PERILOUS TIMES by R. S. Webber

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 23, 1876

FromThe Review and Herald, Review and Herald, Vol. 47, No. 12.

PERILOUS TIMES.

By R. S. Webber

“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.” 2 Tim. 3:1. Perilous means full of danger. Are we living in the last days? The Scriptures plainly teach us that we are, and as we look around us we can see that we are living in times that are full of danger. In Little’s “Living Age,” Vol. 5, page 515, we read that murders in England, until recently, were usually the offspring of the fierce and deadly passions, goaded and wrought upon by wrongs, real or fancied, and overbearing reason and mercy in obedience to the impulse of hatred, malice or revenge, or to the promptings, scarcely less powerful, of avarice or want. It has ceased to be so now.

Crime now clothes itself with a calmness and tranquillity of character, deliberate in inception, and reckless in execution, to an extent foreign to the worst phases of English vice. Murders are now motiveless; not only are they diabolically brutal, but they seem to spring up from pure love of blood. Three-fourths of the cases tried are unprovoked, cool-faced, passionless murders. The nearest relative, or the dearest friend of the victim is usually the murderer. He says the first cause to which we attribute the growth and atrocity of murder is the deficiency of sound and religious education. How well this agrees with 2 Tim. 3:1-5.

Blackwood’s (Edinburgh) Magazine, Vol. 55, p. 533, says that among the many causes of anxiety which the present state of society in the British empire must occasion to every thoughtful or reflecting mind, one of the most extraordinary and alarming is, the constant and uninterrupted increase of crime. Authentic and irrefragable evidence of the magnitude of this danger exists in the statistical tables of commitments which have now for a considerable time been prepared in all parts of the British empire. Since the year 1805 commitments have increased six-fold. They have swelled from five to thirty-one thousand. During the same period, population has advanced about six per cent; in other words, detected crime has advanced four times as fast as the number of the people.

Scotland far outstrips England and Ireland in the race of iniquity. In the year 1805 eighty-nine criminals were brought before the tribunal, supreme and inferior, in Scotland, but in the year 1842 the commitments for serious offenses were nearly four thousand. In other words, serious crimes in less than forty years, had augmented in Scotland above thirty-six fold. During the same period population has advanced about fifty per cent; viz. from 1,800,000, to 2,660,000, so that in moral, staid, and religious Scotland, serious crime, during the last forty years has risen twenty-five times as fast as the number of the people. What renders this prodigious increase of crime in so short a period in all parts of the British empire in a peculiar manner alarming, is, that it has taken place at the very time when unheard-of efforts were made in every part of the country for the moral and religious instruction of the people.

Education among the poorer classes has been promoted more than in the three preceding centuries. Yet crime and a general looseness has increased without an example in the previous history of mankind. In 1842 there was one criminal to 514 inhabitants in England. Many that twenty years ago would have been deemed felons of the highest class, and punished with death, are now disposed of in the police courts, and never appear in the criminal returns at all, which proves that they are no better brought to light now than formerly, as supposed.

It was said that education would lay the ax to the root of crime, that ignorance was the parent of vice; and by diffusing the school-master you would extinguish the greater part of wickedness. What has been the result? Has crime declined in proportion to the spread of education? Are the best instructed class the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the tempter? Far from it. The consequences hitherto, at least, have been melancholy and foreboding in the extreme. The criminal returns in Great Britain and Ireland for the last twenty years demonstrate that the uneducated criminals are about one-third of the whole.

A TABLE FOR 1841.

England, Educated, 18,171. Uneducated, 9,220. Scotland, “ 2,834. “ 696. Ireland, “ 8,753. “ 7,152.

By this table we learn that in 1841 there were in England 27,391 criminals and only 9,220 were uneducated. But the most marvelous of all is the criminal return of Prussia, the most educated country in Europe, where the duty of teaching the young is enforced by law upon parents of every description, and entire ignorance is wholly unknown. The proportion of criminals to the entire population is twenty-five times greater than in France, where education of any sort has only been imparted to two-fifths of the community. The apostle has said that “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” 2 Tim. 3:12. The Scriptures cannot be broken.

We will leave Europe and come to the sunny shores of America. We find the United States boasting of her free institutions, free speech, and Christianity. But what about her crimes? By looking at the statistics of the eighth and ninth census we find that there has been a steady increase of crime to an alarming rate, far outstripping the increase of population.

In 1850 there were 227 detected murders, or 8 to 10,000 deaths. In 1860 there were 528 detected murders, or 14 to 10,000 deaths.

This shows two murders in 1860 against one in 1850 for the same number of inhabitants. There were about 13,000 more criminals in prison in 1860 than in 1850, and 13,815 more in 1870 than in 1860, or more than 26,000 more in 1870 than in 1850. In 1850 there were 23,191,876 inhabitants in the United States, and about 6,737 criminals in prison, or one to 3,442 inhabitants. In 1870 there were 38,558,371 inhabitants and 32,901 criminals in prison, or one to 1,171, making about three criminals in 1870 to one

in 1850 to the same number of inhabitants. This shows an increase of crime in this country at a fearful rate.

With these facts before them, and newspapers coming to their doors every day with columns crowded with the report of crimes of the darkest dye, committed in the most cruel and horrid manner that wicked men and devils can invent, men will teach that the world is growing better; that it will soon be converted, and that the millennium is about to commence. I heard a Methodist minister say that the morning star of the millennium had already arisen. If this is the commencement of the millennium, what will the end be? The apostle has said, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them. . . . Therefore let us not sleep as do others; but let us watch and be sober.” 1 Thess. 5:3-6.

R. S. WEBBER.

Richmond, Sagadahoc Co., Maine.