WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THE WORLD?
THE bold French radical leader, A. Clemenceau, has lately written a book called “The Social Melée.” According to the Literary Digest, he takes Cain as the symbol of the whole history of society. While the modern man does not murder, he contends that he strives by fraud and force to crush out his weaker brother. The following are said to sound the keynote of the book, which may be taken as the echo of many other minds:— “It seems to me remarkable that humanity should have needed the meditations of centuries and the investigation of the greatest minds to discover the simple and apparent fact that man has ever been at war with man, that this war has lasted ever since the human race began. Indeed, the imagination fails to completely conjure up a vision of the tremendous, the bloody, and universal slaughter which has been going on upon this earth ever since it first emerged from chaos. The black cemeteries of coal bear witness of the inconceivable combat of past ages, the combats of man against nature, of man against himself. Everywhere the earth contains traces of this same indescribable strife.” “The forced labor of the chained slave or the free toil of the paid workman both rest on the common basis of the defeat of the weakest and his exploitation by the strongest. Evolution has changed the conditions of the battle, but under a more pacific appearance the mortal strife is still going on. To seize the life and body of others to turn it to one’s own purposes—that is what has been the aim and fixed purpose of the majority of men, from the savage cannibal, the feudal baron, the slave proprietor, down to the employer of our own day.” These extracts state the facts, but neither the cause nor the remedy. The cause of it all is sin, the perversion and transgression of the moral law of God, as told in the old, old Book. “The whole world lieth in the wicked one,” controlled by him through selfishness. It may be covered, as it often is, by a thin veneer of beautiful phrases, but it is there still. The remedy is the power of regeneration through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That only would change the nature of man. But the world will not receive it. See John 1: 11, 12.