=A suggestion.=--The author would suggest that the reader pause one moment before he criticises or rejects the opinions of the great and godly men. What right has a married man to preach, teach and demand continence among young people, his sons and daughters, if he cannot practice self-restraint on a level with the savage and the lower animals? The violations of the laws of sex are the chief causes of human degeneracy. Where married people have been falsely educated in the idea that marriage means unrestricted indulgence and under this delusion have created unnatural demand, a horde of evils will follow. If this unfortunate class care only for a selfish pleasure, the children will follow each other closely and will receive a poor heredity. If they use preventive means to restrict the size of the family, the few children born into the home will receive an unfortunate heredity. Excess in marriage impoverishes the body, mind and soul and unfits for true parentage. Every device used to prevent conception or to destroy unwelcome life will injure the parents and the occasional accidental and unwelcome child will receive a most unfortunate heredity. The mental and moral states, as well as the physical condition of the parents, for months before and at the initial moment and during gestation, must necessarily become a part of the child. CHAPTER XLVIII DELINQUENCY--CAUSES AND REMEDIES =Purity, a nation’s strength.=--The strength and perpetuity of a nation consist not in its standing army, mighty navy, millions of population, strong fortifications, inexhaustible resources of wealth, but in the purity and strength of its manhood and womanhood. Babylon, Greece and Rome did not fall because of a shortage of men, weakness of fortifications, exhausted resources or lack of warships, but because of a degenerate manhood and womanhood. =The home threatened.=--Are there agencies of degeneracy operating in our social fabric that threaten our nation’s strength and perpetuity? We shall see. The greatest social problems of the church and state must be solved in the home. Whatever agencies destroy the home will ultimately destroy society, the church and the nation.