A Modern Sodom

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 13, 1905

THE condition of things in the social and moral world is one of the signs of the end and of the coming of the Lord. “Likewise even as it came to pass in the days of Lot; they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but in the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.”

We have been plainly told that “cities, and even country towns, are becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah,” and that “the world over, the large cities are fast becoming hotbeds of iniquity.” Facts which testify to the truthfulness of this terrible indictment are constantly coming to light, but we do not remember ever having read in current history such wholesale confirmation of this description of corruption in the cities as the account of a recent raid by the police of Philadelphia upon resorts where the law was being transgressed.

A press dispatch gives the following summary of this raid:—

One hundred and fifty houses, consisting of “speak-easies,” disorderly resorts, places of assignation, and political clubs entered. Close upon 2,000 prisoners, men and women, taken. Approximate amount of fines imposed upon men found in the places, $5,000. Approximate amount of bail imposed upon proprietors and inmates, $100,000. Three hundred quarts of champagne and hundreds of cases of fine liquors, whisky, and beer, hundreds of boxes of cigars, dozens of roulette wheels, poker tables, slot machines, and gambling devices of all kinds confiscated. Number of police employed in the raid, 400.

From the report of this affair, as printed in the daily papers, we take the following paragraphs as indicating the standing in the community of some of those who were found in these places of ill repute:—

Simultaneously at eleven o’clock the net began to close in. Over twenty square miles were dragged.

In five station-houses sat magistrates ready for the names of the victims. By midnight these station-houses were filled, ten others were jammed to the doors, and the great cell room in the city hall could hold no more. Every few minutes saw fresh patrol loads of the drag before the doors.

To the Tenderloin the thing was not new, and the painted women of the section smoked cigarettes, laughed, and swore and cried, as the mood took them. But mixed with the painted women, with drunken negroes, and the vicious hangers-on of the slums were men in full dress, clubmen, men of refinement, politicians, lawyers, and men whose faces are familiar in public gatherings and in the higher walks of life. Crouching in corners of the police stations, trying to hide behind the tinsel and the occasional too-scanty clothing of the Tenderloin women, were other women—women whose faces showed that they were of gentle families, women of birth and breeding. There were girls not out of their teens, whose clothing spoke of luxury, and who bore the indelible touch of a gentle home. There were women who were beautiful, and none of all these bore a mark of the Tenderloin.

Of the many women from these houses of assignation who, desperate and hysterical, tried to cover shame with death, two almost succeeded. One stabbed herself; the other threw herself down a flight of stairs. Both were taken to hospitals under assumed names.

In the station-house at Tenth and Thompson Streets, a man portly and kindly looking, whose face is known at every event of importance in Philadelphia, stood and saw the woman who was arrested with him led to a cell. . . .

The portly man paid his fine and rushed out. Later he came back with bail, and the woman, fainting and almost dead from shame, was led out of the room. She was recognized as a beauty whose face is familiar at the opera, and who has a charming family and home.

Who can read these extracts without thinking of Sodom? Note that among the prisoners were “men of refinement, politicians, lawyers, and men whose faces are familiar in public gatherings and in the higher walks of life,” as well as “women whose faces showed that they were of gentle families, women of birth and breeding.” This is a view beneath the veneer of so-called good society. And what is true of Philadelphia is doubtless true of many other large cities. It is a glimpse of the moral corruption which is festering beneath the surface of our modern and boasted civilization.

Any humanly devised scheme of reform will be utterly inadequate to meet the needs of the world at this time. It is not simply reform, but regeneration which is demanded. And only that complete gospel which is “the power of God unto salvation” will save any one from the perils of the hour, and make him meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. Only the message of God for this generation will save the people of this generation from the peculiar temptations and the powerful delusions of this generation. The third angel’s message must speedily be given in its fulness to all the world. In this is the only hope of deliverance.