Disquieting Enough

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 7, 1908

“Disquieting Enough”

An editorial article in the May number of the Homiletic Review considers the progress of “social unrest” during recent months, and says:—

Bomb outrages have increased. Large districts of Kentucky have been terrorized by an oath-bound organization numbering thousands of men, whose head, says the governor of the State, “has the power of life and death over the members,” who freely employ the bullet and the torch to gain their ends. On April 4 the president of the American Federation of Labor informed a congressional committee that either Congress must enact the demands of the Federation into law, or “there will spring up secret organizations bound by oath to the service of the cause of labor, and to the fight we have already waged.” All this is disquieting enough; and besides we have, in consequence of a financial panic, a huge army of the unemployed, many of them bitter and desperate. The social atmosphere is evidently full of electricity. The public peace is in a condition of unstable equilibrium, which, like dynamite, a sudden shock may upset destructively.

This is a conservative statement concerning the actual situation, and these facts prove, as this magazine admits, that “the situation has not been improved.” And yet there are preachers and periodicals asserting that this is simply the evolution of a better state of things, that the public conscience is being awakened, that a higher standard of righteousness is being erected, etc., etc. It is difficult to see how the facts warrant any such conclusions. On the other hand the evidences are multiplying to prove that we are in the “perilous times” foretold in the Scriptures. The signs of the times are being written in plain characters.