“THE following messages are printed in response to many requests for their publication. I have allowed the local coloring to remain in the discourses, because I felt that these elements might add to the vitality of the messages, and make them more concrete and real.
“I have not softened the messages, either, by ‘retouching’ them. These messages were stenographically reported, and they are given here just as God gave them to the messenger,—hot from the heart.
“Happily, however, we are getting away from that false modesty which is not willing to talk about these evils, in order that they may be exposed and corrected, but is willing to tolerate them in guilty and shameful silence. We need to substitute the challenging tones of truth for this cowardly and prudish reserve. We need to speak out. We need knowledge of these secret enemies of our homes. These evils feed on silence and grow by stealth, and we ought today to tell the whole truth and not compromise with evil. ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ As in Hosea’s day, thousands and tens of thousands are being ‘destroyed for lack of knowledge.’ Men and women, boys and girls,—our children, our brothers and our sisters,—are going down. Surely it is our duty to unmask the sources of their destruction, and to seek by all honest and legitimate means to defend ourselves against these secret assailants of the sanctity of the church, the purity of the home, the good order of the state, and the very life of the nation itself.
After every war, there is a wave of immorality. We have just passed through the greatest war of all time, and we are now witnessing the widest wave of immorality in the history of the human race. Like a consuming fire, it is sweeping over the world. Only a spurious and silly optimism can deny this fact. All who really know conditions, both in Europe and America, confirm the fact.”—Rev. John Roach Straton
