Now, wherein did these two women differ? One sinned through an intense
and self-sacrificing love, and in obedience to the strongest calls of
want. Her sin, though it was beyond the pale of the world's toleration,
was yet one _according to Nature_. The other, in a cold spirit of
barter, voluntarily and deliberately exchanged her youth and beauty, the
hopes of her own and another's life, for carriages, jewels, fine
clothing and a luxurious table. She loathed the price she had to pay,
and her sin was an unnatural one. For this kind of prostitution, which
religion blesses and society praises, there seems to be no redress; but
for that which results as the almost inevitable sequence of one lapse of
chastity _we_, the pious, the virtuous, the irreproachable, are all to
blame. Who or what make it impossible for them to retrace their steps?
Do they ever have reason to hope that the family hearth will be open to
them if they go back? Prodigal sons may return, and are welcomed with
tears of joy and clasped by helping hands; but alas! how few parents
would go to meet a sinning daughter. Forgetting our Master's precepts,
forgetting our human frailty, forgetting our own weakness, we turn
scornfully from the weeping Magdalen, and leave her "alone with the
irreparable." Marriage is a holy and a necessary rite. We would
deprecate _any_ loosening of this great house-band of society; but we
do say that where it is the _only distinction_ between two women, one of
whom is an honored matron, and the other a Pariah and an outcast, there
is "something in the world amiss"--something beyond the cure of law or
legislation, and that they can only be reached by the authority of a
Christian press and the influence of Christian example.




THE STORY OF DAVID MORRISON.