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in hope. Preach the gospel to them. Undeceive them. Help them with Bibles, with kindly welcomes, with generous love, and by these means win victories for Jesus which shall stud your crowns with stars of rejoicing, casting which at Jesus' feet we shall crown him Lord of all. The work performed will greet you in heaven and bless the world, for by their fruits the redeemed shall be known.

IMPERILED HOMES.

"Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death." Jer. 21:8.

Romanism is a colossal fact, threatening the American home. Imperiled homes are all about us. The trouble is, imperiled homes are close beside many of us. Some are in them. With many the dream of happiness is vanished. The hope of happiness at home is gone. Never can I forget the man whose wife is intimate with the priest and is dead to her husband. He is without a home and in Rome without a remedy. Homes are imperiled by what is done in them, and by what is left undone. Homes are destroyed by neglect. Homes are built up only by sacrifice, by care, by consecration. In homes, as elsewhere, there are sins of commission and of omission. Two ways open before every household-a way of life and a way of death. No family is so poor as to be compelled to confess that they had but one way. They all had two. They may have neglected one and accepted the other, but they had them both. No one can walk in both ways. A good many try to do it and fail. A choice must be made. This is true, because what God said to Israel he says to all: "See, I have set before thee this day life and good and death and evil." Strange, life should be placed before good and death before evil. The moralist would place good first and life second, or evil first and death second. That would be wrong. Life in Christ is the seedling; good is the fruit.

"For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts" or good thoughts. It depends upon the condition of the heart.

This is true of homes. It is the character that determines the conduct, the life that declares what the fruit shall be. The possibility of a happy home is within reach of all. "Stop right there,” says some one. "You don't know what I have at home." True, and there is one more thing I don't know-I don't know what you are at home. A man made himself immortal because, when a homeless wanderer, he wrote:

"Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home!"

That is good poetry, but to millions it is a mockery and a sham. To them there is no place out of hell where they would be more miserable; no place where they are less respected and beloved; no place where the "might have beens" are so thickly written, and where attainment of happiness seems so beyond the reach.

Wealth does not make a happy home. There are men worth millions who are more miserable, in their splendid homes, than the poorest sewing woman in her garret, singing "The Song of the Shirt." Think of a man, worth millions, mad at his French cook, mad at his servants, going to one of the best hotels and ordering a splendid dinner, and again, maddened at the service, flying into a passion and dying in a rage. Happiness is within, not without. It

is "life and good."

All remember the poor fellow who enlisted in the army. They came to him and asked, "You enlisted?" "Yes." "As a common soldier?" "Yes." "What will become of your family?" "My family will be better off without than with me," and he told the truth. Think of the wives and children trembling because in a few days the door of the prison will swing open to husband and father, and when he crosses the threshold there comes a brute, a demon, of whom all stand in fear. God planned the home for happiness, for thrift, for the promotion of every good. He gave the husband the headship and proclaimed the principles of home rule. Against this, millions war. The wife rebels at the thought of obedience; the husband becomes careless of his position and the duties incident thereto; the machinery gets out of order; cogs are broken in the wheel; there is a jar-perhaps a conflict, followed by a wreck. There are moments in every history when this truth appears. The tendrils of affection are wounded. They bleed. Provocation has been given which alienates and severs. There is the way of death. Enter it and continue in it, and your doom is fixed. It is possible to find an excuse that seems rational for the conduct.

There is not a home intact at this hour that might not have been broken. Its urn of hope might have been shattered. Its happiness might forever have been destroyed. Why is it a strong tower into which its occupants may run and find shelter from the storm and

tempest? Why is there love in the heart, kindness in the life, and joys with which a stranger may not intermeddle? We answer: Because you chose to ignore self, with its rights unquestioned, and to hold all in abeyance for the general goo.!. Self-abnegation is the tap-root from which the tree of kindness, of generosity, of nobility, of true greatness, springs.

Why is another home a ruin? There are abundance of excuses; listen to them: one is frail, temper quick, judgment poor, ability not the best; and the other, holding the scales, as if any one was equal to that task, condemns in the companion the very thing allowed, tolerated and defended in self. There is no fairness, no patience; and so two immortal beings, with an opportunity to be a blessing, become to themselves a curse and to the world a nuisance. 1. Homes are imperiled by a separation from God's plan. Here we reach bed rock.

"The head of the woman is the man."

(I Cor. 11:3.) Romanism declares the head of the woman is the confessor. Christ said: "Have ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Matt. 19:4-6.) That is God's plan. Mormonism sets it aside and battles for polygamous marriages. The one wife is forsaken for some other woman. The home is broken up; God's law is violated, and misery ensues.

It is said the self-poised condor can behold two streams which divide a continent, taking their rise at a single fountain, pushing down different sides of the mountain and passing to distant seas. It is doubtful if there be such a fountain. A fountain is the parent of one stream, not of two. In every home is a fountain. The stream takes its characteristics from it. The choice determines destiny. Life and happiness are the counterparts of each other, and so are death and misery.

Mormonism imperils our homes-not because of what it is doing in Utah, but because the error is tolerated here. In New York it is possible for a man to live with a half dozen wives, providing he marries them in different states. A man is living in the city of New

York with two sisters.

the other in New Jersey.

One was married to him in New York and
Both are with him in New York, for

Mormonism in fact finds a welcome, though not in name.

The same want of fidelity to God's plan is seen in the way wives fail to cling to husbands and husbands turn from the wives they took and promised to cherish to wives of others whom they covet. "Dress that woman, while I go for a doctor," cries the adulterous paramour, as the woman grows black in the face and is struck with death in the midst of sin, because God's law is trampled on.

To the wail of sorrow now heard we are not accustomed. Go where Mormonism rules, and it is everywhere filling the air. The sorrow of broken-hearted wives, the degradation and debasement of adulterous men, are terrible to contemplate. What will the American people do for the imperiled home at the heart of the continent? Look nearer home. This brings us back to the truth,

and compels us to say in this presence:

2.

Homes are imperiled when the inmates choose the bad in preference to the good.

It is what a man or woman is within that determines what he or she is without. Belief influences conduct. When we called attention to the fact that a million of women and more than a million of little girls are asked questions by over one hundred thousand priests which if taken upon the lips of any evangelical minister in the presence of wife or daughter would excite the indignation of the community and cause the perpetrator of the outrage to be branded with an ineffaceable mark of condemnation, we created widespread alarm. In the book we have proven this, as far as it is possible to do so and not incur peril for publishing literature that is obscene. Now we go farther, and say that it is the duty of law-makers, the guardians of a great public trust, to call before them books and persons and find out if the truth has been stated. If so, then something must be done about it, or we surrender the homes of millions to polluting and degrading influences.

There are difficulties in the way of grappling with this question. It is the theory that toleration, freedom of conscience and religious liberty compel us to consent to people's going the wrong way as readily as we would to their going the right way. That may be true, if we have set before them the right way. But if we permit

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