p. 9 | A STRIKING COMPARISON

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 8, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 23.

A STRIKING COMPARISON.

FROM the sermon of the moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, recently held in Buffalo, N.Y., we take this picture of present-day conditions:—

The French Revolution was a growth. It came from the swelling of life—a life that shattered feudalism, and overturned the throne, and broke in pieces old tyrannies and old institutionalisms, and brought clouds and darkness and desolation with it as well as light. Our masses to-day are pushing to the front, and in the push they are not stopping to concern themselves about who is elbowed aside, or what industries suffer, or what establishments go down. Of all the sovereigns on earth, I know of none more to be feared than King Demos.

Our ideals of reverence have gone down. It is awful, the liberty we take with things consecrated and venerated for ages. We laugh at everything. No position, no office, no calling, no relation in life escapes our satire. Nothing is sacred. The family, the court, the church, the highest and holiest things are made sport of. Whether it be a wedding or a funeral, an ordination or a tragedy, a birth or a baptism, we find something to grow funny over. It is the cartoon age to which we have come. With our light and jaunty air, with our flippant handling of things sacred, with our universal irreverence, we are sowing the wind and we shall reap the whirlwind. A laughing, mocking, cartooning age, an age that tends to lampooning and levitation, will soon run to the devil. A tree can not stand without roots. It must grip the solid and substantial if it is to resist the storm and keep its branches in the sky. So precisely with men and nations. If they are not rooted in profound reverence for things good and high and holy, they must go down.

King Demos (the people) is a fearful tyrant when intoxicated with the spirit of disorder, when crazed with the idea that irreverence, outlawry and destruction are a proper remedy for political and industrial wrongs. As to the true remedy, the speaker struck another chord of truth in the following expression:—

It is poor policy to attempt to clean out the well by painting the pump, or to sweeten the city's water by decorating the hydrant. Wake up the springs of justice, inspire the interior life with noble and unselfish purpose, introduce the mind of Christ, and the virus will give place to virtue, bitterness to blessing. The only remedy is the Gospel, platitudinous as the suggestion may seem. The church, like her Master, must have compassion on the multitude, must feel the sorrows and hardships which they feel, and by ways that are new, even odd and unconventional, or startling, if you please, take the cross to men of shop and mill and factory. By tent work, by open-air meetings, by gatherings in down-town halls, by the great-hearted inventiveness of a divine philanthropy—in some way or other, we must go out into the highways and hedges, out into the streets and lanes of the city, out to these struggling brethren of ours, and by a kindness that is patient and tender and persistent, compel them to hear the story of the Crucified.