Hypocrisy is the vice which, above all others, our Lord denounces with the most awful condemnation, raising the drunkard and the harlot, with His far-seeing, merciful purity, and thrusting the Scribe and Pharisee--secret fornicators--into their place. ‘He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.’ Hypocrisy is the vice which distinguishes in the most marked degree those nations which dare to call themselves Christian, but who practically deny every principle of Christ’s teaching in the conduct of public and, to a great extent, private affairs. It is under this reign of hypocrisy that a more dangerous condition of sexual evil has grown up amongst us than has ever existed amongst heathen nations. When a savage tribe enslaves its enemies and trades in human flesh it does not trade against its conscience. In its rudimentary condition of slow emergence from brutish ignorance it knows no higher standard than a savage display of muscular force. When a polygamous nation buys both men and women, or endeavours to enforce the physical chastity of women by harem imprisonment, it obeys the highest authority it knows of, its religion, believed in, although erroneous in its teaching. The bitterest hatred and undying hostility felt by Mohammedan as well as savage communities to their Western invaders is due to the violation of their women, and the treatment of those women according to the hypocritical customs of their lustful conquerors. However false the standard of the savage or semi-barbarous peoples may be, they possess one, and strive to realize it. But the corruption which the latest and intensest phase of competitive money values has introduced into the most enlightened nations, is unexampled in the history of the race. The deliberate reasoning out and justification of the conversion of women into things is the abuse of our highest faculties, our power of reason and conscience. The cruel vice of fornication, protected by hypocrisy, is sowing moral scrofula broadcast, and, like an insidious poison, producing generations of feeble, rickety wills and maniacal monsters. It is the degeneracy of the race. The palliation of this vice is shaking the foundation of our civilization, by destroying the moral basis on which alone progressive society can rest. The purchaser of a woman is directly guilty, but a deeper source of evil influence is the man or the woman who excuses and sanctions the purchase of women, by upholding a double standard of morality for the sexes. In the present age, while the actively licentious are following evil customs like sheep, some of their intellectual and spiritual leaders are throwing a veil of hypocrisy over these customs. The God-given faculties for creating literature, investigating science, and promoting religion are being perverted to the justification or palliation of lust.