We see in several of the States of the Union a decrease, a relative, if not a positive decrease, of the native population, and the physical man actually degenerating, and to an extent that should alarm the statesman and the patriot. Do you explain this fact by the change in the climate and the geographical position? The geographical position remains unchanged, and if the climate has changed at all, it has been by way of amelioration. Do you attribute it to a change in the physical condition of the country? Not at all. There is no mystery as to the matter, and though the effects may be physical or physiological, the causes are well known to be moral, and chief among them is the immoral influence of the doctrine the professor and his brother physiologists are doing their best to diffuse among the people. The cause is in the loss of religious faith, in the lack of moral and religious instruction, in the spread of naturalism, and the rejection of supernatural grace--without which the natural cannot be sustained in its integrity--in the growth of luxury, and the assertion of material goods or sensible pleasures, as the end and aim of life. There is always something morally wrong where prizes need to be offered to induce the young to marry, and to induce the married to suffer their children to be born and reared. So, also, do we know the secret of the rise, prosperity, decline, and death of the renowned nations of antiquity. The Romans owed the empire of the world to their temperance, prudence, fortitude, and respect for religious principle, all of them moral causes; and they owed their decline and fall to the loss of these virtues, to their moral corruption. The same may be said of all the ancient nations. Their religion, pure, or comparatively pure, in the origin, becomes gradually corrupt, degenerates into a corrupt and corrupting superstition, which hangs as a frightful nightmare on the breasts of the people, destroying their moral life and vigor. {171} To this follows, with a class, scepticism, the denial of God or the gods, an Epicurean morality, and the worship of the senses; the loss of all public spirit--public as well as private virtue, and the nation falls of its own internal moral imbecility and rottenness, as our own nation, not yet a century old, is in a fair way of doing, and most assuredly will do, if the atheistic philosophy and morality of the physiologists or positivists become much more widely diffused than they are. The church will be as unable, with all her supernatural truth, grace, life, and strength, to save it, as she was to save the ancient Graeco-Roman Empire, for to save it would require a resurrection of the dead.