THE RELIGIOUS TREND

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 18, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 51.

THE RELIGIOUS TREND.

“Because iniquity shall abound,” says our Saviour in speaking of the last days, “the love of many shall wax cold”. Matt. 24:12. The text indicates that there would be backsliding among the people of God, a manifest coldness and lethargy in religious things. The result of such a course on the part of the church would, in the nature of the case, be loss of influence religiously. Has the church lost influence? This is what President Charles William Eliot of Harvard University has to say on the subject, in a recent speech in Boston before the Twentieth Century Club. His subject was: “A Survey of Conditions of American Education, with Some Accounts of Its Successes and Its Failures.” Here is what is reported:—

Neither our courts, our legislatures, nor our churches have improved and gained a greater hold on the people in the last thirty years. . . . The efficiency of legislatures and the respect in which they are held unquestionably have declined. The courts are, as a whole, less efficient and less respected to-day than they were a generation or two generations ago. Reverence for law is not maintained at its old level. The church and its ministers can not be said to have risen in public estimation since the Civil War. The church in some places clings to morbid poetic images, or turns in others to pomp and ritual. On the whole it shows little willingness to rely on the humanistic and fundamental teachings of Christ. It has no influence whatever on millions of our nation.

And does not this witness speak truly? And the reason is intimated, the church has departed from Christ and His Word. In many cases she has done more; she has destroyed faith in the Bible. But so the Word tells us it would be in the last days. The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.