Reaping the Harvest

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 2, 1915

Reaping the Harvest

THERE is abundance of evidence to show the existence of an international combine among a certain class of capitalists to keep up war scares among the nations, and thus to increase the orders that the various governing bodies would place for battle-ships, guns, and other implements of destruction. It is stated that the Krupp gun works alone expended $200,000 a year “to popularize the idea of war, among politicians and writers.” These capitalists believed that the world was so civilized we would not have any more wars, and that therefore they were taking no risk in seeking the profits from the manufacture of these implements. Hence they went on with their crazed methods of building engines of death.

The war in Europe has broken over the world. The harvest of that kind of seed-sowing is being reaped. Hundreds of thousands of men and boys have already been killed. Other hundreds of thousands of hearts are broken, and multitudes of homes are in ruins.

Do the men who have created this war spirit in the world realize that there is a Judgment-day coming, that there is a just God who will settle with men for such awful deeds?

Agents from this country have recently been abroad; and the newspapers are telling, with a great deal of pleasure, that $50,000,000 worth of orders for cartridges and guns and other such things have been placed with manufacturers in this country by the various warring nations. Other millions of dollars worth of orders are placed with other classes of manufacturers. The people of this sordid, selfish age seem to think that increased business can cover and atone for a vast amount of wretchedness. God says, in His word, that the heart of man is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” And again He says, in His word, that in the time of the end “the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.” Dan. 12:10.

Human beings appear to have a faculty for glossing over wickedness and making it to appear in gilded forms of righteousness. But the gilding is only a deceptive veneer. God says that He searches the hearts, and that He tries the reins, and it is high time for men to awake to the fact that there is a Judgment-day ahead of us, that a just God will sit in that tribunal, and that the excuses and subterfuges and cruelties and barbarities of men will have to stand in the light of the day of eternal righteousness.

We should build for that time, and not be deceived by any of the speculations and absurd theories that are so abundantly advanced by a class of people in this time who apparently are in such a delirious frame of mind that they can not observe the difference between right and wrong.