Man’s Innate Savagery

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 21, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 21.

Man’s Innate Savagery.

A prominent newspaper of not only national but international fame, in speaking of the Boer and Philippine wars, and of the recent revelations of cruelty, thus speaks of the dominant principle in a war of conquest:—

The fact is that fighting under the impulse of patriotism, in a just cause or against an adversary of equal or greater strength, often develops in men the noblest sentiments, including magnanimity and fairness. But fighting inferiors, on a mere basis of aggression, has a very different effect on human beings.

The man who spends his time killing other human beings on a salary as a mere business proposition, is very much like a dog that kills sheep, or a weasel in a dove-cote. He is very apt to enjoy killing for its own sake.

We must not denounce the British in too wholesale fashion, when our own record needs investigation.

Human beings have recently escaped from a state of savagery in which murder was the principal amusement. Our improved morality is largely veneer, and we fall back to the savage state very easily when our savage occupation of killing is restored to us.

How true that last sentence is demonstrated to be in the recent and shocking revelations which have come to the world in the slaughter of Chinese and Filipinos. Men seem to have killed for the love of killing, and to have butchered young and old, innocent and guilty, without compunction of conscience, as tho the slaughtered were so many beasts.

The only thing that has lifted men from savagery to civilization is Christianity. It may be denied, but it is true. The very gentleness of some of the men who have thrown all their powers against Christ and the Bible, has been wrought in them by generations of Christianity, perverted tho it was. That was when Christianity was on the upward path from the Reformation of the sixteenth century through Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists. Despite the hereditary unsloughed errors the trend was upward toward more liberty of thought, toward an open and free-scattered Bible, toward loyalty to God’s Word, toward freedom of conscience.

But now we see a reaction in two lines, which often cross and intertwine. One trend is to the worship of the golden calf of material prosperity, to which everything else is prostituted. The other trend is back to the ritualism, the formalism, the superstition of the Dark Ages. In both of these war is glorified,—in the one for the winning of new empires of material wealth and power, to secure and protect which armies are necessary; in the other, to enforce and promote by State aid a formal religion, from which the power and life of God have departed. Both are evil; but the tyranny of overweening wealth is preferable to the tyranny of a religion which lords it over men’s consciences. When the two are fully united, as they are sooner or later bound to be, woe worth the day. Already the Protestant churches are justifying and glorifying war, and fostering it in their own folds by semi-military organizations. The inquisition of the Dark Ages is defended in our great reviews without a protest. How long will it be before it will be advocated.

There is but one thing which will save the church and make it the salt of the earth, and that is the everlasting Gospel in its power and purity in the hearts of its individual members. The only true reform is the re-forming from the mind by the creative power of Jesus Christ. The savagery of to-day may be gently veneered, but it is none the less cruel and far more deceptive than it was in barbarous ages. Read God’s word-photographs of the heathenism in the beginning of the Christian era, and of the formal religion of the last days, and note their likeness. You will find them in Rom. 1: 28-32, and 2 Tim. 3: 1-5.