Thus the howl of the witty, the brilliant, yet the thoroughly irreligious. The _Saturday Review_ had its say in an article so stupid in its bitterness that I do not wish to quote it here. But I should not be giving a complete picture if I did not include one or two of the remarks made by the professedly anti-Christian press--newspapers which owed their very existence to their pandering to vice. For example, an amusing print--long since fallen into oblivion--but, during its brief space of life, known as _Sporting Truth_, was pleased to remark as follows-- "The best censors of morals are the public, who are quite able to get along without the aid of the Council. We do not want to be made moral by a paternal Council any more than we wish to be made sober by Act of Parliament. And the sooner the Council turns itself to its own work--to the better drainage of the city, to the improvement of the water supply, and the thousand and one other urgent needs of this mighty town--the better we shall be pleased. And if they must have the spies and informers they appear to have so plentifully engaged--the Peeping Toms, the Paul Prys, the key-hole listeners, the dirty-minded, leprous beings they seem so pleased to patronise--the man who can never see a couple crossing a field but he scents immorality in the air, the lineal descendants of those revered elders in God who concealed themselves in order to descry Susannah's nakedness--if they must have these writhing, detestable _police de moeurs_ in their employ, let them withdraw them from music halls, and send them to the sewers; and the quicker they are poisoned in that foul, mephitic atmosphere, the better for the business of the world." This is enough. It is necessary to have indicated the nature of the opposition to Mr. Charrington's work for the purification of the music halls, but it serves no good purpose to particularise further. Let me rather turn to another side of the evangelist's fighting life. Let me tell, as I am impatient to tell, of his wonderful purity crusade, and its results. It is a terrible story, and shows Frederick Charrington, perhaps, in the greatest peril of his career, yet--as always--undaunted and unstayed. CHAPTER VII THE FIGHT FOR THE PURITY OF THE EAST END In 1885, the late Mr. Stead, whose death this year in the "Titanic" suddenly closed so brilliant a career, startled the whole of England by the publication of his "Maiden Tribute" in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, of which he was editor at that time. When the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was talked out just before the defeat of the Ministry it became necessary to rouse public attention to the necessity for legislation on this painful subject.