Appalling by B. | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 7, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 39.

Appalling

By B.

The National Commission on Crime Prevention Through Moral and Religious Education has recently told us that “of thirty-four millions of youth in America between five and eighteen years of age, only about one half are now receiving religious training, either Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. This is a seed plot of enormous proportions out of which criminals may naturally develop.”

The report goes on to state that “many judges, prison wardens, chaplains, and others in close touch with delinquents and criminals declare that the vast bulk of crime is committed by young men whose home influences have not been helpful or whose moral and religious training has been neglected.”

The three outstanding figures of the World Conference of Christian Youth held in Berlin, Germany. They are, left to right, Dr. Kelley of Glasgow, the European president of the federation; Dr. Daniel Poling of New York; and Dr. Gustav Schuermann, the world president of the conference. There were 14,000 youth from more than a score of nations in attendance, which is said to be the greatest convocation of Christian young men and women ever held.

Calvin Coolidge has recently stated that crime is costing this nation some $7,500,000,000 annually, or about 8 per cent of the national income. Half of this amount is lost through theft, burglary, larceny, stock frauds, credit frauds, mercantile frauds, insurance frauds, and a thousand and one swindles and confidence games. The other half is paid in taxes for the prevention, prosecution, and punishment of crime, including police, courts, prisons, district attorneys, sheriffs, et cetera.

These appalling figures should stir every parent in the land to a sense of his obligation for the religious training of his children. The principles of religion embedded in the character during the days of childhood and youth are the greatest bulwark against moral delinquency the world knows. God will hold the parents of the seventeen million children and youth who are receiving no religious instruction responsible for the future acts of their children, for upon parents rests the prime responsibility of religious training. The parents of the land are the ones chiefly responsible for the so-called crime wave, for if the parents and the home had done their part thoroughly and well, there would be no crime wave. And there will be no great diminution of crime until the parents do their rightful part.

Children who are brought up without the benefit of regular instruction in the principles of Christianity will be lacking in their moral and ethical concepts. There is no substitute for religion in the inculcation of right moral values and the establishment of high ethical standards. It would be much better for the child and for society at large to omit the child’s formal education in reading, writing, and arithmetic than it is to omit his religious education. If the child should grow up having to sign an X for his name, and yet knew the difference between right and wrong, he would be better off than if he could read and write a half-dozen languages but had no appreciation of the line of demarcation between goodness and wickedness, righteousness and sin. B.