Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, January 21, 1868

The Gomorrah of the Nineteenth Century.

A WRITER in the Chicago Tribune describing the present moral condition of the city of New York, says:

The wickedness of New York no one pretends to deny. It is a city of moral filth and spiritual decay. You learn that a fine house in a good location is to let at a very low rent, for the simple reason that next door is a brothel. New York is horrible in the indulgence of the basest of appetites. Tens of thousands of men go that road alone into the company of vile women, and as many women to whom dress and pleasure mean corruption. The aristocracy of New York is not an aristocracy of wealth, but of self-indulgence. The ambition of the young bloods is not to have plenty of money, but to riot with money or without, in gilded sinks of iniquity. And these gentlemen of the metropolis, whose blood grows fouler every day, are as well pleased with themselves as the proudest lords of the proudest aristocracy in the world. Nowhere can you see faces baser and more insolent than you may see in Fifth avenue.

The unceasing scramble for gain, and horrid squabble of half-mad scramblers, fill the whole stage of life in New York. Selfishness is the law, and success the gospel, of the millions whose noise fills the day here, as it were, with the groan of an earth-demon. Nobody cares, nobody hears, if any voice is raised but the voice of the market, and the song of pleasure. I speak of course with a reservation as regards the voice which may come direct from kind Heaven, through some inspired man or some signal event. Such a voice these hucksters and harlots would undoubtedly hear; but, alas, who is inspired of all the talkers, pious and profane, in the Babylon of our land? New York has no great preacher. Beecher, on the Brooklyn side, draws crowded houses year in and year out; but he is not a great moral power. His decided inclination to comedy has no redeeming background of tragic earnestness; hence the hearers of Mr. Beecher are entertained, but are not convinced. The fullness and charm of Mr. Beecher's sensibilities undoubtedly edify his disciples and please the crowd, as fine sentiments on the stage please the crowd. But they do not convict and convert. Mr. Beecher is essentially a weak man, because he plays with the truths of religion. People go to be entertained. And they go away merely entertained, because the great pulpit performer does not deal in downright, consistent, and powerful intellectual convictions, but in changing, inconsistent and practically feeble imaginations. The dreams of Mr. Beecher's soul are profoundly radical and heretical. The theology which he professes to teach is strictly orthodox. To avoid getting into trouble, Mr. Beecher attempts to discard logic and theology in favor of piety and religion. The result is that Mr. Beecher builds on shifting sands. He involves himself in a kind of intellectual dishonesty which is fatal to his power. He plays fast and loose with truths of absolute importance, until he becomes a player merely. If he could pass his nights for awhile, watching through the streets, with the leprous victims of sin, until a grand, grim earnestness became the supreme impulse of his soul, and then could sift, and weigh, and utter the soundest truths in a terrible honesty of clear conviction, his weakness would become strength. Instead of this, he puts his soul into a novel, and sells the novel for thirty thousand dollars to the Ledger.