The “Mark” Will Soon Be Enforced
By L. A. S.
To one acquainted with the principles and methods and recent history of trades unionism in this country, it must be evident that the way is prepared for an early fulfilment of the Bible prophecy concerning the enforcement of the mark of the beast. A power has arisen in the United States which has for its one specific purpose the control of the buying and selling of goods; that is, it controls labor, upon which buying and selling are dependent. Already the mandate of this power has been heard forbidding buying and selling except by its permission. To the non-union man it says, “You shall not sell your labor,” and to the employer it says, “You shall not buy non-union labor.” The individual who incurs the enmity of this power, whether working man or employer, finds it impossible to secure his rights. The working man can not obtain work, and without this he can not buy the necessaries of life for himself and his family; while the employer, rather than face the loss incurred by a strike of his employees, will agree to the most unjust exactions. Witness the extortion of money from builders in New York City and elsewhere by walking delegates of the labor unions, under threat of ordering a strike for noncompliance with their demands. It would be a brave merchant to-day who, if ordered by the labor trust in his city not to sell to, or buy from, a certain individual or class of individuals, under penalty of having his business ruined by a strike or boycott, with its attendant acts of violence, would venture to disregard the dictum of this power. It only remains that the power of this great confederacy be turned to the enforcement of the mark of the antichristian power prophesied of in Revelation 13 and 14. And as the mark of this power is an institution the essential feature of which is cessation from work, it is plain that no great step will be required to bring the labor confederacy to the point of dealing with this matter. And the prospect is that just this thing will be done. Believers in this institution realize the possibility of such action, and are calling for it. Note, for example, the following words spoken recently by a Des Moines, Iowa, clergyman, to a large audience, his subject being the problem confronting labor:— If it (unionism) is ever to furnish the panacea for our labor ills, it must broaden and deepen its life currents on the moral ideas that affect the welfare of the laboring man. It must join the churches everywhere in the protection of Sunday as a day of rest and recreation. It means more to the laboring man to have all unnecessary work done away with on the Lord’s day than to any one else. Here is a place for effectively using the splendid machinery of organized labor. To this statement add the following from an editorial in The Independent (N. Y.) of October 1:— No one can watch the recent development of trade unionism, with all its unquestioned value and importance, and not be impressed by the rapidity with which it is tending to become a dogmatic religion, surcharged with bigotry, fanaticism, and superstition. The unions have erected Sunday into a sabbath of the faithful. The union itself has become a church, to which on every seventh day the faithful repair. The unbeliever is no longer merely a “scab,” he is a sinner, living under wrath. The individual member who goes out from among the industrially redeemed is a lost being, who can not be permitted to live inconspicuously among his fellows, but must be followed with anathemas and all the pains and penalties of the excommunicated. . . . The trade unions embrace possibly two and a half million members. If they are all to become dogmatic religionists, the days of persecution “for the faith” are not over. A little change in the situation which will bring the matter of Sunday rest to the front as a thing to be enforced by union labor, and bring under the wrath of the labor confederacy those who oppose the Sunday sabbath, and the crisis will be upon us. And how suddenly, in this day of sudden things, such a change may be brought about! The final conflict, like other final consummations, has been delayed only by the delay in God’s work. But “there shall be delay no longer.” L. A. S.