Three Letters-S-i-n by Emma Hildreth Adams

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 17, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 11.

Three Letters—S-i-n

By Emma Hildreth Adams

By Emma Hildreth Adams

S-I-N! No other word in human language occupies so much room. It has empire in every human heart, and has had from dawn of human history. It influences the speech of mankind, vastly, heartlessly, mightily. It fills millions of minds with thoughts, malicious, cruel, revengeful. It renders millions of homes cheerless, miserable; rends them asunder, destroys them. It shapes destiny with iciest purpose. It shrivels character, mercilessly, triumphantly.

S-I-N! It is the largest, most expansive, most progressive word in all languages. From tiny birth to bitter, stinging maturity, it develops oftimes with speed astounding, frightening. Apparently, sometimes, its frightful work is done almost before it is begun.

In its swift, dire course it banishes noble emotions; puts to death pure thoughts; extinguishes the finest aspirations; obliterates the divine impress in man; uproots faith, and at last, slyly, artfully shoves death into the place of eternal life—“sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

S-I-N! It is the busiest, most enterprising word uttered by human tongue. It rests not night nor day. At daybreak and at nightfall it is at its tasks. It erects every jail in the country, town, or city. It builds all the police stations the world over, and appoints the policemen. It constructs every state prison in every land. It sets up every scaffold for its takers of human life. It plans every murder, every suicide. It devises schemes for a thousand kinds of theft, and for the countless methods of cheating the innocent and unwary. It entraps and misleads silly women; multiplies deserted children and careless parents, while the defrauded and overworked poor increase.

S-I-N! It is a word freighted, laden, with enormous responsibility. It is the prime mover of every law evolved for the restriction and limitation of men’s rights, civilly, socially, politically, officially. It is the cause of the overwhelming sum-total of bribery to-day, bribery of lawyers, legislators, judges, committees, commissioners, councils. It is the author of the tremendous amount of defaulting published far and wide; of the frightful lack of official integrity so much lamented by true citizens; of the startling, unreasonable striving after extreme wealth; for the closing the doors of opportunity to thousands of men of little fortune, by the greedy, ravenous, prosperous few.

It is godfather to all the frauds perpetrated in executing building contracts, and for the shameless deception practised in many of the arts, industries, and manufactures of the world, alike in quality of material and quality of workmanship.

One conspicuous field for rich returns in its pernicious line is the trusts, those combinations of corporations so promising of swollen dividends for the very few, of robbery for the hundreds.

S-I-N! It stands for all that is spurious, unreal, adulterated in food, drink, and clothing and consequently for half the diseases which torment, waste, destroy, most of the race. On its gigantic shoulders rest the causes of centuries of unspeakable misery, of generations of blighted lives, of sad deaths uncountable. Oftentimes sin renders the parent heedless of solemn duty to his child, steals away all fine sense of responsibility for him. It causes unwise, worldly-minded sons and daughters to evade that beautiful obligation of smoothing the pathway for aged parents, deserving or undeserving. It permits selfish kindred, the world around, to toss aside all burden for unfortunate ones allied to them by ties of blood.

S-I-N attained the summit of its maldoing

, the crest of its crafty scheming, the zenith of wily striving, when it accomplished that saddest, most far-reaching, most remarkable, most remedial of all deaths — the death of Christ on Calvary, the death of the Creator of all things, of the Redeemer of this hopelessly imprisoned world, the Life-bearer to the human race.