Here is a clear and successful recognition of the truth that religion has not such strong alliance with the unregenerate heart that she can afford to dispense with all legitimate aids and recommendations. The firemen have their upper parlor in the engine house furnished richly and tastefully. The drinking saloons are invested with all the attractions that marble, and glass, and drapery and pictures can give them. One man who appeared last week before the excise commissioners, said he had expended ten thousand dollars in fitting up his saloon. He knew it would pay; and we cannot expect irreligious young men to be drawn away from these by mere religious appliances. We must employ other attractions. We must make our houses beat the public houses. We must sanctify new forces for this end. Pictures and cabinets, carpets and draperies, music and games are not the devil’s any more than they are ours. Young men will have some retreat beside their comfortless boarding-houses; some society besides their landlord’s family, and it is a match between the devil and the church which of us shall furnish these. Depend upon it, if the church do not give them amusement, regulated on a liberal Christian basis, the devil will give them abundance that is unregulated. God forbid that Christian squeamishness should suffer them to turn aside to the house whose gates lead to hell, and to habits which shall make mothers curse the day they gave them birth. I will give two incidents showing the practical working of this new system in the Troy Association. A member of my church, walking in the street one evening, saw three young men just before him, and overheard one say to the others, “Come, let’s go and take a drink.” One of the others replied, “No, I don’t care to take a drink. Let’s go to the Christian Association Rooms.” “Pshaw!” said the third, “I don’t want to go there to prayer meeting.” “No, no,” was the response; “they’ve got a right nice place there, and we can have a good time.” He went on describing the rooms, and then added: “_and they’re for just such fellows as we are_.” He gained his point, and they followed him to the rooms. Three clubs of young men, or boys rather, were broken up soon after the new rooms were opened. I do not know their character fully, but have been told that drinking was practiced at their meetings. They now frequent the rooms of the society, and pay over into its treasury their club subscriptions. There are many more of such cases. They speak with trumpet tongues as to the value of this policy. They show that its practical influence is against the groggery and the gambling saloon, and if it work no other result, that of itself is vindication enough. And now I leave the subject. I do not shrink from the application of this Bible principle to our amusements. The other, the separative policy, the keeping of leaven and lump apart, has been tried, and has failed, utterly failed.