THE PULPIT AND PRESS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 27, 1881

THE PULPIT AND PRESS.

OF what use is it to the man who has to struggle six days in the week to keep the wolf from the door, to go to church on Sunday and hear a panegyric on Moses or John the Baptist? He wants something to help him over the hard places in his lot, to help him bear his burdens and be faithful in his daily duties. He wants encouragement, sympathy, inspiration. He asks for bread, but receives a stone, and goes away disappointed, if not disgusted. “And thus the preacher who should have come down upon human life as an angel charged with a message from the secret places of the Most High, becomes a mere chatterer of words, talking in an unknown tongue” to men who long for the living gospel.—Pittsburg Christian Advocate.

Divorces are now more numerous in New England than they were in France in the worst time of the French Revolution. Taking the period of the last twenty years, the divorces of Massachusetts have averaged one to every thirty-six marriages, while for the last three years the ratio has been one divorce to every twenty-three marriages. The average ratio in Vermont for the last eight or ten years has been one divorce to seven-teen marriages, and in New Hampshire and Maine it has been about the same, while in Rhode Island the proportion is one divorce to fourteen marriages, and in Connecticut one to eleven marriages. One divorce to every twenty-three, seventeen, fourteen or eleven marriages all over New England, Connecticut being the loosest and lowest in the scale! To the foregoing humiliating figures add the hard fact, that while in New England the actual number of marriages has very much decreased within the last twenty years, notwithstanding the increase of population, the divorce rate has considerably more than doubled within the same period. The nearer to the present date we bring the figures the more startling they appear. In 1860 there was in this State but one divorce to fifty-one marriages; in 1878 there was one divorce to 21.4 marriages. At this rate of demoralized [legislation], it would not be difficult to predict the time when marriages and divorces will be about equal.—New York Evangelist.

The California Christian Advocate expresses the opinion that “Sara Bernhardt and her illegitimate children are a fair representation of the moral condition of the theater. She is and has been in open revolt against morality and decency, and yet is the most popular actress in the world. Her abandoned character adds to the enthusiasm of patrons on the stage. They like all her acting on and off the stage.”

The Maine Christian Mirror calls attention to the small number of additions to some of the stronger churches in that State, which had able pastors during the past year. Ten churches are named, with a membership of from 100 to 400 each, which, altogether, have received only twelve additional members during the year, several having received none and others but one. These churches, it says, represent about 1200 families and about 1500 Sunday-school children, so that there has been but one addition out of 100 families and out of the 125 Sunday-school children. At that rate religion would become extinct in those communities in two generations. Their only resource is “periodic revivals.”