The Industrial Conflict in the Light of Revelation.
By Geo. W. Rine
THE GREAT CLASS STRUGGLE FORETOLD BY PROPHETS.
REPRESENTATIVE SIBLEY, of Pennsylvania, gave the following note of warning, in a speech in Congress:— Prompted alone by our love for rich and poor, by our love for the welfare and peace of our common country, let us warn you that the masses of the people are aroused. All over this fair land they are on their knees in prayer. Their wails have been heard at the throne of the Almighty. My friends, hunger and cold know no laws, and when these twin devils are let loose and you force them out upon the world, “Then woe to the robbers who gather
In fields where they never have sown;
Who have stolen the jewels from labor
And builded to Mammon a throne.
. . . . . .
“Then to him who hath reveled in plunder
Till the angel of conscience is dumb,
The shock of the earthquake and thunder
And tempest and torrent shall come.” Employing the term “Armenian” to designate the oppressed poor of our own country, Senator Tillman said in part:— The Armenians are here at your doors. In every city and hamlet of the United States they can be found, and I warn you they will not be held down for all time by the Turks who now oppress them. A day of reckoning will come unless there is no longer a just God in heaven, and when it does come, woe be unto those who have been among the oppressors of the people. . . . The sordid despotism of wealth, to use the phrase of Justice Brown, is already felt throughout the land. God grant that our country may be spared the enactment of such scenes as were witnessed in Paris in 1789. But the fair flower of liberty can not be uprooted or smothered by the noxious weeds of monopoly and class privilege without bloodshed, and a cataclysm which will give us a military despotism, or leave the country redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled. The conservative, far-seeing English scholar, Mr. Frederick Harrison, discussing the perils incident to congested wealth, declared: “The day may come when we will conclude to do away with the rich man altogether; and no socialist, no anarchist, no nihilist is doing so much to hasten the coming of that day as the rich man himself.” The statesmen and other great thinkers of Europe entertain the same fears as to the social outlook in their own lands. The late Conservative Prime Minister Salisbury, a British lord, declared in 1897: “From all I have seen and heard, I feel assured that there will arise in this country, and speedily too, a revival of that great feud between the house of want and the house of plenty.” That grim old warrior of Germany, Count Von Moltke, said just a few months before his death: “The days of war of cabinets are passed. The elements that now threaten peace are found among the people.” Referring to the frenzied greed of the capitalists and the hate and envy of the laborers, he said further: “These are the dangerous elements which are producing discontent everywhere, and may at any moment precipitate war, even against the will of the government.” Professor Ely, of the University of Wisconsin, perhaps the greatest authority on political economy in America, said, not long ago, that dynamite explosions are a local manifestation of an international devil, and added: “I must say frankly, that I believe we are just beginning on a terrible era in the world’s history, an era of internal and domestic warfare such as has never been seen, and the end of which only God can foretell.” Citations of exactly the same import might be given from the speeches and writings of eminent men of all nations, until we should have volumes of extracts. But the foregoing excerpts are sufficiently conclusive as proof that the prophetic foretellings of the same tenor, which we shall now briefly study, are about to meet their verification and fulfilment. The Prophets Foretell the Struggle.
