Is it asked, if the disclosures that I shall make are not by their very publication subversive of good morals, and the calling attention to the true relation of the sexes suggestive to bad men of, and conducive towards, their false relations? I answer,— First, that to ignore the existence of sin, error, misery, is in reality to encourage and to increase them. It is like walking upon thinly-crusted lava, or upon breaking ice, certain to prevent our saving others, ready indeed to ingulf even ourselves. We varnish over or seek to conceal vice, and it loses half its grossness—it becomes attractive perhaps, or fashionable; but if we strip it of its veil, any soul, not wholly smirched, will recoil with horror. Again, all of us learn the lessons of life by experience—sad experience, indeed, it too often is. Many a man would give even his own soul could his past life be restored to him, and its follies, its sins be effaced. Too often his soul is no longer his own to give: inextricably entangled in passion’s web, wound about and about with its myriad threads, there remains but the dead and worthless semblance of himself, that can be restored by nought save the boundless grace of God. Who would not gladly escape such risk, and welcome every premonition of danger? Still again, many, claiming to be immaculate themselves, will ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And yet, living together in communities, as we do, it must be confessed that we are responsible, every one of us, and to a very great extent, for the shortcomings and evil deeds of all the rest, and it must also be confessed that there does not exist, that there probably never existed, a perfectly immaculate man, who never once has erred in the very matter we are now considering, either in deed, or in word, or in thought. Consoling indeed for those of us who humbly confess our infirmities is this very fact. Take the very basest of us, and he at times is conscious of vain regrets of his own misdeeds, and a fond desire that those whom he loves, for every man has such, may be better than he. Take the very best of us, and he sees a height beyond any he has yet attained, that he prays he may yet reach and pass.