Modern Society | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 27, 1872

Modern Society.

It seems almost superfluous to multiply testimony as to the fearful condition of manners and morals in our great cities. Facts are facts, and they are now pretty generally known and acknowledged. In view of them, very few now have the hardihood to dilate very largely on the claim, urged more strongly in former years than now, of the increase of virtue and the improvement of the race. T. DeWitt Talmage in a sermon recently delivered in Brooklyn Tabernacle, bore the following testimony, in which he very properly connects the iniquities of our day with the judgments of God which are sure to overtake them speedily. He said:—

“It seems as if modern society were hastening back toward the days of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which sculptured their vileness on pillar and temple-wall, until nothing but the lava of a burning mountain could hide the immensity of the crime.

“At what time the Lord God shall begin to purge our cities I know not, nor whether it shall be by flood, or by fire, or by hurricane; but I do not believe the Holy God will stand it much longer. I think that the thunderbolts of his indignation are hissing hot, and that when he rises up to scourge these crimes, against which he hath uttered more bitter curses than against any other, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah will be found to have been more tolerable than that of our modern cities, which knew better, but showed disposition to do worse.”

In the same discourse he spoke of the lawlessness now so alarmingly prevalent in the land as follows:—

“We are, in our cities, on the march toward that state of barbarism where every man is judge, jury, and executive officer—a state of society in which that man has the supremacy who has sharpest knife, and strongest arm, and stealthiest revenge, and quickest spring.”

When these things culminate in the calamities of the great day, as they will soon do, as surely as the word of God is true, will not some of those who have thus plainly spoken, stand speechless before their own testimony? “Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”