THE YOUNG MAN'S VIEW.
A ruined young man in one of Chicago's segregated districts for advertising and encouraging vice, asked this question, as he stood on the curbstone in one of our midnight gospel meetings: "If the wise men who are set up over us to rule us want it this way, what can you expect of us?"
Such is the inevitable reasoning of young men. They commonly believe that the city licenses the criminal resorts which its police protect, and they are not conscious of bad citizenship in supporting resorts which are in such favor with the city government.
Long ago Archdeacon Paley wrote in his Moral Philosophy "The avowed toleration, and in some countries, the licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication. The Legislators ought to have foreseen this effect."
LAWGIVERS ARE INEXORABLE.
The greatest of lawgivers, Moses, made no compromise with vice. He is inexorable. "There shall not be a harlot of the daughters of Israel." The daughter of a priest who profaned herself was to be burnt to death. The Old Testament is hot with warnings against patronizing "strange women," that is, foreign prostitutes who had invaded the Holy Land, like the imported white slaves of the French traders here today. Manu, the ancient lawgiver of India, provided that the adulterer should be burnt to death on an iron bed, and the adulteress devoured by dogs in a public place. Buddha speaks with loathing of immoral conduct.
The Son of God, that his mercy towards repentant women who washed his feet with their tears might not be taken as softness towards sin, came back from heaven to say in the Book of Revelation, that he will "cast into great tribulation" and "kill with death" wanton women and the men who visit them. Of these iniquities the compassionate Redeemer says, "Which things I also hate." Rulers cannot claim any consent or condonement of their regulation of vice from the Head of all human government, the King of kings, to whom they must answer for their rule or misrule.
FALLEN GOVERNMENTS AND A FALLEN CHURCH.
So scandalously far can a fallen government and a fallen church depart from the Head of the church and the Head of human government, that we have seen kings, even the pious king of France, Saint Louis, giving a royal permit to harlots; and the Mayor of London, William Walworth, in 1381, managing the brothels at Southwark for the Bishop of Winchester, who owned, licensed and regulated those abominable places. The Reformation party prevailed upon Henry VIII, in the thirty-seventh year of his reign to end this infamy, and "this row of stews in Southwark was put down by the king's commandment, which was proclaimed by sound of trumpet." Thus as Dr. Fuller wrote, "This regiment of sinners was totally and finally routed"—a warning to other vice districts, and an example of how to deal with them.
From that date, 1545 to 1864, England gave no official endorsement to vice. Then a wicked government, after calling the medical head of the system of regulation in Paris to visit London, and getting the Parisian chief of police to write a book for their information, thrust upon the unsuspecting English nation the odious French system of legalized vice—restricting its application at first to certain garrison towns, but cunningly extending it to the whole country, the Crown colonies, and Canada and India. After a heroic crusade of twenty-two years, led by Mrs. Josephine Butler, the aroused conscience of Great Britain compelled Parliament in 1886 to repeal the loathsome Contagious Diseases Acts.