Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream.

To think that we can solve a problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means--as so many good and earnest women seem to imagine--by any multiplication of Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent organizations--is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and straws.

The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a great degree revolutionize our life.
My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double standard.

I know well how much has been said and written on this point; it has been insisted on possibly _ad nauseam_.

But even now I do not think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a "tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true moral order.