SNARES FOR UNWARY FEET.
By S.
THERE is a true optimism, and there is an optimism which is nothing less than sheer blindness to the conditions that exist. We are living in an age of license—license of saloons, license of vice, and license of all kinds of attractions that lead to both. The snares that have been set for the unwary feet of both age and youth are beyond number, and innocence and virtue are not safe even under police protection; for in many instances the police are protecting the vice and the snares and pitfalls, rather than the persons who would fain escape them. Rural districts are continually feeding the already congested centers of population, and in those centers lurk the ravenous Minotaurs, whose appetite is never satiate, tho it feed continually upon the innocent offspring of a million desolated homes. There is no adequate safeguard to-day even for those who prize virtue above rubies. The following extract from a sermon recently delivered in Brooklyn, N. Y., by the Rev. Newell Dwight Hills, at the Plymouth Church will show something of the terrible snares that beset the feet of the young in that and adjacent cities; and what is true of those great cities is true to a greater or less extent, of all the large centers of population, and of many that are not so large:— There never was an age when cities held more temptations, and the necessity for safeguards was greater. There never was an era when there were so many forces gilding sin. We have come to a time when all the places where vice reigns and men appeal to the lower passions are made beautiful. It is a popular saying among the thousands of young men who come to this city from the country, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” But that sentence should be interpreted to mean, “When in hell, do as the devils do.” It is an age when beautiful paintings and stained-glass windows adorn saloons and hotels; when men are hired to write alluring plays; when tunes are made catchy to convey suggestive words; a time when gardens such as those on the road to Coney Island abound, where young men and girls stop, first for a chop or a roll, and then for worse. It is easy enough to break through the hedge of innocence. According to the American nowadays, the Revised Version of the Bible seems to be, “Obey your children.” If to-day a child does not wish to go to church or Sunday-school, he is not made to go. Parents should themselves drill into children the principles of morality and integrity. Men and women, if you find your children go astray, do not blame them, but their fathers and mothers. It is thought that the methods of restraint of our New-England forefathers were too severe. Thank God they were rigorous. Our pleasure-loving age differs from that age as a jewsharp from a pipe organ. Don’t think for a moment, young men and women, that because you are living the life of the flesh, you have any conception of pleasure. Liberty degenerates quickly into license. Every time you commit a single sin, you cut a sensitive nerve of happiness. If you could only hear the stories that are told to me. If you ever had to go to pray at the bedside of a dying girl, and heard her curse you with hideous curses, and ask the devil to dam you for the sin you had heard her confess, you could understand what a pastor sometimes has to hear. Another peril is the tendency of Americans to turn night into day. All the wreckages of life are in the night. If we could only go back to old-fashioned candles and bed at eight o’clock, we would soon get back to virtue and integrity. Men and women, if you want to ruin your children, turn them loose in the streets at night. Give them parties when they are ten or twelve years old. Give the boys dress suits, the girls party dresses. Teach the latter to count their little lovers before they are twelve, and then God pity the man that marries these unmarried widows at fifteen. The picture which he presents is a terrible one, and we know that it is true. The professional optimist will hide his eyes from this, and pin his faith to a glorious future. The true optimist sees the deplorable conditions into which the world has fallen, remembering that God has said it would be as we have found it to be, but pins his faith to God’s promise that when these conditions had reached their climax, He would come to make an end of sin, destroy those who had identified themselves with it, and upon the renewed, purified earth, establish His rule of righteousness. That good time, that glorious future, is hastening on. Sin is reaching its climax in this earth, and the advent of man’s Redeemer draweth nigh.