What Can Be Done to Stop It?
A PERTINENT question is propounded by the Rev. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church, New York City. The question is, “What can be done to stop it?” Some things that greatly need to be stopped, but for which no apparent remedy is in sight, are enumerated by him thus:— Tell me, if you can, what can be done to stop men from beating down values and making properties worthless on which multitudes of people of modest fortunes have invested all they have. Tell me what can be done to stop strikers from their violent acts, by which they prevent honest men from working, because they do not wish to join their unions. What can be done to stop the demagogues, who are everlastingly at their work of stirring up the poor against the rich, and fomenting contests between labor and capital, as if the one were the natural enemy of the other? What can be done to stop extravagance, display, and show, and make very rich people economical and modest in dress and conduct, and saving, in order to give abundantly where gifts would help the community? What can be done to stop fellows from running after each new light, and taking up each new gospel? What can be done to stop married people from putting away each other, as soon as they get tired of each other, and adding to the sin of unfaithfulness the further sin of rushing into the arms of the partners of their guilt? Men are talking about these things and deploring them, and hoping that they will in some way right themselves, but no one is showing any way within the limits of human power or wisdom in which these evils are to be remedied; “yet,” to quote the words of a prominent Methodist journal, “no one who thinks it over from a Christian standpoint can doubt that if they are not stopped, the harvest will be frightful beyond telling.” We are in the time of the harvest,—the harvest of the gospel, and the harvest of the world; and the latter will indeed be a frightful harvest. The only thing in which there is light and hope is the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation. “Preach the word.”