Extracts on the Times

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1866

Extracts on the Times.

THAT we are living at the climax of wickedness and at the end of the age, is evident from the following quotations:

The N. Y. World of August 16, 1865, gives the following as a part of a speech of Dupin on the report of the Attorney General of France, on prostitution:

"Debauchery does not any longer afflict the sight as it did forty years ago. * You speak of courtesans who appear in public places. Yes, they live fast and go in splendid equipages so as to attract attention. What is high society doing? She looks on and models herself upon them. It is that class of woman who give fashions to the ladies of the great world; it is they whom the latter copy. Such is the example given by high society."

Speaking of woman dressing on credit, in order to keep pace with the fashions, he says, "Whose payment is always fatal to virtue."

Some of the ladies of Paris reply to Mr. Dupin, in defense, thus:

"Mr. Dupin does not seem to know that if honest women dress like fast women, it is simply an attempt to keep their husbands near them: for they know through sad experience how men do love this sort of creature. * More than one among us goes into those expenses to prevent her husband from throwing out money to his mistress."

Rev. O. B. Frothingham, in The Friend of Virtue, on costly religion, says:

"We New Yorkers live daily on the very brink of destruction. All the demons are let loose upon us; the elements of every conceivable disease, thievery, vice in every variety; and the Citizen's Association cannot find ten good men to undertake its gigantic sanitary work."

In the course of an editorial article, intended to show that it is the certainty, and not the severity, of punishment which is needed for the suppression of crime, The Pittsburg Commercial makes the following statements:

"In fifteen years during which the annals of crime in this country have been stained by more than fifty murders, a single instance of hanging has been affirmed by the executive as the measure of extreme penalty due, and there justice was cheated of her victim by suicide."

Says The Congregationalist:

"Crime abounds here [ New York ] to a fearful extent. Indeed, the tide of evil seems just now to be at the flood, and to have reached a point beyond which it cannot go. The columns of our daily papers come to our doors every morning burdened with descriptions of the murders and assaults of various kinds which have been committed between the setting and rising sun. It is terrible to think of the crimes of every die and every kind, almost, which are perpetrated on this little spot of earth. A man goes out here after dark at his peril."

Says The Albion of Febuary 18, 1865, "Mendelsohn's beautiful song, 'It is ordained in God's course,' has been converted into a polka, and published in Prague."

Thus runs the world. A poor prospect of the promised ( by man ) temporal Millennium.