This is a grim fact when the future of the race is considered; and of its grimness there can be no doubt. The vital statistics do not lie, and they are the proof. There are other proofs. The statistics of baptisms are steadily falling. In many West End congregations the sacrament of baptism has become a rarity! Sunday schools are getting smaller and smaller. The records of seven years (1908-14) showed the appalling fact that fourteen of the chief Free Church denominations of Britain have lost 257,952 scholars. The materials out of which the Church {12} was formerly built are crumbling away. Empty cradles mean empty Sunday schools, empty classes, and, ere long, empty pews. The strangest thing is that in face of the forces that threaten destruction the Churches are silent--as if mesmerised! In these last years even the church-going population of this country was rapidly reverting to the base conditions in which Christianity found humanity, and from which the Cross in a measure rescued it. And the Church has lost the power of sounding the trumpet and warning the people of coming judgment. IV When we inquire into the causes of this parlous state to which the race has been brought, we find that the greatest is self-deception. If men and women realised what they were doing, they would be horrified. But they don't realise it. They are acting on noble principles! They can provide for and educate two children {13} better than six; therefore, in the interests of the race, they will only have two! One parent wrote to the Press recently that he could only give a public-school education to one boy, and therefore he had no more! They have the idea that by coddling the few they will usher in the super-race. In short, they murder the race, but they do it on noble principles, in conformity with the sanctions of religion, and in the name of the most high God! Their lives are a direct reversal of the elementary canons of morality; but they themselves imagine that they are the most perfect products of evolution, and that they are, by a process of racial suicide, bringing the race to its perfection--ushering in the super-race and the super-man. What a false education must that be to which the race is thus sacrificed. Education is not a matter of money or accomplishments, but of wonder, reverence, imagination, and awe. Heaven and earth are waiting, without money or price, to {14} thrill the young heart with glory and loveliness; but the poor soul must not be born because he cannot go to Eton. And the great wide world is calling for men; provinces added yearly to the Empire demand men; great plains wait the spade and the plough; the realms of King George have as yet only their fringes occupied, and the race must produce the men who will go in and possess, or other races, not yet tired of life, will enter in. And yet, in the name of the race, the race is being sacrificed.