STRANGE TIMES | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 4, 1878

STRANGE TIMES.

WHATEVER may have been the real condition of things, there never was an hour when the community was so continually appalled by the disclosed failures of trusted men. No social position, no period of previous integrity, no Christian profession or office, has proved a safeguard to virtue. The men in whom the most confidence has been placed—a confidence won by years of apparent faithfulness—have suddenly stood confessed, in the presence of their ruined friends and relatives, and of their business peers, as criminals of the deepest dye. All ordinary probabilities of business honor and righteousness have failed. Men do not know whom to trust or what is safe, or what more serious calamity may break upon them with the next day's news. It is true, perhaps, that there never was an hour in history when there was such a strain upon human virtue in the business world; but it is a significant fact that in this extreme trial the best forms of manly honor have failed.

No small element in the anxiety and distrust of the hour is the condition of our national politics. The country never had a truer or more patriotic man in the presidential chair than at this time, nor a cleaner or more able cabinet, as a whole; but the party which placed them in power is divided in counsel, and without harmony in interests. Its Congressional leaders are more anxious to place themselves in such attitudes towards the policies of the country, whether wholesome or not, as to render themselves conspicuous candidates for the chief office in the land at the next election, than to bend legislation to the serious financial necessities of the hour, and to secure the permanent restoration of confidence, at least so far as the action of Congress is concerned. It is a pitiful and wicked condition of things, that, in this most perplexing and trying period, the important interests of the country are laid aside, the worst passions of the politicians are aroused, and the peace of the whole land is disturbed, in order to enable one party or the other to manufacture, out of the very life of the nation, material for a coming election, in order to hold or to secure a preponderance in the administration of the government.—Zion's Herald.