The Coming Reformation: Professor Pearson on Social Change
The following extract from a recent discourse given by Professor Charles Pearson, of Chicago, shows how existing conditions in the world are impressing thoughtful observers with a sense of the imminence of a mighty change in the present order of human affairs, even without the assurance of the fact which we have from the word of prophecy. The professor’s subject was “The Coming Reformation:” — Ours is a mechanical age. It produces wealth so rapidly that all previous ages seem poor. We have grown rich faster than we have learned the proper use of our riches. We are making money, but we do not know yet how to distribute it. Many men are too rich for their own good. Many are too poor for comfort, for health, for nobility, for decent, progressive, civilized life. Everything is subordinated to the desire to make money. A moneyed aristocracy—an aristocracy of financiers, of manufacturers and merchants, and railway and steamship kings—now rules the civilized world. The working classes are discontented and threatening. . . Men and women are underfed, and children die of inanition because food is rendered artificially dear. Men, women, and children sit in darkness because kerosene oil, stored in the earth by God for the use of all his children, is made under inequitable laws to yield fabulous wealth to a few persons. Men, women, and children are crowded into small, dark, comfortless, unsanitary tenements, and puny, diseased children are born and die there, because lumber, brick, glass, iron, and lead are made artificially dear in the present cruel eagerness for wealth. I do not see how any intelligent man can expect the existing order of things to continue much longer, or how any humane man can desire that it should. Nor does it require very much prophetic foresight to see that it will not.