is with the cause of character that man should deal.

come as long as causes are in operation.

Effects must

There is an unnatural superabundance of births. Men and women, ignorant of the laws of God written on the body and soul, enter the most holy state of marriage, and, regardless of consequences, propagate their combined imperfections. Children are born with defective, unkind, deformed, unlovely bodies and minds, born of parents who, by yielding to inordinate desires, have disobeyed the laws of life, and their offspring must accept their existence with many predispositions to discordant living.

Man is a harp of a thousand strings, which, when properly played upon, gives forth the most sweet and delightful harmony; but should the instrument be intrusted to ignorant hands, and should its delicate chords be harshly stricken, the most frightful inharmonies will issue therefrom.

Immorality is human weakness, transmitted or superinduced by uncongenial circumstances. Many persons are under the influence of psychological imitation. Persons in which the nervous temperament predominates are found to be far more prone to imitate any striking trait or action in others. This physical weakness subjects the individual to deleterious and obnoxious influences, if not counteracted by a stronger moral power. The knowledge of psychological

and moral laws will, inevitably, broaden human sympathy and produce a more discriminating and mollifying judgment of human frailties.

Society is covered all over with the fortifications of ignorance. Men are profoundly ignorant of themselves, and environed by false conditions, which must be changed before all the affections, desires and faculties can have an equal action and be properly developed. In every joint of the body, and, therefore, in the function of the mind, you see bad habits looking you in the face. From many considerations and causes unworthy of the man of science, and the philanthropist not the less, the world has been, generation after generation, deprived of most essential parts of human knowledge. But the hour has at last arrived for rending the vail of ignorance. There is an ocean of crime and pollution under the fashion and hypocritical modesty of civilized society, surging its mighty tides against the constitutions of the young to an extent almost beyond belief or delineation.

The curtain must be rolled up. Parents, guardians, brothers, sisters, strangers, lovers! You are admonished to gaze upon the scene! The vices and secret crimes of the young must be fully and truthfully exposed to public apprehension. Without such knowledge of the interior abominations of civilization, there is no security against the greatest calamity which can befall a nation-youthful depravity, constitutional weakness, hereditary licentiousness, incompatible marriages, insanity, imbecility, idiocy.

Who play tricks with conscience, dare not look at their own vices. If the vices of sensualism or conjugalism were confined to youth, if their baneful effects did not invade the precincts of manhood, the matter might remain wrapt in ignorance, prudishness, obscurity and mystery. But how

inexpressibly different are the facts! The fire and genius, the beauty and elasticity and chastity of childhood and youth, are not only laid in hopeless ruins by physiological vices, but the distressing influence of such vices extends to subsequent years, poisoning the normal joys of marriage; blasting the beauty and sacredness of love; killing the charms and attractions of offspring, and spreading deformity and social animality where only cheerfulness and satisfied content should reign. Humanity demands the health of her children; and everything unfavorable to their health and prosperity must be abandoned.

Ignorance everywhere abounds, and is too manifest even in the humanitarian institutions. Medical and all other mysteries should be the property of the people. Philosophical minds and true philanthropists are never chained to the rack of superficial modesty. They seek out and expose the hidden sources of mystery; they strive to understand and remove their causes. The question of physiology may be legitimately attached to the subjects of health, chastity, virtue, happiness and spiritual nobility of character. It is a subject which concerns not merely the young; the aged have great interest in the development and excellency of coming hosts. It is a question of fearful import not to young men only-for the yet unmarried woman must find her companion on that side of the race. It is a theme of wondrous magnitude, not merely for this day and nation; the weal or woe of countless millions, yet unborn, rests upon the foundation of the present.

All excess is vicious. It is enough to know that physiological and psychological laws remonstrate against stimulants. Unnatural tensions give momentary pleasure and brilliancy, but re-action must follow; herein lies the mischief. He who wishes to bless himself and the world by example,