p. 8 | IN THE MODERN CITY by S.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 20, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 47.

IN THE MODERN CITY.

By S.

The real conditions of the modern city when brought to the light, reveal something upon which no moral man can look without a blush of shame. The general reader knows, in a general way, that wickedness is rife there; but it is seldom that even a portion of the festering sore is uncovered to the general public gaze. It is done at times, however, and a shock of horror and shame goes through the moral, self-respecting citizens.

But to the student of God’s Word this has a meaning. The wickedness of the world that brought about its destruction by a flood of waters is working in the earth to-day. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain are duplicated, added to, multiplied in the great, steaming pools of sin which our modern great cities are. Listen to the hopeless plea of a young Jew of New York City, when a well-known speaker had finished exhorting his hearers to higher ideals for the betterment of society:—

Now you go to your quiet home in a decent street, where no harm comes to you or your wife or children in the night; for it is your home. And we—we go with our high resolves, the noble ambitions you have stirred, to our tenements, where evil lurks in the darkness at every step, where innocence is murdered in babyhood, where mothers bemoan the birth of a daughter as the last misfortune, where virtue is sold into a worse slavery than ever our fathers knew, and our sisters betrayed by paid panders; where the name of home is bitter as mockery; for, alas! we have none. These are the standards to which we go from here.

That young Jew was familiar with the evils of the tenement-house, where immorality was allowed to carry on its work in the same buildings occupied by the families of the respectable poor; where children were reared in the very atmosphere of vice and pollution; where young boys and girls were made familiar with the lowest forms of vice, and enticed or forced into the ways of wickedness. That is but one of the blasting influences prevalent in the great cities of to-day. It is not confined to New York City; it is not confined to America; it is the scourge of the world. We hear terrible accounts of the conditions that prevail in the cities of the Old World, where school children have been forced by their own parents into lives of the lowest vice in order to add a few more thalers to the family income; where officials have winked at or participated in, for a consideration, crimes which can not be told in print. And then our attention is called back to the conditions in our own land by the revelations of a Lexow Committee, the startling declarations of a Dr. Parkhurst or a Bishop Potter, and the bringing to light of deepest wickedness by the investigations which they started. Listen to the indictment which Mr. Riis, in The Outlook of October 26, brings against the municipal government of the city in which he lives:—

“There is a class of landlords who can be absolutely counted upon to follow the fortunes of the Hall [Tammany]. They are the ones who have sold their souls, as their houses, to the devil, and take his wages. They have a grievance, for the law which they hate now puts a fine of a thousand dollars upon the tenement that harbors prostitution with the knowledge of the landlord. We have heard it until it has made our hearts sick, how they traffic in virtue, these vultures, that their pockets may bulge and their diamonds blaze while mothers weep; how girls are snared for the bagnio, and sold by their seducers into a slavery from which death is the only escape; for while they live, they must help fill with the wages of their shame the bottomless coffers that buy elections and our liberties. There came in my mail to-day a reprint of a paper read before the American Medical Association by the assistant surgeon of the Good Samaritan Dispensary. It tells of the new horror of children of tender age coming to the hospital with unnamable diseases; and I know that it is all true, for I have seen it. Mr. Riis declares that the political issue of the day for that city is not whether New York shall build bridges, railroads, or public libraries, but whether it shall longer stand before the world as a silent partner of the most infamous conspiracy of any day, to which nothing is pure, nothing sacred; which drags down with one polluting hand innocent womanhood, and with the other collects blackmail impartially from ‘the prostitute it has made, the friendless peddler, the sweeper in the street, the policeman on his beat. On the very buttons on his coat they have set a price which he must pay, or pay the penalty.’”

New York is not alone in this. In some degree it is carried on in every large city, and in many of the smaller cities and villages. To add to the distressful situation, the inhabitants of rural communities are migrating to the more populous centers, overcrowding the labor market, and adding another depressing influence to those already at work against morality. The increase of the large cities at the expense of villages and rural districts is not imaginary, but is proved by statistics to be continuous and rapid.

Is it not true, then, that evil men and seducers are waxing worse and worse? The Lord has declared that they would do so in the last days. 2 Tim. 3:1-7, 12, 13. They are doing so now as never before. Where are we, then, in the history of the world? Are we warranted in assuming, as many do, that there is a glorious temporal future before this and succeeding generations? If that assumption be true, God’s Word can not be. In the days of Noah the world was filled with wickedness. It was destroyed by a flood of water. Christ has told us that the days of Noah would be duplicated at the time when He should return to the earth. Matt. 24:37. We see the duplicate now. We are living to-day in the most solemn hours of this earth’s history. The moral conditions of the world, together with what God has said concerning them, show beyond the shadow of a doubt that the time of Christ’s return is near at hand. The very wickedness of the world is a warning to its inhabitants that the end of sin’s dominion is about to be proclaimed.