A Wrong Conception of True Reform
In the Post-Standard-Express of Syracuse, New York, of January 13, is a nice little story of Pitcairn Island. It tells the story of the mutiny of the Bounty, the survivors on Pitcairn Island, and also the religious character of the people, of an Englishman who declares that Pitcairn Islanders are the most religious and contented people on earth, and “the population, according to Mr. Hesketh’s account, now consists solely of Seventh-day Adventists, and numbers 150 all told. They have a school and a church, and the schoolmaster is preacher as well as medical adviser. There are sixty-seven children under sixteen. The food of the islanders consists of sweet potatoes, a little corn, a few yams, pumpkins, and tropical fruit. The total wealth of the islanders in English coin is about £10.” Public offices are not rewarded with a salary. The officials are a chief magistrate, two assistants, and two other officers. Every person over eighteen, male or female, has five votes in each election, one for each officer. The man who is fined works out his fine on the roads. A religious ceremony begins and ends each day’s work. This writer in the Post-Standard says, “Such is the product of an act of lawlessness,” and the writer says, “That stubborn virtue which exists in human beings and defies all efforts to quite subdue and exterminate it” asserted itself. He declares: “Since they could not live by drunkenness and lust and murder, they would try living by the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. In that one tremendous experiment on Pitcairn Island was illustrated in epitome the whole descent of society from savagery to civilization. Civilization, morality, religion, sprang up spontaneously from the foul soil of lawlessness and bestiality. [Italics ours.] These restraints of law and morality, this instinct of religion, are not superficial and exotic to human beings. They are instinctive. They are the clutch of the animal at the straw which saves him from the fate of the brute.”
All of which is far wide of the mark. The one thing that saved Pitcairn Island was the life which is in God’s word, and the one power that turned them from any kind of lawlessness to the keeping of the commandments of God was the life from God. No society living ever reformed itself by itself, or in itself. No civilization on earth ever made upward strides in morality in and of its instinctive, inherent possessions. It was and always has been and always will be, if at all, by the receiving of life from God. We know the story of Pitcairn, we know those who labored there, and we are sure that every truly moral, religious soul will bear witness to the truth of what we say.