22 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
sermons. A small minority only can be directly influenced in their 
conduct by an appeal to their reasons with abstract truth. You may 
persuade a savage that civilization is a good thing, but, unless, in 
addition to this, you instruct him step by step in the elements of 
culture, there is every chance of his remaining a savage. You 
may inculcate in a man the virtue of self-sacrifice, but unless you 
can tell him, at the same time, how self-sacrifice will show itself in 
his daily conduct, and in his particular acts, it is more than probable 
that he will go through life just as selfish as the rest of us. We have 
made wonderful advances in all the arts except the art of living. We 
are able to control the forces of nature even to the mystery of 
electricity, but we, as a race, are making no advance in that which is 
nearer to us, and should come first, the controlling of ourselves and 
the conforming of lives to a standard that is ever becoming higher. 
Lest I should seem to overstate the case I would like to give some 
testimony in support of what I have said. A writer in Zhe (Vene- 
teenth Century says: “‘ Crime in England during the last thirty years 
for which we possess official returns, has not decreased in gravity 
and has been steadily developing in magnitude.” In the United 
States, where we would expect to find life-problems being worked 
out under the most favorable conditions, what do we see? Hon. 
Andrew D. White in a recent address said: ‘‘ The number of deaths 
by murder in the United States is more than double the average in 
the most criminal! countries of Europe ; and this number is increasing 
in our country every year and in a ratio far greater than the 
increase of the population.” The statistics of 1890-91 show an 
increase of less than 25 percent. in population, but an increase of 
59 per cent. in the number of persons charged with murder. Presi- 
dent Schurman, of Cornell University, said not long ago in speaking 
of divorce: ‘The United States grants more divorces than all the 
world put together. We grant annually more than 25,000—a 
hundred a day if you give the judges a Saturday half-holiday.” If 
the present rate of increase should continue “a hundred years from 
now more than half of all marriages will be terminated by divorce.” 
He says the evil of divorce is not a single isolated factor in out 
modern life, but only one of many kindred aspects of what we may 
call the modern spirit, “which is a tendency to selfishness, to 
impatience, to immorality, to irreligion.” Our daily newspapers are 
little but a catalogue of crimes in all grades of society. The world 
