CHRISTIANS, TO THE RESCUE!
By Dwight Spencer
INFIDELITY is rapidly gaining ground in the West. To be convinced of this one only needs to spend a few months west of the Rocky Mountains. What a scramble for wealth and pleasure! All fear of God and all thought of a future have been flung to the winds. Mines and mining, theaters and dances, dresses and balls; these are the general topics of conversation. All are eager for excitement, and whether it be found in the dram shop, the gambling saloon, or the low playhouse, does not matter. The coarser the play, the better it will draw; the more impious the book, the greater the number of its readers. Profanity is the rule rather than the exception, and in many instances the women swear worse than the men. The few Christians, finding themselves powerless to oppose this tide of sin and iniquity, often fall in and float along with the current. Vital piety—old-fashioned, prayer-meeting religion—is hardly known. The vigorous, self-supporting churches west of the Rocky Mountains would hardly exceed two or three score. There are towns of five hundred people without a single church-goer; and entire Territories, numbering a hundred thousand inhabitants, where not one in a hundred statedly visits the house of God. In the great mining-camps, and in many of the towns, sin runs loose six days in the week, and holds high carnival on Sunday. The reason for this state of things is not hard to find. The wonderful facilities for accumulating wealth which the West has afforded, have given the people the means for the gratification of their appetites and passions. Multitudes who at home were kept temperate and chaste, either by poverty or social ties, coming here and finding relief from the one and freedom from the other, give way to their naturally evil tendencies, and follow the leading of unbridled appetite and lust. And when men become impure in life and beastly in practice, they don't want a God looking around, nor a future terrifying them with its retributions. Men first become bad and then infidels; they never say "no God" till they have made themselves fools. A man with a red and scabby face came hiccoughing up to me the other day, and with a drunken laugh said, "I understand that they have left 'hell' out of the revised Testament." This accounts for Ingersoll's great popularity in the West. His lectures, next to the cheap novel, are more widely read than anything else. Ingersoll is simply a product of the times. Some men would be great if born in any age, others owe their greatness to the age that produces them. The demand of this age was for a man who could amuse; and lo! Ingersoll! Frisky and frivolous, witty and wicked, he was just the man for an easy-living, irreverent age. The people were bent on sinning, and he was just the man to make them believe that they could do it without running any risk. Men buy his books and attend his lectures for the same reason that a housebreaker employs a talented and witty lawyer; they want to get clear. Take the dishonest, the drunken, and the unclean out of the ranks of his admirers, and there would not be many left. Every seducer, every Nihilist, and every bloody-handed assassin is ready to throw up his hat for Ingersoll. I know that the picture is a dark one, but it is not too dark. I have been over the ground, and know whereof I write, and the picture, dark as it is, is one that American Christians need to look at. If we would retain our hold upon the East, we must save the West. We cannot have a Christian East and an infidel West. Infidelity is vigilant and active; it is bent upon conquest. No half-hearted efforts will answer. The church must gird herself for a mighty struggle. We have for a long time been preaching self-denial, and practicing self-indulgence. We have well-nigh lost the meaning of the word sacrifice. Last year the Mormon Church with its hundred and forty thousand members, men, women, and children, contributed more for missionary work than was contributed by the whole Baptist church. When I think of this it makes me blush with shame. The Mormons might well send missionaries to us to preach the duty of giving. Five hundred new missionaries are needed to fully occupy this field. Shall they be forthcoming? Shall the West be saved?—Dwight Spencer, in The Watchman.