POSITION OF THE CLERGY.
The editor of a great Chicago daily said to me, concerning the readiness of many people to segregate and regulate vice. "The clergy won't stand for it."
Mr. Huxley, shortly before his death, addressing a company of clergymen, said that men of science in their search for the truth, may find themselves obliged to return to the guardians of Divine revelation, the ministers of God, and that if they did so return, he hoped that the clergy would not have betrayed the gates.
James Russell Lowell has told us truly that compromise in a matter of fundamental morals, that is, slavery, cost us the Civil War. In matters of eternal truth, and in matters of fundamental morals, we must not, we will not, compromise. WE WILL NEVER BETRAY THE GATES.
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE WHITE SLAVES AND THE BLACK PLAGUES.
The White Slave Trade means two things, snaring girls and spreading disease. As tuberculosis has been called the White Plague, the diseases spread by vice are now called the Black Plagues. Every father and mother, every youth and maiden should be instructed at once in the right way and put on guard against the reptiles that lure unprotected girls, and against the sting of deadly disease that inevitably punishes all who break the moral law, which is physical law as well.
It is not enough to hint softly at these horrors. The truth must be told as plainly as the preacher's Bible and the physician's microscope tell it. Delicacy is excellent in telling the truth, but the delicacy that suppresses the truth is sin. Our loins are to be girt about with truth—our loins, the apostle says, the region of our sex life—girt with truth, not with ignorance and false modesty.