| Show AIVAXCIKG THE WHITE GROSS i lnin Taut to tJic PCIVB About the Social Evil White Cross sermon in aid of the church movement against adultery was reached by the Rev Dr B F DeCosta in the chapel of St Augustine in Houston Hous-ton street New York east of the Bowery Perhaps you did not come here to see God he said Perhaps you would rather see something else not in spirit but with the fleshly eye The licentious Jews were ashamed of their vice and tried to cover it but the Lord called them ivhited sepulcheres The sacrifice of all that was best and purest in women was an essential rite of some old heathen re ii nons and the votaries made a virtue of constant vice The high priest in their temple of Venus was a courtesan and i I the religion was prostitution It is suggested by some that certain evils always have existed and always will exist and that as man is possessed with certain appetites he will commit certain sins but it does not follow anymore any-more than there will always be poverty because a certain social condition makes a needy class A revolution is to come that will give all honest and capable men n fair chance Society is not always tro ing to be responsible for the manufacture ot poor and of drunkards or of prostitutes prosti-tutes either The social revolution is not going to take in only a part but the wholeto reconstruct society from top to bottom The question is not will a certain portion por-tion of men and women sin butwill they sin by your connivance The social evil is a cancer and society must destroy it or society will die It has destroyed every people that let it alone from Sodom to the nineteenth century If it is let alone here it will destroy America The dram shop is the antecedent to the house of the strange woman Of 2000 fallen women whose cases have been 1 studied nearly all fell through strong drink Many people prepare for vice by intemperance in eating It is idle for any man to think of being pure while he plays the glutton So with bad literature I whether it comes through silly novels or through vile and cheap Sunday papers which fathers place on their tables Sunday Sun-day mornings I charge again that you respectable people are responsible for the existence of the strange woman She would die out in six weeks were it not for the support of men sitting in the pews The Vhite Cross is a pure Christianity applied to every department de-partment of the physical and moral world Purity of the body must go with purity of the sonl Then men will be what they ought to be and they will never be ashamed to look a wife sister or mother in the face The double standard of virtue which bears harshly against women is accepted most strongly by women who turn against their own sex If there is any object to be found in the earth equal to a mean and contemptible man it is a heartless woman A woman may repent and become as chaste as the icicles in the temple of Diana and yet she is not allowed to come into the honse and scrub the floor In the mans case not even repentance is required re-quired Women I beg of you to standup stand-up for your sex and make one standard for men and women alike We seek to save woman by saving man In ninety eight cases out of every hundred the man is the cause of the fall Who is paying to keep the 10000 women of New York on the streets tonight Man is paying to keep them there and to damn them there I |
