to be educated. In fact, I want them to be as unlike the instructed barbarians of Europe as it is possible to make them. I want a college course that the faculties may be fostered and not forced, that the university may have material to work on, and that real scholars, that real trained men may be the product and the finished result, so that our country may escape from being what Europe is.

It is said that Bismarck once, forecasting a world war, pointed to America as "the one safe country." Yes, it is the one safe country, but unless it turns out real leaders — leaders in its legislative and executive halls, leaders in its universities and its churches, leaders in leadership itself - America will not long remain "the one safe country." America is the richest country in the world as well as the safest. According to an English economist, America's national wealth is about two hundred billion, or twice the wealth of England and very nearly equal the combined wealth of England, France, and Germany. Our wealth is ten times that of Italy, eight times that of Austria, and four times that of France. Don't we need honest guardians for such a treasure?

Our land is the land of opportunity, and here in the South opportunity is at its greatest. Again, the need of men, the need of well-trained, honest men, the need of honorable, the need of educated men. Don't forget that the market value of a man is a dollar or a dollar and a half a day from his head down, and it is a man's own price, and he can get all he asks, from the head up. America is the richest as it is the safest country in the world. We have to make it also the best.

Graduates, just a word of congratulation. Your diplomas come from men who know how to teach, who represent in themselves education at its best. They say you are ready to begin work, and you may believe them. Graduates, don't

make the mistake of sitting down in front of your brand-new diploma and, Micawber-like, wait for something to turn up. You have to be like sportsmen, the venatores and piscatores, and go after the fish and game and don't expect them to go after you. If opportunity does not knock at your door, go out and hustle until you find it. Don't believe that bilious old senator who represented opportunity as knocking only once at every door, but do believe the Mississippi-born poet, Malone, who exploded the Ingalls fallacy in these beautiful words:

"They do me wrong who say I come no more

When once I knock and fail to find you in,
For every day I stand outside your door

To bid you wake and rise to fight and win."

And when you take your place in the world of action, when you seize every opportunity for advancement and progress, never forget at any time, whether at work or at leisure, that you are and must ever be typical Christian gentlemen. Don't forget your Alma Mater, the friends and teachers of your plastic, formative period, and leave no effort untried to have the true principles and methods of education obtain everywhere in our own fair land, that America may be not only the safest, richest, and best of all the nations, the great land of human opportunity, but that it may also become the land of Christ with the spirit of the Gospel permeating the laws, the activities, and the relations of all the favored ones who live and labor under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. Then there will be no need of spasmodic "duty and discipline" movements, to combat softness, slackness, indifference, and indiscipline in America, and no need to have recourse to a eugenic system to raise a race of Americans unconquerable either in peace or in war.

THE CHURCH AND THE SEX PROBLEM

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT A MEETING OF THE AMERICAN
FEDERATION FOR SEX HYGIENE

THE opportunity of addressing this federation is a source of great pleasure to me. As a member of a Church which during its whole existence has waged a constant, strenuous, intelligent warfare against the social evil consequent on the fall of man, and as a teacher whose life is consecrated to the education of boys and young men, I rejoice at the chance of paying tribute to the lofty purpose and unselfish zeal of the members of this society. Your purpose, gentlemen, is sublime, your zeal inspiring. And it is good that such is the case. For there is need of both in view of the delicate problem which is calling for solution.

This question of sex hygiene is not merely pedagogical, nor yet one that affects temporal interests only, such as the health of the individual and the present welfare of the family and State. Though it does not neglect these, still it reaches beyond them and has its chiefest concern with the eternal destiny of man, the fate of his immortal soul. Man's temporal and eternal interests are involved in the problem.

unique importance.

Hence its

In the final analysis the question concerns the abolition of sexual sin. Many suggestions have been made for the accomplishment of this. That which is most in favor at present

advocates the public teaching of detailed sex hygiene to our school children.

A careful study of the proposed courses reveals therein two elements, one intellectual, the other ethical. The former is detailed, the latter vague and purely naturalistic. The course adopted, therefore, will appeal primarily to the intellect. Its main effect will be knowledge, information, not will power, not virtue, either natural or supernatural. The course is incapable of arousing strong moral forces. The appeal is made to the wrong faculty. The emphasis is put in the wrong place. Hence motives for right conduct will be weak and ineffective. Information, aye, even love of learning, cannot keep a man upright before God, cannot cleanse a heart or keep it clean. Knowledge is not moral power. There is a deep psychological truth in the horrid sneer of Mephistopheles that man used reason to be more bestial than the beast. Does not Coleridge insinuate a similar idea by saying that it is principally by the will that we are raised over the estate of an animal? Both authors read history and knew something of psychology. They were not theorizing. Knowledge of itself saves nobody from delinquency.

Almost all our sinful men and youths realize that some dread disease follows sexual sin. The result is not virtue, but precaution to avoid the disease. Better sanitation, not more morality is the outcome. A race of hygienists, not a galaxy of saints is the result. An apostle of this movement sums up my contention in this pithy sentence: "I confess that I am not moral, but I am hygienic." Hygiene is a barrier of straw before the onrush of the primal passion in man. Christ, not hygiene, saved the world. Christ, not hygiene, will clean the world and keep it clean. Hygiene will but give point to Sophocles' burning words: "Fair to the eye, but a festering sore within."

Some ten or twelve years ago the physical dangers of this sin were brought to the attention of our college boys. The horrors of venereal disease were laid bare in lecture and pamphlet. Nothing was hid. A marked improvement in morals has not been noted. Your society is distributing a play called Damaged Goods," whose lesson is my lesson, to wit: knowledge is not a protection against passion. The keen psychologist, William James, approaches the same truth when he insists that sensuous images must be combated by ideals that lie beyond the intellect.

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Why, ladies and gentlemen, if belief in a personal God and an eternal hell is at times scarce sufficient to keep men clear of impurity, is it too much to say that insistence on hygiene will be altogether ineffective for the preservation of chastity? Solomon, who was wise beyond measure, answers: As I knew that I could not otherwise be continent except God gave it, . . . I went to the Lord and besought Him." As it appears to me, not only will the detailed teaching of sex hygiene prove ineffective of the very noble purpose in view, but it will even thwart that purpose.

This phase of the question must be examined critically and dispassionately. Such an examination necessitates the consideration of some facts concerning children of ten or twelve or fifteen years, and youths of eighteen and nineteen years. At these ages the faculties are untrained and to a large extent undisciplined. The imagination is flighty and irresponsible and extremely susceptible to sensuous images. These images impress themselves on the phantasy and notably influence the actions and often the whole life of the youth. Moreover, the will of the child and youth is weak and vacillating and subject to the allurement of pleasure in whatsoever form it may appear. Now the sex passion is for the most part aroused through the