THERE IS A REASON FOR IT.
By T.
It is a fact apparent to all, that lawlessness is spreading most rapidly. The police officer accepts a bribe, and closes his eyes to the work of criminals who ought to be brought to justice. The judge on the bench allows technicalities and unwarranted precedents, shrewdly presented by crafty lawyers, to shape his decisions, instead of being governed by the everlasting principles of right. The result of this procedure on the part of the judicial bench is the failure to convict and punish men for their dark deeds. The trial of every crime in the calendar, from murder on down the list, is made to drag thru weary days, and sometimes weeks and months. Men have become irritated at this, and in various places have expressed themselves in mob violence. Thru all this system of crime and crime protection there runs a great chain of influence. The politician must hold his influence, and so he will protect this and that wrong—does so that he may hold the votes they can control. Then these wrong-doers, with whom he comes directly in contact, have their friends, and they too must be protected. Thus the evil goes from one to the other, until the whole nation is honeycombed with the baleful disease. There is a cause that is back of all this breaking down of the bulwarks of morality. The embankments have been digged away, else this flood of evil could not be deluging the land. When we seek for the reason, it is not hard to find. For the last half century a great class of men have been soberly and ardently teaching that the Ten Commandments are abolished. They have done this largely to quiet the awakening consciousness that the world has gone wrong on the Sabbath question. The law of God plainly says that the seventh day is the Sabbath. It can not be made to say anything else. And by searching the Bible from Genesis to Revelation no evidence of any change in the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day of the week can be found. This is the statement of a simple fact, that is apparent to any one who studies the Bible for himself. The stirring activities of the century just closed have brought a great many things to the front. This is particularly true in the field of Bible study. These truths had been covered by centuries of tradition and superstition, and some of them have been accepted, in theory, by the masses, while others, that involved some inconvenience, have been rejected. Among the truths rejected is the Sabbath. And one of the most prominent arguments brought forward against the Lord’s holy day of rest has been the theory that the law of God is abolished. Men may reject and trample upon wrong or oppressive human law, and as a result there will come forth a strong nation of free men,—a nation loyal and true to law and order. But when the law of Jehovah is lightly regarded, it shows that the great foundation principles of morality are losing their hold upon the minds of men, and nothing short of the worst kind of anarchy can come as the fruit of such evil doing. Take the person, for example, who holds the Ten Commandments in high esteem, and teaches them to his children. Could you imagine such a one at the head of a mob of law-breakers? Could such a one accept bribes to do evil, or to protect the evil-doer in his vices and crimes? God’s law has been set aside in the minds of many; the abrogation of the law has been seriously and ardently taught, and the terrible fruits of this worst of all forms of anarchy are making their appearance. What an awful record will have to be faced when the final harvest of this wrong teaching is reaped? Men who regard the ways of righteousness should give serious attention to these things. Every one who respects the law of God should hold it before the minds of men, and thus seek to restrain the flow of evil as much as possible. God is calling for men to-day who still have the sense of right and truth. He needs them to stand with Him in these days of lawlessness, to hold forth the words of life to perishing men. T.