IT IS TRUE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 15, 1900

IT IS TRUE.

In the following extract from the Interior of March 8 there are several profound sermons:—

“Foresight is the projection of existing conditions and causes into the future, and calculating the results. It is an equation of what they have done with what they will do. . . . The whole past of life is a record of successive alternations of rising and ruin. . . . One after another, civilizations and empires have passed away; and since history began, they left the record of the forces which lifted and then overthrew them. . . . The world moved at a leisurely pace. A thousand years was, in results, then, as one day. The world moves swiftly now—a day is as a thousand years.

“One century has seen a nation grow on this continent from a straggling fringe of log huts on the Atlantic, till it became the wealthiest and potentially the most powerful homogeneous power that ever dwelt upon the earth. Judging by any standard in the past, such precocity means a short life. Even an old forest tree seldom falls by its own weight. The immediate cause is a blow of the wind, or fire. No empire or nation ever disappeared by slow and quiet decay. Every one in the past was destroyed by force. Decay was the proximate, but not the immediate, cause in any instance. As our nation has grown to maturity so quickly, will it not perish as quickly? If one century was sufficient to bring it to maturity, will not another century mark its decline and fall? If an empire could survive a thousand years when all causes moved so slowly, can ours survive long when they operate so swiftly?

“If we inquire for the causes which operated to destroy the empires of the past, we shall find that they were all included in, or grew out of, wealth and luxury—the moral and physical enervation which it induces; but wealth increased very slowly indeed. We make a greater increase every day than Persia or Egypt ever made in a year—we may say in an age. Their luxuries have become our necessities. We struggle for wealth as they never did. History never saw a people so mad for the possession of money as we are; and no people ever squandered it as recklessly, not to say as riotously, as we do.

“The licentious passion for wealth as it then existed found expression in combinations of men for its sudden acquisition. They organized into robber bands and launched pirate fleets, to war upon productive industry and upon each other. Do we not see the same thing now under the forms of law? What are these labor unions and capitalistic trusts but rapacious tribes, engaged in warring upon each other and upon productive industry? What is the objective of this tremendous struggle and conflict, what the ideal, if it be not luxury, idleness, and selfish indulgence?—perhaps not the immediate ideal of all those engaged in it, but it is the ultimate ideal—selfish indulgence. It appears therefore that the disintegrating forces which caused other empires to fall are working with unexampled energy in our own. . . .

“Selfishness, individual and national, destroyed the empires of the past, from Alexander's to Napoleon's. It was an unmitigated selfishness, lighted up by no ray of philanthropy. The destruction of Sodom was symbolic teaching for us, and there is hope in it. If there had been ten righteous men in the city, they could have saved it. . . . At first general view one would say that the future is not hopeful. It would appear that as we grew in a night, we are to perish in a night.”