p. 111 | The Reign of Crime

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 22, 1874

The Reign of Crime.

It is often charged that Adventists look too much at the dark side of things in setting out the increase of crime in the land. The Chicago Evening Journal is a paper widely known in the North-west for its cautious editorials. It is then worth something to know that in the issue of that paper, of Aug. 26, 1874, an editorial appeared of which the words at the head of this article, are the heading, and the following is an extract:—

If Mr. Beecher used to be rather soft on the doctrine of “total depravity,” we suspect he may have got more light on this point by this time. But Brooklyn does not by any means monopolize the illustrative evidence of it. Crimes of all sorts and sizes seem just now to be “breaking out,” like the measles, all over the body social. The newspapers, if they give the news at all, have to be darkened with the wretched records of misdoings. We confess the dailies at the present time are not so cheerful reading as might be. Suicides, murder, and the whole catalogue of offenses against God and man are startlingly prevalent. Is it symptomatic of some great social disease, the seeds of which have been long growing, but long hidden? Is there some malign moral miasma in the air?—some taint in the blood?—some great, though subtle, popular error that has been silently conceiving sin, and at last bringing forth iniquity? Or is it only a kind of spiritual contagion, or epidemic, like the epizootic, for instance, among animals, that has somehow got started, and is sweeping across the continent?

Such questions are full of significance, even if not easily answered. The philosophy of epidemical influences in society is better understood than it was a generation ago; but we suspect the subject is far from being cleared up yet. We need more light both as to the incipient causes, and the concomitant conditions which allow such alarming potency to causes that seemed to be latent, until, all at once, they break forth, as if thousands had suddenly taken to the habit of carrying loose powder and matches in the same pocket. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he;” is it, then, that somehow communities get to thinking of the same ill things, and the bad thought becomes a tempting suggestion, and forthwith begins to work in the heart like a spark in an old-fashioned tinder-box? If so, one scarcely dares to think of the frightful consequences that may come of this Brooklyn scandal-sowing throughout the land.