Is the World Growing Better, or Worse?
WHEN Adventists discourse upon the abounding iniquity of this age, they are accused of allowing their peculiar views to color the facts. This makes the testimony of those who oppose us doubly valuable, when they unconsciously sustain our position by unbiased statements of their views of the times. A correspondent of The Religious Telescope bears the following testimony on the present moral condition and prospects of the world.—Voice of the West. “Drunkenness increases. After all the lectures, sermons, and private reproofs, the demon continues to slay his thousands every year, under the very shade of our churches. Moderate drinkers multiply. Cider, beer, and wine, are consumed largely by the masses. Distilleries flourish. Wholesale dealers grow rich; retail venders multiply around us daily, filling every village and city with their ungodly examples, blasphemous oaths, and obscene songs. Result, poverty, crime, overflowing jails, and penitentiaries. “Blasphemy is the order of the day. Go where you will, you hear the name of God taken in vain. Merchants swear, mechanics swear, lawyers, doctors, and literary men swear, and little boys, before they are scarcely able to walk, learn to belch forth the most fearful oaths. The most common of all sins, it has never yet found an excuse. It is open, willful hatred to God, and contempt of his authority. “The love of worldly amusement increases; at least the means of gratifying this unholy passion are multiplying. In ancient times, multitudes assembled to witness the Olympic games, or gathered by thousands to the Roman amphitheater, to witness the ferocious encounters of wild beasts; or, what was still more gratifying, they beheld the death-struggle of criminals as they appeared in mortal combat with these same wild beasts. In modern times the Spaniards gratify this morbid appetite for amusement, by witnessing the terrible bull-fights so common in all the kingdom. Men, women, and children, go forth by thousands to behold these exhibitions of cruelty and bloodshed, thus cultivating the baser passions of the human heart, at the same time they pollute and deaden every polite and noble attribute of the human soul. And this is called innocent amusement! Have we advanced any in restraining this passion? Let the theater, the card-table, the billiard-saloon, and the ball-room, answer the question. Let the multitudes who witness indecent performances at circus shows, or frequent the horse-racing, and cock-fighting, or the beastly conflicts of the Heenans and Sayerses with which the age abounds, explain how much they are elevated above the obscene Grecians, the blood-thirsty Romans, or the besotted Spaniards. “Fictitious reading is another means of gratifying the thirst for pleasure. Formerly people thought there was at least some virtue in reading history, biography, philosophy, and some even thought it well to read the Bible. But now the rage, to speak plainly, is for falsehood. Fiction, romance, and obscene poetry, find ready sale, and multitudes of readers and admirers. Half the reading of the present day may be described in three words: love, murder, marriage. This is the staple of the New York Ledger and Mercury, and the thousand and one smaller journals published in America. As for books of fiction, the heart sickens to contemplate the thousands of volumes issued annually, and the multiplied thousands of readers they must find to keep them afloat. ‘Why do you not peddle better books?’ I asked of a young man who was circulating for sale among the passengers in a railway car a half bushel basket full of lies, lies embodied and surrounded with yellow covers of the most approved style. With some astonishment he inquired, ‘What do you mean?’ I mean histories, biographies, works on poetry, philosophy and religion. ‘Never sell ’em in the world. You’re the first man ever called for any such a thing,’ was his significant reply. It was his business to satisfy the cravings of the public maw. Works of fiction—of falsehood rather—could alone do this. He was simply making money by supplying a morbid appetite with what instead of satiating continued to whet the vitiated taste. Whether right or wrong he did not inquire. His object was to make money. Any means to attain the end were, in his opinion, legitimate. “The love of gain is another abounding iniquity of the present day. To make money, manufacturers use inferior materials, make poor work, thus gaining their end by falsehood. Venders carry forward the deception, by exaggeration and flattery. To get money, men gamble, steal, rob, murder. Worse still, they seek office, and prostitute public confidence to the base purpose of acquiring money. One buys a patent for a rat-trap, or churn, or feigning genius, takes out letters-patent himself for some trifling invention, and then brings into requisition all the artifice he can command to lie some unsuspecting victim out of a few hundred, or thousand dollars. Another sets out on a wild adventure to California, Arizona, or Australia, to dig gold, perchance forsaking a wife and three or four children in order to satiate his thirst for gain. “Every one ‘looking for gain from his quarter,’ the helpless poor are forgotten. Even professors of religion forget that we have the poor always with us, forget to do them good, suffer them to hunger and die under their very eyes, while they make money and live in state. This is not the worst of it. The poor who are able and willing to work, are ground to powder. They must work long and hard, and at the lowest possible rates; then be sometimes cheated out of their thrice-earned wages. “Amid the speculation, the wild adventure, the lust for gain, God’s house and God’s cause are forgotten and forsaken. They have no relish for any place or any society where money-getting is not the chief motive. Money takes up all their day thoughts and night dreams. “Pride is another evil, a sin of immeasurable magnitude that, like the pestilence which wasteth at noon-day, walks forth with all the disdain of its father, the Devil, stamped in its forehead. It creates caste, fosters aristocracy, and looks with supreme contempt on its more virtuous and more honest neighbors, solely because they are poor. Even many churches of Jesus Christ foster this spirit. ‘Tell this not in Gath!’ The poor are almost always suspected of vice; the rich are as generally allowed to be virtuous and innocent till proved guilty. So judges man.”