In that remarkable prophecy given through James, to which I have so often referred, is introduced this sharp, straightforward warning and appeal to the rich who, “in the last days,” withhold a just wage from the laborer, and are therefore enabled to “heap up treasures.” “Come now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. . . . Your gold and silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire.” James 5:1–3. Does it not look as if we were about to witness the actual fulfilment of this awful prediction? Not for its own sake did our Lord foretell the awful impending social conflict, but that all those who love His appearing might know that “the coming of the Lord is at hand,” as the apostle expresses it in the eighth verse. The prophet Habakkuk says of the grasping rich living near the close of time: He “enlargeth his desire as Sheol, and he is as death, and can not be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations, and heapeth unto him all peoples. Shall not all these take up a parable against him, and a taunting proverb against him, and say, Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his! how long? and that ladeth himself with pledges [bonds, stocks, etc.]! Shall they not rise up suddenly that shall bite thee, and awake that shall vex thee, and thou shalt be for booty unto them? Because thou hast plundered many nations, all the remnant of the people shall plunder thee.” Ch. 2:5–8. It is evident that the remnant of the people must be the last people. Read also the first chapter, verses 13 to 16. Here the prophet represents the rulers of the mart, of the money tables, as dealing treacherously and swallowing up—that is, financially—the poor, who are more righteous than their oppressors. The poor are caught up in nets as fishes that have no ruler over them; that is, have no defense, no means of resisting the rapacity of their oppressors. “Therefore he [the oppressor] sacrificeth unto his net [unto his machinations, artifices, wily schemes] and burneth incense unto his drag [rejoices in his artful schemes by which he despoiled the helpless poor].” The late Senator Ingalls, in a speech in the Senate, delivered in the middle nineties, unwittingly uttered the following luminous comment on this prophecy. Discussing the marvelous rapidity with which the wealth of the nation501has been monopolized by the few, he exclaimed:— “It is, so far as the results of democracy, as a social and political system, are concerned, the most terrible commentary that was ever recorded in the books of time; and Nero fiddles, while Rome burns. It is thrown off with a laugh and a sneer as the froth on the beer of our political system. . . . By some means, some device, some machination, some scheme, some incantation, honest or otherwise, some process that can not be defined, less than a two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession, and have kept out of the penitentiary, in spite of the means they have adopted to acquire it, of more than one-half of the entire accumulated wealth of the country.” In a previous article, entitled “Lovers of Pleasure,” I endeavored to show how the votaries of wealth and fashion are reveling in luxurious and licentious pleasures, recklessly, with no thought of the claims of God or of their less fortunate fellows, upon them. The prophet Amos graphically portrays the awful retribution that will be visited upon these abandoned devotees of voluptuous and pompous pleasures, at the hands of their infuriated victims. In ch. 8:3, he declares: “And the songs of the temple [margin, ‘palace,’ A. R. V.] shall be wailings in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah: the dead bodies shall be many; in every place shall they cast them forth with silence.” Note also verse 10 of the same chapter: “And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentations; . . . and I will make it as the mourning for an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.” Verse 9 should be read in this connection as evidence that the prophet is delineating last-day events. These scenes are enacted at a time when the Lord is about to cause “the sun to go down at noon,” and to “darken the earth in a clear day.” The heartless greed and clutching avarice are trenchantly sketched in verses 4 to 6. Do not fail to read them, and with them read again the article of this series, under the caption, “Capitalistic Monopoly and Oppression.” We all know the story of the wonderful deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, under the visible leadership of Moses. We remember how the millions of Israel were defrauded, oppressed, and ground down under the iron heel of tyranny. All who accept the Bible as a revelation from God, know that the Exodus of the children of Israel was a magnificent type of the final deliverance of spiritual Israel. Israel’s land of promise, Palestine, is used throughout the Scriptures as a symbol, or type, of the eternal inheritance promised to the saints. We remember the awful plagues that were visited upon the Egyptians, the oppressors of God’s people. In the words of Amos, their feasts were turned into mourning and their songs into lamentations, and their mourning as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day. This last specification was literally experienced in Egypt as a result of the last plague. “And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of My people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters. . . . And I have come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians.” Ex. 3:7, 8. We have several times referred to the statement in James 5, to the effect that the cries of the oppressed laborers had entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. And as He gloriously delivered His oppressed people in the time of Moses and Pharaoh, so He is now about to deliver all those who love and serve Him, from the hand of the oppressor. “Be patient, brethren,” “grudge not one against the other,” He counsels; for, “behold, the Judge standeth at the door.” The spirit of meekness is the opposite of the spirit of revenge and retaliation. Only the “meek,” in the words of the Master, “shall inherit the earth”—the earth rejuvenated and brought back to its pristine perfection. The meek will never resort to violence or any form of physical coercion. “Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.” Ps. 2:12.