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I. THE FACT OF SHAMEFUL LIFE ITSELF.

1. In the midst of the great city, with all its grandeur and luxury, there hangs the dark shadow of one prevailing sin, the presence of which everyone knows and feels, but of which no one dare speak. We deprecate the contamination of the statement, while we suffer the curse of the fact. It is an ancient shame, coeval with the earliest corruption of the human heart; stalking in its painted abominations amongst the most splendid refinements; mingling its polluted stream with the foremost tides of civilization; moving with colonies; as sure to be found in every city as crime or death.

2. As in this passage, so everywhere, it is woman who stands in the foreground, and upon her the malediction falls. Consider this army of six thousand women, so many of them mere children, some of them from homes of sanctity where grey hairs have gone down, through them, in sorrow to the grave. Some indeed were born so low that they could not fall; but to many it has been a fall as awful as that of a star from its sphere. It may be easy to forget a lower state in rising to a higher, but never in the profoundest degradation the condition from which we have lapsed. Remorse can never abandon the human soul. This remorse accompanies the lost girl in her descending career. In the early stages there is an incongruity between that "soul's tragedy" and the gay welcome into the world of the lost; but as with rapid descent the steps go downward God's violated law of purity makes known its awful vindications. On that pallet of straw, in that damp, dark cellar reeking with the miasma of debauchery and death, the woman dies.

3. If the sufferings of the victim furnishes no reason for calling this fact before us, the peril of the young and innocent should. Silence and apathy are not justified by any motives of delicacy. The curse is in having a social cancer, not in talking about one. The only possibility of curing a wrong is to become clearly conscious of it. To prevent talk there is on the one hand a morbid sensitiveness, and on the other frivolity, which only finds the subject an occasion for jest or an insinuation that the reformer knows more about it than he ought. At least there is an unconsciousness of danger which cries, "Don't disturb this matter; let it rest as something that cannot be helped, or with which we have nothing to do." Is it so that innocent lives are in no danger? Is there a moral swamp whose foul vapours ever spread? We must have quarantine for pestilence. We break laws and burn buildings if it come too near. But a moral evil that oozes its damnation through brick walls, and saps the city with corruption, that breaks the hearts of good women — this we must not speak about, but let alone. So, then, it is a safe danger, is it? Who is safe? Are you in your respectability, O father I while this temptation waits for your sons? Are you in your honour, O mother! while mothers are broken-hearted for their daughters' shame? Are you, O citizen l with this many headed fountain of poverty and crime? Preach to the heathen, but this devil. worship — as to that walk about in silence. This is neither delicacy nor sense. No! bring into open view the shame, even as this woman was; let it be marked, that the full light of Christ's truth and purity may stream upon it.

II. THE RELATION OF IT TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT PERSONALLY INVOLVED IN IT.

1. The accusers felt by the Saviour's reply that in some way. they were related to the woman's guilt. Not by that, it may be, but by some sin. But how many are conscious of this special crime? People think the text a lesson of charity, but it is a lesson of justice also. But what justice is there in our modern custom that scarcely frowns on the guilty man — sometimes laughs at and even patronizes him — and pours all its vials of wrath upon the woman, the victim of his falsehood and meanness? What justice, honour, and delicacy, O refined woman! who, recoiling with virtuous scorn from that fallen sister, will welcome him by whom she fell? I suppose the mantle of Christian charity should cover everybody; but if there is anybody that it won't cover, and that ought to have the privilege of lying outside the hem of it in the cold blast and biting frost, it is that man who trades in a woman's affections, and leaves her to suffer in the guilt, and goes on to new conquests, and boasts of his victories — smooth, flattered, welcomed in refined society, when his only use in the world seems to be to make men feel that any particular devil is unnecessary. No! I insist that the shame should be divided, and that the sinning man should be branded as distinctly as the sinning woman.

2. The accusers went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, being convicted by their conscience. Yes, conscience, if nothing else, convicts —

(1) The aged of participation in the shameful life. It is most awful to contemplate — a profligate old man without even a sinful excuse for his corruption.

(2) And youth. Vain attempt to paint a picture which needs not to be painted, so terribly is every lineament of it drawn in thousands of faces, in hundreds of homes, in ruined character, in diseased manhood, in beautiful life recklessly thrown away into untimely graves.

3. What are the causes? Well, one is want. Thousands have struggled to the last thread of subsistence before yielding to temptation, and have, poor wretches I resorted to the streets to eke out a living. If you ask what you have to do with this matter, you have to cease to glory in buying cheap, which involves starvation wages.

III. CHRIST'S TREATMENT OF IT.

1. The first idea of all Christian treatment is to get rid of sin — not to palliate it. How? The very least we can do is to recognize our obligation of personal purity.

2. The other point of treatment is mercy, giving a chance of repentance and reformation to the sinner. This was what Christ did, and if He did, who shall refuse? But Society makes a Dante's hell of the state of shameful life; closes its doors and writes over them, "No hope." Consider the words of a poor girl: "Now I have once done wrong, I can't get anyone to give me work, and I must either stay here or starve." Have we any right to establish such an inexorable barrier? Conclusion: We hardly comprehend the full meaning of "Ye scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites — the publicans and harlots enter the kingdom of heaven before you." The Christian idea is to seek and to save the lost. Some one may suggest that those we may save are only like a drop in the ocean. But every drop is a soul. Mercy is justice in this case. Christ has proposed the true test: "Let him that is without sin," etc. No one can do that. But He interposes with His more excellent way — of hope and new life; and He says, and requires us to say, "Go and sin no more."

(E. H. Chapin, D. D.)

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KJV: And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

WEB: The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery. Having set her in the midst,