p. 136 | A Spasm of Virtue

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 10, 1871

A Spasm of Virtue.

The public mind is just now undergoing a violent spasmodic action in favor of certain aspects of common morality. The chain of circumstances which has led to the present earnest, excited state of public feeling is very remarkable.

First in order came the New York riot of the 12th of July, which opened the eyes of the people to the insolent assumptions of our Roman Catholic population, while its prompt and effectual suppression braced the public sentiment against the rising tide of popish influences as nothing for many years has been able to do.

Then came the Westfield disaster, with its two hundred killed and scalded victims, followed by the railway accident near Boston and the explosion in Mobile bay, which together added nearly one hundred killed to the list of the dead. These catastrophes threw a ghastly light upon the rapacity of corporations which imperil daily the lives of travelers to avoid the expense which would assure their safety.

Meanwhile the corruptions suddenly unearthed in the municipal government of New York startled the whole country. From the revelations made, it appeared that at least ten millions of dollars had been paid away in payment of bills fraudulent in amount, and that the debt of the city had been increased more than sixty-three millions of dollars without the knowledge of the public, since the time when the present mayor entered on his office. Abuses almost as flagrant were discovered in the Quarantine management and in the city jail, the officials in both having employed their station as a means of extortion and plunder of which hitherto there has been no general knowledge, and for which the victims had no redress. Abuses in the School Board were found to have reduced the average number of pupils in attendance during 1869, more than three hundred below what it was the previous year, although at the same rate of increase, as had been shown for several years previous, and with the largely increased accommodations, the average attendance ought to have been, at least six thousand greater than before. These revelations have led to such an uprising of popular indignation as New York has not witnessed since the war, and to vigorous and determined measures of correction and redress.

The effect of these disclosures has been increased by the discovery of the embezzlement of funds of the State of Pennsylvania, a Republican administration in this instance being guilty.

While the public mind is exercised by these facts, suddenly the customary cloak of concealment is torn off from another class of evils that fester beneath the fair surface of society, more dangerous than any already mentioned and more difficult of correction. The body of a fair young woman is discovered packed in a trunk at a railway depot in New York, and checked to Chicago. By a series of steps which read like a chapter of romance, the body was identified and the guilt of the murder fastened on a known abortionist, while in the neighboring city the young man who had caused her ruin, shoots himself when he reads the developments in the morning papers. Swiftly after this horrible tale comes the report of another, and then a third, victim to these hellish arts, and the arrest of the disreputable practitioner brings to light evidence of the ample and lucrative business which the impurity and selfishness of society had been bringing to their doors.

It is no blind chance which has placed these fearful disclosures of two months in such startling conjunction. God has designs of deep and gracious wisdom in thus compelling the attention of the people of this land to the alarming evils that are working in our political and social life. It may be the means of quickening the moral sense of the Christian community and arousing them to a united, determined, and overwhelming movement for political and social purity. But we have little hope indeed for such immediately favorable result. The pending movement for political reform in New York will undoubtedly be temporarily successful, but it has not the element of a thorough and permanent reformation. It is, we fear, a spasm, violent but transient, and in itself no symptom of cure. In all the discussions which it has provoked on the platform, in the papers, and even in the pulpit, hardly a word has been said of the responsibility of the city and its government to God. The prophets of the hour can see no higher than the responsibility of the officials to the tax-payers. That which is the one truth of the history of Babylon and Nineveh, of Tyre and Sidon, of Rome and of Paris, that cities are judged and punished or rewarded by the God of Heaven, seems to occur to few minds in our great metropolis, or elsewhere. The only thing which can save us is a movement of deep and genuine repentance toward God, and firm and steadfast determination to purify our private, social, and political life, according to the standard of his revealed will.—Christian Statesman.