glorifications of immorality and all those moral transgressions that play a special role in destroying Christian marriage and the Christian family. From the theater in the big cities, where spiritual and intellectual self-improvement is supposedly cultivated, and the elegant novels that are written for these classes, all the way down to the smallest popular newspapers that are distributed and sold door-to-door, it is frequently frivolity, sensuality, and even adultery that gets portrayed in countless twists and turns and depictions. For this very reason, on the other hand, the Christian Church is an object of hate, because it is obligated by its Christian dictates to fight against immorality. And, therefore, whenever any person practicing religion becomes guilty of a moral transgression, this is used by the immoral press with derisive joy as a weapon against religion. It triumphantly proclaims every slip like this and thereby robs the people and the world more and more of faith in a truly higher morality and chastity in life. The advertisements of many papers offer a kind of chronicle of daily dissoluteness and give the people the most detailed knowledge of all the hidden pathways upon which this vice creeps along. In England, this tendency has already reached such a height that papers that exclusively portray this wretched side of human life in stories and novels, and that publicly conduct a kind of marriage brokerage for the people, the workers, and the serving class, are sold in hundreds of thousands of copies. I do not doubt that these conditions among the working population in England have substantially contributed to reducing life expectancy in some classes and regions to an average age of fifteen years. What else might we expect if, under conditions like these, unconditional freedom to conclude and dissolve marriages were to be introduced, and civil marriage in the spirit of Enlightenment-mongering were simultaneously to gain domination over the people! It is in the nature of things that workers frequently get together in large masses; they live together in huge crowds in workers' houses; the two sexes are also all mixed up on these occasions. What would become of all these workers if Christianity could no longer assert its doctrine on purity, on chastity, on sin, and if, at every enticing opportunity and danger, one called out to the mass of people: There is no longer any firm marriage bond, you may marry and separate as you please! Sexual indecency is a danger that confronts people early on and that frequently exerts its most dreadful influence at an early age, so that it evades almost any kind of preventive supervision. Only the heart of a Christian mother or
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