United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has
just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading
nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that
whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year
before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has
shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that
after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was
wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the
world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want
to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to
let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there.
So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as
the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral
light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who
likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what
is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by
disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses
it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and
make it better.
That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can
do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can
guide the feet of those who are going astray; and when its members have
realized the power of the Christian principle, then they will not be men
if they do not unite to see that the rest of the world experiences the
same emancipation and reaches the same happiness of release.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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