CHAPTER III.
FIRST PRINCIPLES "But what can we do ?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the forlorn accents of a latent despair.
Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress two cardinal points upon you.
The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple with.

All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities.

But the evil which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on which it rests.

It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust.

The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.
The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.
The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory.