I say to you young men preparing for the priesthood, if you want strong churches and strong men and women in them, go worship with your parishioners in their homes. Take my word for it that you will be surprised at the result. We have filled the hungry mouths in our land of plenty, but there are more starving hearts than you know of all about you. Build up the family altar, and the home will come back of itself. Do not bother yourselves about “God in the Constitution,” if you have Him installed in the people’s homes. If God is feared in the home, _there_ is written the Constitution which will never need amendment. The greatest peril that besets the American home to-day is its godlessness. Put back the family altar and let there be written over it the old stout challenge to the devil and his hordes: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord;” and even the slum tenement shall seek to attack it in vain. In the town of which I spoke, there have in the last half dozen years grown up two clubs, one for the men, the other for the women, and I am told that practically they all belong. The result has been the disappearance of pretty nearly all of the pleasant neighborhood life of that day when a man gave his arm to his wife after supper and they went together for a social call upon some neighbor, for a chat, a little music, going home in good season for bed, telling one another that they had had a good time. There are no good times in that town any more—not of that kind at all events. The men spend the evenings bowling at the club; the women meet in committees to plan public improvements. The old time supper has become a later dinner and it is the rarest of all things to find a neighbor “dropping in” unannounced—so rare that one feels that it somehow is not good form any longer. The family firesides are cold. And the young—I am told that there is a disproportionate number of them growing up idle and useless, if not worse. They have lost their hold, though they do not know it. I am no enemy of clubs, although I know little of them; but, as a substitute for the altar, I will fight them until I die. And I am a great backer of woman’s influence in public affairs—it has been good always and everywhere in my sight; but I say to you now that I would rather see, we could better afford, that every club and organization in the land should cease to exist, and every ten-pin alley stand silent and deserted, than that the old home life which centred about the family hearth should go from among us. With it goes that which nothing, no commercial gain, no advance in science, or government or human knowledge, can replace.