“Oil-driven, single-funneled, and protected against air-bombs — H. M. S. ‘Queen Elizabeth’ as she will be when completed.”
A STORY which had quite a large circulation, some years ago, told of a German scientist, named Frankenstein, who concluded that he could take the elements of which man is composed, and make man. After years, he succeeded in making a large man physically, but a horrible monster mentally. This monster that he had formed longed for a mate, and searched the world that he might find it. Frankenstein himself revolted from the awful responsibility of killing this human monstrosity which he had created, or of bringing another monster into the world that might fit the one already formed, and might not. He died at last from the violence of his own creation. In other words, he undertook to make man, and made a demon, superior so far as physical strength is concerned, but devilish in mental and moral make-up.
This is in a way a striking illustration of what the civilization of the present time is doing without Christ. Not long ago the New York “Independent” suggested some of these things that might destroy the civilization that had created them. For instance, splendor and luxury are among them,—“baleful products of civilization which enervate energy, and slay the mother which bore them.” Invention and science are other products of this wonderful civilization. Science, the “Independent” calls “the glory of civilization,” but civilization which makes science its glory may be expected to be destroyed by its glory.
Science has blessed, but it may work to destroy as well as to bless. This is demonstrated in the fact that the strongest, ablest service of science is given to war. Even now, in a comparative time of peace, the war burden is crushing this old world, and it goes on increasing from year to year, creating bigger guns and mightier Dreadnoughts. The “Independent” well asks: “What will be the result when war comes, when those who even now can scarcely feed their babes find no work to keep body and soul together? What when the fleets of war prevent the fleets of commerce from feeding the millions that crowd the cities? What when the cities themselves are bombarded, not only from the ground but from the sky?”
Surely science, as applied to war, is a Frankenstein monster indeed. The awful creation will devastate, burn up, and destroy in a day what it has taken civilization ages to create.
Take, for instance, another product of civilization, the saloon evil, and the low resorts, gambling-hells, houses of ill fame, that grow out of it, vice licensed and commercialized.
Take some of the mighty explosives over which science has rejoiced, like nitroglycerin, and dynamite, and cordite, and other powerful agents,—splendid, in a way, when they tunnel the mountains and break mighty canals through the rocks. But when they are used, as very clear evidence in the Indianapolis dynamite trial brought out, to wreck and destroy the buildings that are of real use in civilization, the creation has become a monster, and especially when these mighty explosives are used by such a class of people as the I. W. W.’s and Syndicalists of the world, who are not only educating the people to their own views of matters, but who are declaring that the minority must act, devastate, kill, destroy, against the will of the people as a whole, until they can seize all the products of civilization. Their best weapons are these mighty, easily compounded explosives. The “Independent” well says that “the danger is serious, and the people should be warned, and should act. It is something to make stricter laws as to the use and storage of dynamite, which it is now easy enough to get; but if the present social war grows, it WILL AWAKEN THOSE WHO SLEEP. We make no crusade against Socialism, we are willing it should make its argument and win if it can, but we do object to a minority of men fighting the majority meanwhile with dynamite and sabotage.”
And these are the products of civilization with Christ left out. All civilizations without God have become monsters, and have wrecked the very lands which created them, and this very condition of things which we see at the present time is striking fulfilment of the prophecies of God’s Word repeated over and over, that man left to himself, apart from God, will develop just such conditions of things as we now see, and which are holding the nations in the very grip of paralysis and fear. Take the whole 59th chapter of Isaiah, and it reveals to us just such times as these in which we live, monsters developing in the midst of a people professedly religious.
In the third chapter of 2 Timothy, verses 1 to 5, are mentioned eighteen different sins out of which grow these monsters of civilization. These sins are held by a class who have the form of godliness but deny its power. The hope of the world is not in the form of godliness; it is not in a profession of religion; it is in the power of godliness to restrain all the unholy passions of the human heart. No wonder that the apostle declares, in this passage to which we have last referred, that the times are perilous.
And these very conditions have been brought about by another monster of civilization, the product of that school of criticism which has exalted above the Word of God the theories of men. This exaltation of evolution is one of the planks in the platform of those who are destroying society at the present time. If there was ever a time when a message was demanded, it is the message which God has given for these days: “Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment is come; and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” It is creative power that is needed in these days—creative power applied to character—and a science that is subject to moral law of the Creator.
