CRIMINALITY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 17, 1898

THERE is no day in the year in which the papers do not come laden with their revolting and appalling list of crimes. In one column the head-lines tell of a horrifying murder. A page is devoted to the details of daring robberies, and annoying petty thieveries. The libertine who by his infernal arts has alienated husband and wife and wrecked a once happy home is photographed, and his worse than beastly sins described. The defaulter, the embezzler, in a word, the criminal of every grade and conception, furnishes a large proportion of what the public calls “news.”

And the records do not confine these crimes to men, neither to persons of maturer years. But boys of what used to be called “a tender age,” banded together as outlaws, boldly invade the alleys, lanes, and sometimes the most public streets of our cities. And even the tenderer natures of women are broken down by this tidal wave of crime, and wives, mothers, yes, and young girls, become bold-faced and daring participants in the evils of this age.

What does it all mean? In the past ages some localities would become notorious for such vices and crimes. But since the days of Sodom and the Flood, when has it been so universal?

In some of the prophecies of the last days may be found words like the following: “For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying, Wo is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers.” Jer. 4:31. And again the Word says: “Hear the Word of the Lord, ye children of Israel; for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.” Hosea 4:1, 2.

How graphically do the Scriptures describe the times in which we live! And there is an all-pervading and ever-present sense of the thought that the crimes and social and political difficulties rising in such alarming proportions everywhere portend awful calamities and dangers for the immediate future. Calamities and dangers there will surely be, but he who rightly reads the indications of the present may know full well what it all means, and knowing he may have the shelter of Omnipotence from the approaching storm.