A SIGN OF THE TIMES by J. D. B.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 24, 1879

A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

By J. D. B.

RELIGIOUS PAPERS APOLOGIZING FOR ILLEGAL PRACTICES.

The efficiency of the various useful and ornamental articles—as books, engravings, chromos, etc.—having been exhausted as premiums for enlisting subscribers, as about the latest thing, religious newspapers have taken to offering revolvers.

Consistency would seem to require that a paper professing that the millennium is near—when all such things shall be beaten into implements of useful service, rather than destruction—instead of fostering the manufacture and use of such injurious, dangerous, and deadly weapons, should discourage them.

But we are prepared to find any amount of inconsistency even among religious people in the pursuit of money, when religious people and papers countenance and sanctify the various evil, and often criminal, means used to obtain money in fairs, etc.

And here comes a notable example. The American Tract Society, in the Illustrated Christian Weekly of July 5, 1879, devotes a whole page to an advertisement of a revolver (paid for it of course), then they supplement the advertisement with a notice in which they recommend the pistol as a “safe and reliable weapon,” and apologize for the carrying of it as being “an absolute necessity” in some cases; and that, “as with anything else, the harm is in the abuse, not in the use.” But who does not know that we had no such necessity for universal armament till the invention and cheap sale of pistols created it. Here is a case where the proverb is reversed, and “Invention is the mother of necessity.”

But this carrying of deadly weapons is illegal, and hence a crime. What shall we think of the safety of law-abiding and moral principle, when educators of the people and conservators of morals, like the Weekly, have no stronger thing to say against an illegal, criminal, and hurtful practice, but that “the habit of carrying fire arms may be a very foolish one”?

Surely some one is becoming converted, but it is in a wrong direction to bring about a millennial reign of the Christian principles of “peace on earth and good will to men.”—J. D. B., in Bible Banner.