We must, then, proceed on a true principle in trying to remedy the profligacy that disgraces so many of our crowded centres, and the demoralization that is fast gangrening even our rural districts. One thousand eight hundred and forty-odd years ago, you might have observed a poor, meanly-clad wanderer, wending his steps on the Appian way to the Capitol of the world,--the wealthy, magnificent, and ungodly city of Rome. He has passed its gates, and threads his way unobserved through its populous streets. On every side he beholds gorgeous palaces raised at the expense of downtrodden nationalities; stately temples dedicated to as many false gods as nations were congregated in Rome; public baths and amphitheatres devoted to pleasure and to cruelty; statues, monuments, and triumphal arches raised to the memory of blood-thirsty tyrants. He passes warriors and senators, beggars and cripples, effeminate and dissolute women, gladiators and slaves, merchants and statesmen, orators and philosophers;--all classes, all ranks, all conditions of men of every language and color under the sun. Everywhere he sees a maddening race for pleasure; everywhere the impress of luxury, everywhere the full growth of crime, side by side with indescribable suffering, diabolical cruelty and barbarity. And this poor, meanly-clad wanderer was St. Peter. Oh! how the noble heart of the fisherman of Galilee must have bled, when he observed the empire of Satan so supreme--when he witnessed the shocking licentiousness of the temple and the homestead; when he saw the fearful degradation of woman groaning under the load of her own infamy; when he saw the heart-rending inhumanity which slew the innocent babes and threw them into the Tiber; when he saw how prisoners of war, slaves, and soldiers were trained for bloody fights, and entered the arena of the amphitheatre, and strove whole days to strangle one another, for the special entertainment of the Roman people. When Peter came to Rome, that city was the condensation of all the idolatry, all the oppression, all the injustice, all the immoralities of the world; for the world was centred in Rome.