(A Quaker publication presents the following startling truths that are worthy of our prayerful meditation Not to find fault with others for catering to prevailing shameful practices, but to encourage all who love the Lord to do all within their power to protect and safeguard the morals and highest interests of our young people, we pass this on.)

Our readers know the Editor is distressed about the immodest dress that is encroaching on church services nearly everywhere. And it is high time parents woke up to the situation as it prevails in many places in the public schools.

With the opening of school the Editor has been interviewed and written to by concerned parents who deplore the gymnasium suits and exercises their children are asked to wear and participate in. Mothers feel chagrined at the kind of clothes their daughters are asked to wear during these exercises. It is true that in some places boys and girls are segregated for these exercises, but it is reported that there are windows or peekholes where boys look in on the girls and girls look in on the boys during these exercises. In one place it is reported they have an exercise where boys and girls are obliged to strip off all their clothing, and while the sexes are separated during this exercise the tendency is to destroy the sense of modesty in the rising generation. Such practices are calculated to pave the way for nudism that is making such inroads in some parts of the country.

When parents ask that their children be excused from participating in these exercises, they are told it is part of the required curriculum, and that their children cannot pass in their grades, if the exercises are not taken. Furthermore they are ridiculed for their stand, and the children are made to feel they are inferior by the attitude of other pupils, and in some cases by the teachers themselves. Under this pressure it is likely that most parents give in to the demands, and try to make the best of it, hoping their children will come through the ordeal with their sense of modesty unimpaired. But we consider the practice calculated to destroy what sense of modesty children have, make them loose about going to mixed bathing beaches, and likely to destroy any compunctions they have against wearing immodest clothes on the street and even to church.

These practices are the entering wedge of worse things, and may be classed as some of the by-products of the teaching of Evolution in the schools. When children are taught that they are the far-off descendants of monkeys and apes, it does not take much persuasion to get them to ignore the conventionalities of good society; and since animals have no sense of modesty, why should the evoluted animal (called man) have any such sense?

Some games played in the schools are calculated still further to diminish the sense of modesty on the part of the young. Judging from pictures of basketball teams that sometimes appear in the newspapers, the attire of the players is far from what is desired. Appearing in public in such attire tends further to diminish all sense of modesty on the part of players and spectators until one wonders if the time is not coming when games will, be played with the contestants entirely naked! It is reported that when the Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes gained control of Jerusalem and popularized the Grecian games, young Jews were led to compete in these games in public with no clothing whatever on them. That was in the days of Grecian decline. Civilization is on the decline in our days also, and it looks as though the race was headed again for the slime and corruption that marked the declining years of those ancient nations.

A few centuries ago, when European nations were sinking in corruption, a few religious men and women, their consciences grieved at what they saw on all hands, crossed the sea and planted a nation on this continent that thrived and became at one time the model of all nations. But prosperity and plenty have brought their train of evils that attend luxury, and the standards of those ancient nation-builders are being ignored. There is no new continent to which conscientious individuals can go and plant anew a nation with ideals of thrift and honesty with the religious atmosphere that a Bible-believing and Bible-practicing people love. America is, as some one has said, "the last West." We can go no further. Civilization is evidently doomed unless a reformation in religion, politics, business and society takes place.

The plan of consolidated schools that has brought all the school children of a township to one center to obtain their education, while advertised as a great improvement over the old district school plan, has failed to produce the genuine scholarship of the old schools. The little school house on the corner produced better writers, better spellers, better mathematicians, better readers than these boasted consolidated schools. Furthermore, play was clean, teachers were religious, Bible readers and Bible believers. The New Testament was a book every scholar was supposed to have and read from every morning in the opening exercises. Now the devoutly religious schoolteacher is rare, and there are whole schools with scarcely a boy or girl in them who makes any claim of being a Christian. If a boy or girl undertakes to cite the Bible as authority in many schools he is laughed to scorn by teachers and pupils.

Unbelief in the Bible, loose morals and immodest dress are all of one piece. While Christians are sleeping the devil and his folks are running things about to suit themselves!