How Can It Do It?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 21, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 34.

How Can It Do It?

—What spread-eagle nonsense is the following, from Senator McLaurin at Spartansburg, South Carolina, July 4:—

Our nation, with its free government and its aggressive Christian civilization, is in a position to march forward and convert the world. With the isles of the Pacific in our possession, with the confidence of the millions of heathens in the East, and with our wealth and commerce and Anglo-Saxon love of liberty, we can raise the banner of the cross and accomplish the heaven-designed work of having the Gospel preached to every creature.

“Convert the world”! To what? to whom? To the liberty of the few? to the inequality of man? to the worship of Mammon and Mars? What Gospel will “we”—a nation—carry? How fully is that nation prepared to do this, with its strife of labor and capital, its race conflicts, its 10,000 homicides, its numerous suicides and lynchings, its awful procession of 100,000 drunkards, stepping into their graves at the rate of 275 a day, its myriads of prostitutes and libertines,—how can this nation “convert the world,” or accomplish the work of carrying the Gospel to every creature?