Increase of Unnatural Crimes.
The thoughtful man or woman who reads or merely scans the news of the day must be struck by the increase of unnatural crime, if such a term may be used. Of course, all crime is unnatural, or ought to be; and yet on the other hand it is the legitimate fruit of a seed-sowing of lawlessness, lust, and sin. As an instance of the prevalence of this sort of crime, we pick up a local paper of October 10. It tells of a school-teacher in North Dakota, shooting three trustees, three girl pupils, and then committing suicide. This was in a settlement of Mennonites, a place that would not be expected to bring forth such results. From Pittsburg comes the news of an intelligent young man of seventeen years of age brutally murdering his mother and sister, wounding four smaller sisters, and seeking to kill three brothers, who overpowered him. Just the other day it was discovered that two young lads, one of whom was considered a good boy, in a town near San Francisco, had been setting fire to various buildings in the village for months, destroying many thousand dollars' worth of property. The sister of one, a pretty girl, was privy to the work. The motive seems to have been sheer maliciousness. The commissioners of prisons in England report that 17,163 more persons were sentenced to ordinary imprisonment in the year just closed than in the year previous, and 183 more to penal servitude. And such items as these are found in every day's news. Truly the apostle and prophet said: “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse,” and “in the last days perilous times shall come.”