Increase of Crime.-

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 11, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 23.

Increase of Crime.—

That the last days of the world are marked in the Scriptures as days of increase in sin, wickedness, trouble, and crime, is evident to every careful reader. This condition is stated in many ways and many times. The world, apart from God’s plan, is lost, and is constantly developing the disease of sin and its manifestations in outbreaking lawlessness, wickedness, and crime. In the great cities of the United States there are schools of crime. The late Dr. Andrew D. White, of Cornell University, showed some time ago from census statistics that in 1850 the number of criminals confined in prisons was 300 for each million in population; 1860, 600; ten years later, nearly 900; and in 1880, nearly 1,200. The number of homicides, or murders, for the last seven years, according to the Homiletic Review, aggregates 47,469, while the number of legal executions was only 722, and the number of lynchings, 1,115. The tenth census reported 4,608 persons in prison charged with murder; the eleventh census, 7,351. There were 10,500 murders in this country alone in 1895. Certainly this does not show that we are nearing the time of peace and safety predicted by false prophets; rather, we are in that time when more and more are revealed the great facts that profession is not possession, that a backslidden church departing from God’s word can not save the world; that attempted civil reformation and intellectual enlightenment apart from the power of God are ineffectual to lift the race. The only hope of the world is in Christ Jesus our Lord.