Barbarism or the Millennium?
EVERY city, nearly every village in the land, is set thick with saloons. In the large cities they are numbered by the thousand. Besides the ruin they inflict upon the persons and property of individuals, and the distress and degradation they bring upon families, they are a powerful factor in politics. To a deplorable extent they debauch the character and destroy the integrity of government, municipal, State, and national. The influence of the rationalistic foreign element was never so great in this country as it is now. It boldly defies the Christian character of our institutions, and seeks to replace them with the license which prevails, so far as it is not restrained by the strong hands of strong governments, on the continent of Europe. Possessing the ballot, the mere politician will never offer any resistance to this foreign influence. Wherever the direct issue is made in any of our large cities, or other locality, where the German element is strong, the distinctively Christian institutions of our country go to the wall. The secular press is mainly rationalistic or infidel, and misses no opportunity to sneer at the Christian faith, to travesty Christian doctrine, and to assume as established facts the baseless theories and assumptions of rationalism. Scarcely a day comes and goes without its revelation of official corruption, and as for crimes and misdemeanors, the daily budget of them is more than any of us have time to scan, and they are passed over without an emotion. If we look into the church, by which we mean the aggregate of professed Christians, expecting to see the Bride, clear as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as a host, we shall be disappointed; and it may puzzle us to tell where the line of religious principle and that of worldly morality begin and end. Do not all these elements of the situation, taken together, give a gloomy aspect to the future, and threaten the defeat of religion, the subversion of moral principle, and the destruction of the freedom of the State? Certainly, if intemperance, license, dishonesty, disbelief in man's responsibility to God, oppression, and inhumanity are to prevail, society will plunge into anarchy and chaos, and it will not be the first time in the history of civilization that such a plunge has been taken. In fact, civilization seems to rise, like the wave, to a beaded and snowy crest, visible from afar, and then to sink from view. So rose Judea, crowned with its golden temple on Moriah; Greece, with its marble Parthenon gleaming over its delightful valleys; Egypt, with its Karnac and Luxor, and America, with its Mitla, Palenque and Uxmal. Taking a sweeping view of the past of civilization, the scene is best illustrated by the incoming of a tide,—the waves rising and receding, but each one striking higher than its predecessor, and not falling so low. What promise is there that our Protestant Christian civilization shall not recoil, leaving its impress as the highest reach of a flood-tide which had been rising for a thousand years? Abundant reasons why this should not be so may be offered: The greater volume of intelligence, of practical and abstract knowledge; the greater force of moral principle; the stronger and steadier adhesion to justice, equity, individual and national honor, and such like conservative influences. But not one of these was wholly lacking in the civilizations of the past. If our own nation is not to relapse into barbarism, it will be only because the disintegrating and destructive forces are determinedly resisted and overcome. We must press forward for education, temperance, purity, individual integrity, and all the virtues of Christian character. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, indefatigable labor is the price of Christian civilization. Let our free school system succumb to the assaults made upon it; let our churches yield to indolence, selfishness, and irreligion, and go into decay; let the press cease to battle for purity, morality, honesty, and piety; let the immoral classes carry the elections in our cities, States, and nation, as they strive with all their force to do; let all those who are striving for righteousness fold their arms and cease from their labor—and we shall, as a people, rush to barbarism as the avalanche dashes down the mountain side.—Christian Statesman.