LOVE WAXING COLD | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 17, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 16.

LOVE WAXING COLD.

In Christ’s wonderful discourse recorded in part in Matthew 24, in Mark 13, in Luke 21, He notes various events which will precede the end of the age and His second coming in glory. Among these is great spiritual declension on account of abounding iniquity. His words are, “And because iniquity [lawlessness] shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” Matt. 24:12.

Love stands for loyalty, integrity, faithfulness in duty. The thought is that lawlessness will be so great, so abounding, so all-permeating, that good consciences will be affected, tender hearts will be made hard, keen sensibilities will become benumbed by the narcotizing power of sin. And this condition is becoming strikingly manifest.

This is an age of great enlightenment. Never for thousands of years have the people of earth been so generally educated as now. Never have the principles of righteousness been taught as prevalently as now. Never have the principles of Christianity been heard of throughout all the earth as now. And to all these there is general acquiescence as to their righteousness. And yet as compared with the light which the world has—and so God judges—there has never been seen such abounding lawlessness and utter indifference on the part of those professing better things. As evidence of this condition of things take the following, strong, striking statements from an article by Charles H. Parkhurst, D.D., in the Christian Work of March 14. Before presenting these quotations, it may be well to preface them by saying that Dr. Parkhurst is an able Presbyterian minister; that he has for many years been an active worker in New York City; that he has for years put forth earnest, tremendous effort in an endeavor to purify the city politically; that his investigations have brought to light as never before the festering pool of civic corruption which has spread its polluting miasma to almost every corporate borough of our land. After all this experience, after all the efforts to reform the city, this is a part of what he has to say:—

When a man is freezing to death, the supreme horror of the situation does not consist in the extreme cold to which he is exposed, but in the physical insensibility which the cold has induced and which destroys all power of appreciating the cold and of forecasting its fatal issue. So it is of the effects that come from inhaling a fetid atmosphere; its peril is not so much in its poison, in itself considered, as in the power which that poison has, so in all stealthiness to insinuate itself into the system as to prevent the victim from realizing that the hidden deadliness of its power is present and swiftly at work.

Something like that is the nature of the peril with which, as a city, we are at this moment menaced. The thing most fitted to alarm us is not that we are having our moral vitals pecked out of us day by day by a flock of foul birds, filthy harpies who live by the blood they drink from the dying, and fatten on the carcasses of the dead; but that our vitals have been for so long, and in such a sly, insinuating way, gnawed into that we have no distinct consciousness of the depth to which their beastly beaks have plowed. We have so long and so constantly breathed the filth-laden atmosphere exhaled from the lying, stealing, lecherous mob of unconscienced creatures who call themselves the government of the city of New York, that we are losing, and have to a considerable degree already lost, the power to feel sharply and passionately the daily and momentary outrage that is being perpetrated upon us. We are morally benumbed to the hateful significance of it all. We are losing our talent for indignation.

This league of conspirators that we call our municipal administration have been, for such a term of years, systematically slaughtering our material interests—making merchandise of individual rights, making spoil of the comfort, the prerogatives, and even the lives and the virtue of men, women, and children, that we have grown numb to the fact. We have learned to treat all this as a matter of course. That this city should, for instance, have as chief of police a man reputed to be a coarse, hoggish, guzzling, lecherous vagabond, has lost its power to stir up even the Christians in a passion of irrepressible moral revolt. That is our situation, and it is charged with the likelihood of grim fatality.

The question that arises, therefore, is whether there is any aspect of the present situation so appealing as to move any considerable number of staunch and influential people to excited action. I know of only one such, and that is the relation of Tammany government to the children. We learn not to care much for adult criminals; but there are a good many tens of thousands of people who, without regard to political or denominational affiliations, shrink from seeing the little innocents corrupted and labeled and already despatched by quick express hellward, almost before they are old enough to distinguish intelligently between righteousness and sin. I know of no such specimen of glaring and brainless stupidity as to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in this city every year in maintaining Sunday-schools, missions, clubs for boys and girls, and all the paraphernalia of gospelizing effort, and yet to be deliberately tolerating in our midst veritable schools of Satan, which if not taught by the devil himself, are run by his understrappers on Fourteenth Street, which amounts to the same thing, and which are certainly putting an infernal taint upon more souls every three months than with all our Gospel machinery we are saving to God and decency in an entire year.

Our children, no matter what part of town it is they are living in, are breathing a debauched atmosphere. They are being morally tainted by what is in the air, even tho not distinctly and intelligently conscious of what is in the air. A malarial pool may infest our house with microbes, even tho it does not lie exactly in our own front dooryard. The virus is working into the children’s moral systems, and when, twenty-five years hence, they have become adults, they will still be what the subtle defilements they are now exposed to are making them. Soiled clothes can be bleached white, but soiled souls can be washed and rinsed, washed and rinsed, and the stains still be left in them.

I could wish that for one year all our churches might be closed, all our Sunday-schools and missions suspended, and all our evangelizing money and effort withdrawn from the usual channels, if in their place could be substituted, uptown and down, a campaign of moral enlightenment sufficient to convince parents, Protestant, Catholic, and Hebrew, that so far as the children are concerned, this city, as now administered, is the fore-porch of hell, and Satan’s recruiting ground from which to fill up the ranks of the damned. I know of nothing more appalling just now than the inactive interest with which a host of parents are at this moment contemplating the moral situation with which we are confronted.

In particular, why do not New York mothers arouse to the horrible seriousness of the crisis? They have an indefinite idea of what is going on; why do they not get a definite idea? I once said to a lady in this city, “Why do you not study into the case and do something?” She commenced studying into the case, but gave it up after a little, saying, “It is too horrible, I can’t.” If the situation is a little too horrible to study into, isn’t it a good deal too horrible for young souls to wade into and rot in?

This is the situation in New York. It is true in a lesser degree, sometimes proportionally greater, in nearly all the large cities of our land. The same evil virus is working in smaller towns and rural communities. The caucus governs the election, and the “boss” rules the caucus. “Moral reforms”—only professedly so—are used to “work” the religious element, and the final results are the same—more corruption. And the sad thing is that the people generally are not moved by the appalling condition. Dr. Parkhurst feels that there is but one thing which will move the people,—the imminent, fearful peril of their children; but even in this the parents who ought to be the most interested are apathetic, indifferent, listless, inactive. Truly, the situation is “charged with the likelihood of grim fatality.”

But what a condition it is, in the light of the words of Jesus Christ! We can see the fulfilment of that prophecy, and also this of the apostle Paul: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.” (See 2 Tim. 3:1–5.) And among the greatest perils is a dead conscience, utterly irresponsive to the calls of duty, morality, and God. “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold; but he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.” “It is time for Thee, O Lord, to work; for they have made void Thy law.”