ABOUNDING OF INIQUITY, AND SAYING OF PEACE AND SAFETY
By S. B. WHITNEY
ABOUNDING OF INIQUITY, AND SAYING OF PEACE AND SAFETY.
At the risk of surfeiting or disgusting the reader with sickening descriptions of the present moral condition of the world, I venture to offer the following articles, as indicative of what it is, and as a verification of the prediction that “iniquity shall abound.” The first is from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of Dec. 21, 1875. Perhaps some may think, with the editor, that “Bro. Talmage” is “unnecessarily violent,” but we think none can accuse him of being unjustly so. “Brother Talmage preached last Sunday against Brooklyn and the politicians. ‘What a horrible sink of iniquity it is,’ he said, speaking of Brooklyn. ‘We here have much for us to weep over. Sin is on every side of us, and it seems as though it was impossible to find anything that is good and true. The shriek of blasphemy rolls up from dens of hell, blasting the heavens; the cry of the lost soul is heard at every street corner; there is the clash of the decanter and the clink of the gambler’s dice, and everywhere a horrible wail rises that is enough to make the denizens of the infernal pit close the doors, put their fingers to their ears, and rattle their chains with utter despair.’ Without stopping to call for the police, the good man went on to bewail the present commercial dishonesty. The Shylocks of trade were greatly in the majority; they were rotten through and through, ‘and they will go down to hell.’ The whole commercial world is rotten, rotten. And worse and worse and more of it. “‘The political history of our city and of our whole country is the history of fraud and dishonesty. There is not one man in a thousand of our politicians who is pure and upright. If an honest, a benevolent and Christian gentleman steps into the arena, and proclaims his intention to stand on a pure platform, and purify the slums of politics, then he is at once beset by the press, which so blackens his character that he is soon led to think that he is better fitted for Sing Sing than for public office. Oh! what a creature one must become in order to enter the political arena. The respectable young man who goes from a Christian home must clasp hands with the lecherous wretch from the rum cellar; he must associate with the lowest villains, chuckle with them over their coarse jokes, and join in their blasphemy. The most God-forsaken people in our city are the politicians. I can pray for the prisoner in Raymond-street jail, but I don’t think there is any use in praying for an old politician. Fraudulent election inspectors sit around fraudulent ballot-boxes, taking fraudulent votes from fraudulent voters, making fraudulent returns, which send men to our legislatures that are better subjects for the penitentiary or the asylum for idiots than for legislators.’” “The good doctor saw a costly funeral train, a long line of carriages filled with—bloats. Politics meant delirium tremens. He concluded with a declaration of bitter war against social iniquities, whether encountered in the dens of poverty and disgrace or under the blaze of parlor chandeliers. ‘I shall smite them with the two-edged sword of the Lord,’ said the preacher. ‘You may call this thing fast life, high life, or eccentricity; but I call it the vomit of hell; and the man or woman whose life is secret rottenness, garnished by gold, will be wrapped around the fierce fires in hell and will drink the dregs of a deeper damnation. A great yell will go up as they go down to the pit, and the fiends will cry out, “See what you have done! See what you have done!”’ It will be observed that the good man continues—if we may be pardoned the term—to shake ’em up lively; but we do wish he would cease to be unnecessarily violent.” The other is from the Golden Censer under the title of “Enough corn in the United States and Great Britain is annually wasted in brewing and distilling to feed five million men. Every grog-shop, every house of infamy, every gambling saloon, every dishonest store, bank, insurance company, declares there is no God, or if there be, let him strike if he dare! Corruption in the most of the city governments—corruption reaching from the weather-vane on the top of the city halls down to the lowest stone in the foundations; thousands of men anxiously waiting for Tweed, the apostle of scoundrelism, to get out of jail; churches with men in their membership not clean enough to swab the doorstep of the pit; the theaters, huge houses of shame; three-fourths of the newspapers, with their editors, reporters, and printing-presses suborned of the devil; American and European society, rotten until the filth drips hissing through into the world beneath and smells sickening to the world above; France and Prussia feeling for each other’s throats; and although the dead in battle outnumber five times all the present population of the earth, yet nations longing for war, and this hour six million men in Europe arming for conflict, while applauding nations look on, and the cry is ‘Blood! give us more blood!’ the earth staggering under the successive shocks like a foundering ship at the moment when the passengers cry, ‘She’s going down!’”—T. De Witt Talmage. But to show how even such things may be made to contribute to the support of modern fables, I offer the following, from a later issue of the same journal, and also to show the fulfillment of the prediction that men will say “peace and safety” just before the day of the Lord comes. 1 Thess. 5: 1–3. “A distinguished clergyman, president of one of our Eastern Colleges, in closing a letter to the N. Y. Observer, adds: ‘As I have read, of late, the multiplied accounts of peculations, robberies, burglaries, murders, suicides, and of gross disorders in a large number of our leading colleges, I have come to the conclusion, strange as it may seem, that the millennium must be near. That passage in the Revelation has occurred to me: “The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.” I profess no special skill in the Apocalypse; but from these abounding “devilisms,” as our good Dr. Skinner used to call them, am I wrong in catching a gleam of light? At all events, let us hope that “he hath but a short time!”’” That the devil’s time is short is not questioned, but it would seem that those who will not admit that these things point to the “end of all things” must be willingly ignorant. S. B. WHITNEY.