No Fear of God in the Land by Dudley Marvin Canright

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 21, 1871

No Fear of God in the Land.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

The following, from the Christian Statesman, is just, and gives a fair idea of how little God is recognized or feared among men any more. Will not God visit for these things?

“But the moral lessons of this terrible visitation demand our special attention. ‘Is there evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it?’ Can we read the story of Sodom and see no moral element in the fate of Chicago? No other American city was given up so entirely to the greed of gain. The marvelous accumulation of wealth by which even poor men in a few years had become the owners of millions, intoxicated the inhabitants with prospects of unbounded prosperity. Above all others it was a boastful city. Its pride and pretensions were fully equal to its energy and success. This sin which the word of God censures as bitterly in communities as in individual men, was a special characteristic of this fated city. Her spirit was that of the proud Eastern monarch who said, ‘Is not this great Babylon which I have built?’ She said in her heart, ‘I sit a queen, and shall see no sorrow; therefore, her plagues have come in one day; she is utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.’ Rev. 18:7, 8. Licentiousness held its filthy revel there as in other cities. Sabbath-breaking was grosser and more general than in many others. It is practical atheism to deny the connection between these public sins and the awful judgment which has fallen upon the city. One of the most painful aspects of the whole scene is the failure of the burned city and of the rest of the country to perceive the hand of God in the affliction at all. The newspaper dispatches and the utterances of the Chicago authorities, have utterly lacked any religious or moral sentiment such as ought to be suggested by the calamity. Discussions of the subject have been confined to the physical circumstances that promoted the conflagration, to the amount of property destroyed and the sufferings of the people, and to the prospect of the speedy restoration of the city on a scale of greater magnificence than ever. Without the confession of a fault or a single purpose of amendment, without the slightest public acknowledgment of Him without whose aid and protection men build and watch in vain, the proud purpose has been announced that Chicago shall rise again. When the conflagration was at its height, such remarks as these were heard: ‘We never do things on a small scale.’ ‘It is the grandest thing of the kind on record.’ ‘St. Louis can’t equal it.’ ‘It beats the tunnel under the lake, and all other great projects.’ ‘Won’t Cincinnati be envious?’ ‘We are burning down our surplus houses and wealth, just to start even again with St. Louis.’ ‘These,’ says a correspondent, ‘were some of the remarks uttered half exultingly, but with compressed lips and pale faces, by merchant princes and financial kings as they felt beggary creeping over them. They manifested, even in the throes of this living death, the ruling spirit of this people, the utter worship of their city that transformed its faults into virtues, its punishments into glory.’”

“In calling attention thus to the moral significance of this awful calamity, we do not intimate that it is for her pre-eminent wickedness that Chicago has suffered so terribly. The eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell were not sinners above all the Galileans. The voice of this providence to other cities is, ‘Except ye repent, ye shall likewise perish.’”

“This reverent recognition of the hand of God and the righteous methods of his government in this dispensation does not tend to check the flow of charitable contributions toward the scene of the great disaster. No hearts will be so open to the cry for relief which comes from one hundred thousand shelterless and penniless people as those in which there is the clearest sense of the retributive element in such calamities.”

D. M. CANRIGHT.