And what do we mean by their safety? We know there are some in these days who ask the question--"Are you saved?" meaning by that, "Have you the eternal salvation?" It is a presumptuous question, and if answered at all is answered presumptuously. It is forestalling the everlasting things. Safety as we speak of it is not that. But--peril tracks the course of the young, peril in some way perhaps of deeper hazard than our fathers knew. There is that peril as old at least as Solomon, and which he expressed in this way: "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth: and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes." Follow, that is--putting the poetry aside--follow the life of selfish pleasure and indulgence to which thou art inclined. There has always been that peril. It has run upon the courses of the world's youth all down the ages. But now its lines are darker--at all events than they were in the days of the writer of Ecclesiastes--"Know thou," _he_ said, "that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." And we may say this too. But there is a large number of young persons now who will answer: "We do not know this: we know nothing about God: who He is, or _whether_ He is. If we are not to walk in the ways of our heart and the sight of our eyes, to please ourselves and care for nothing else, you must say to us something beyond this, that God will bring us into judgment." Brethren, here is the greatest peril of this age. We may find one here and another there who, with atheism at his heart, is still upright in life. But break down the belief in God, and what the morals of the people shall be, let that nation answer which set upon her altars now nearly a hundred years ago the image of the goddess of reason. Let faith in God fall out of the young man's heart or the young woman's heart, and with it all fear of God, and what shall you put in its place? What instead of this shall keep them straight in their way? shall hold them safe? There is reputation. But this is a shifting authority. It changes with conditions. It has no fixed standard. It depends on opinion. That which makes the young in the most disastrous sense of the word _unsafe_, may in no way interfere with their reputation--but quite otherwise--with those among whom they live. Then there is what some have called the enthusiasm of humanity. We cannot form any estimate of this as a power over men, because we have no sort of understanding what it means. And there is civilization. Is it civilization which makes laws or admits of laws and finds accommodating administrators of laws, under the action of which the most sacred charge of a State--its helpless and innocent childhood--is left a prey to vile associations of men and women, from whose soul within them is obliterated all that was Divine, and all which is not devilish?