The Age We Live In

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 25, 1874

The Age We Live In.

The worship of the golden calf seems to be the only religion which really retains any vitality in this age. Faith and self-sacrifice are apparently dead and the mainspring of human energy is gold. The intrinsic value of a thing is of little consequence, but what it will fetch in the market is all-important. Art, which should at least be above the sordid worship of money-bags, has been degraded, and the painter or actor strives as earnestly to produce a marketable commodity as if the perception and reality of color and form had been given for no other purpose than to be turned into filthy lucre. The business of buying and selling is fast crushing every noble feeling and sentiment. The ledger has become the national Bible, and the counting house is the church. It is ludicrous, yet painful and humiliating, to contemplate the vice of the popular mind. The rising generation are systematically taught to revere only such things as tend to money getting.

The multiplication table is regarded as the city code, and men are rigidly classed in accordance with a rule which, more frequently than not, brings the worst to the surface. Even in scientific and purely intellectual circles it is quite common to measure a man by the style he keeps up or the marked attention he is able by purely money influence to command. Respectability merely means a certain status in society, and many men are classed as mean who, possessing a certain income, are yet honestly determined to live within it. Unfortunately it is often considered a crime to be poor. Good men deplore these vices of our age, and talk as if mere words would cure those evils. Society is rotten at the core. We are standing on the crater of a social volcano, which, bursting out at every moment, scatters into the air the temporary gilded structure which we are pleased to call people's prosperity.

Beneath this fair surface of glitter and fashion lies a seething pit of poverty, superstition, and vice. Ruffianism and crime stalk boldly in our midst, and vices which were once the special shame of the ancient world have made their appearance in modern society. In our leading thoroughfares and by-streets are to be found men and women from whose features all traces of humanity have been battered out by misery and debauchery. These are the dark shadows upon the picture of our fair world which no quantity of words will tone down. —Sel.