I could give you others, but these speak volumes for the value of this policy; and, from the bottom of my heart this morning, I say God bless the Young Men’s Christian Association, and pledge them my poor efforts and influence, and prayers to help forward the work so nobly begun. I know not where to stop. My heart is so full that it seems as if I could spend the day on this theme. But I must stop, and, in conclusion I say, first to the church, accept frankly the responsibility which God throws on you in the persons of these young men. You are the appointed agency, the proper agency, and the only agency to save and restrain and protect them. You cannot shirk it, especially as city churches. Into these centres of trade and education God pours the young men, and he asks you and me this morning if we are ready for them; if, while business and education are multiplying their facilities, the gospel of Christ, represented by the churches, is multiplying its facilities to make the city the _best place_ for the education of young men in virtue. He asks these churches if there is nothing significant, no message to her in the concentration of the mass of our young men and the mass of Christian culture, organized power, and wealth, at one point? Have these things no relation to each other? Yes, brethren, they have. There is no evading it. The finger of Providence points unswervingly to these city churches as the great sources of Christian influence upon young men. Let us not fail to hear these voices. The ten thousand appliances of vice, confronting the church with brazen defiance, or with devilish ingenuity and secresy sapping the foundations of manly honor and integrity, call to us, deal gently with the young man. Fathers and mothers, the yearnings of whose hearts you read full easily in your love for your own sons, whose happiness, whose very lives are bound up in the honor and prosperity of these sons and brothers, call to us from their distant homes in quiet villages, and on the open farm lands, call to us with agonizing earnestness—deal gently for our sakes with the young man. Our community, our country, calls to us. Oh, when I look upon society and see what characters ride rampant there, when I look at government and see the awful corruption festering there, when I see how men in power, from the chief magistrate of the nation down to the humblest postmaster, will sell their souls for party, and betray their country to its enemies through lust of power, or something else, God knows what; when I see drunkenness holding high carnival in the nation’s capitol, reeling in the seat of the President, and retailing its maudlin declamation before a sickened country from Washington to Chicago, I can only turn to God and the future. Our only hope is in the work of the Christian church through all its agencies, social, ecclesiastical and educational, moulding out of the glorious material so abundantly at its disposal, a band of men who