THE DEVIL UNCHAINED

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 17, 1868

THE DEVIL UNCHAINED.

Rev. Dr. Chapin writes as follows in the Liberal Christian:

There has never been a time when the calls for philanthropic activity were so numerous and pressing as to-day. Our northern society is honey-combed with evils and vices. Turn which way we will, we are confronted with a pitfall, or a slough. Our streets are filled with beggars; truant and vagrant children, coarse, ragged, pale, meet us everywhere, asking us to buy that they may not starve. Men and women appeal to us for labor or aid to keep them from crime. Noble charities are suffering for want of funds to carry on beneficent operations; and as we go to see what can be done, a young man falls prostrate at our feet from intemperance, and in trying to relieve him we stumble into the mouth of hell, where Satan plays his game for souls, burning up the bodies of his victims to get the stakes he has won before the time. It seems as though the fountain springs of vice had overflowed and oozed down through a thousand invisible channels, and made the very ground beneath our feet one vast quagmire of sensuality, and corruption, and crime; and out of the morass come up the pleading voices of thousands and thousands to save them from sinking, and lift them back to the solid ground of virtue; here are many States filled with ignorance and vice, disorder and misery, opened to Christian charity.