"HEALING THE HURT SLIGHTLY."
By Editor
THAT is just what the Lord declared the false prophets in Israel did by their preaching peace and error. That is just what many of our modern false prophets are doing at the present time. The Christian Statesman of July 21 has an article with the above heading. After speaking of the adjustment that must be made between capital and labor, and the tariff reform that may be demanded, and reform in other directions, it states that this government must recognize in itself God's government. It says:— "There is a government above the government of this nation; there is a violent wrestling of right other than that by strikers and anarchists. God has a government which extends to all the affairs of men and nations. This nation has set that government at naught. God's law has been, and is being, defied. This is the real reason for our national troubles." Every word of the above is true, but not in the sense designed by our contemporary. What the Statesman is calling for is that the government shall enforce Sunday observance; but we would like to ask the Statesman, and all other Christians, how it would be possible for the government to enforce God's law. God's law is a law of love. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself," is the summing up which not only our Lord but the ancient prophets gave of God's holy law. That law can only be obeyed through love. Love can only come through faith; and by what power can a civil government create faith or produce love? Of course it could compel men to outwardly yield to certain things, but if the yielding were not a heart work, it would only be rank hypocrisy. But if it be a heart work, there is nothing whatever in this government to hinder any man from obeying God. Therefore, for the government to compel men to obey a higher law is to compel them to be hypocrites, and how would this please God? Would God chastise us for not being hypocrites, or compelling others to be? But the higher law which the Christian Statesman demands shall be enforced is not the law of God, but a substitute of that law by the "man of sin." In enforcing that, the government would not only compel men to be hypocrites, but doubly hypocrites,—hypocritical in obeying a law for God's law that was not God's law, and in attempting to be by compulsion that which we cannot be compelled to be. If the Christian Statesman, and thousands of others who are talking just as that paper does, desire that men shall obey God's law, and that the nation shall be saved from calamities, why do they not preach the gospel, the power of God, the only power which can bring obedience to the law of the Most High? The Advance of July 19 points out one of the manifest inconsistencies of the sympathetic strike. It says that some of the members of the Chicago Council posed as friends of the laboring classes against the capitalists, but that one or two of these men were the most notorious boodlers in the council; that they have never failed to champion the very worst ordinances for the benefit of monopolies; that they have voted franchises worth millions away from the people and into the hands of the capitalists; that every laboring man in the city is paying tribute to monopolies who have become rich and powerful and insolent through the votes of the boodlers in the council; and that when the strike is over, these men will be looked upon as champions of the laboring man's cause. In fact, it does not seem as though more unwisdom could have been used than has been used in this last railway strike. Not only has unwisdom been manifested, but lawlessness has been one of its salient features. For instance, here in Oakland mobs paraded the streets, derailed cars, "killed" engines, overturned coaches, and tampered with switches, by violence taking men from trains who had just as good right to work as any striker in the Union; yet during all this the Union claimed that it was for law and order. A meeting of the best citizens in the town was held, and a series of resolutions passed frowning upon the acts of lawlessness which had been committed, in which resolutions nothing whatever was said against the Railway Union or in favor of the capitalists; yet some of the strongest expressions in favor of law and order were hissed by fully one-third of the large audience, which numbered, doubtless, not less than three or four thousand.626Immediately afterward a meeting was held by citizens claiming to be the friends of labor, in which resolutions were solemnly passed declaring that there had been no violence, no mob power, nothing but law and order and peace in the city of Oakland. Do these men really believe that expression? If they do, they manifest a degree of moral obliquity that is absolutely alarming. If they do not, a constant reiteration of their sentiments will bring them to that. One of them is reported to have stated that he had been in three strikes. He said the next would be, not a strike, but a revolution, which, in other words, simply means rebellion. The unwisdom of the whole thing has been manifested in the results, the losing of men's labor and reputation falling more heavily upon the workmen themselves than upon any other class. Blinded indeed is he who cannot see an index to the troublous future in these upheavals through which we are passing.