p. 16 | Fruits of Intolerance by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 22, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 33.

Fruits of Intolerance

By Editor

We commend to our young men readers "Letters to a Young Man," on page 12. It offers some most excellent suggestions to one who may be in the doubting condition.

We wish that we could tell our readers the many good things we have in store for them, but we can not do it at present. In fact, it is impossible to do it at any time. There are always new, great things springing up which give opportunity for new views of Christianity, new conceptions of God's plans, new gratitude to Him who has thus revealed Himself. But this we hope to do,—to make every paper full of these good things for our readers.

To those who sometimes become hopeless over missions, we commend the article on missions on page 14, "What Christianity Has Done for Some Chinese." One of the great difficulties to-day in home lands as well as foreign lands is that the simple Gospel is not preached. The words of God are hidden under human theories, and human theories have no power. The Word of God is living; and when the living Word of God is received, it is able to change hearts.

We are sorry to record the death of James A. O'Connor, founder and pastor of Christ's Mission in New York City. He was the editor of The Converted Catholic, was born in Ireland in 1846, educated for the priesthood in Baltimore, and in Paris, France. He was ordained a priest in 1871. For eight years he continued a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, and then became a Protestant, and in 1879 founded Christ's Mission. It is said that in his thirty years of work he had induced 161 priests to become Protestants, and also thousands of men and women. While he told many facts regarding the Roman Catholic Church, yet the spirit in which they were told was, so far as we have observed, a kindly and Christian spirit. Referring to his death, the Western Watchman calls him a "half-idiot," and concludes its note by saying, "We do not think him responsible, and hope he has found as favorable a judgment in the great bar above."

The pitiable foolishness of practical joking was shown in St. Louis not long ago when a mother pointed a pistol at her three-year-old and only child, called "Hands up," and pulled the trigger. Ten minutes later the little boy was dead. She thought that it was a toy or harmless. She knows better now. It was a poor sort of education to give the boy even if the pistol had been harmless. At its best, practical joking is foolishness. It demands very little brains.

John Warne Gates, the well-known and spectacular American financier, is dead. He died August 9 in the arms of his wife and son. He started, a barefoot boy, at Turner's Junction, now a part of Chicago, making his first money by shucking corn. With this he purchased an interest in a thrashing-machine, making $1,200 the first year. He next entered the barbed wire business, which finally resulted in the ninety million steel wire trust, swallowed later by the United States Steel Corporation. He was a big plunger, or gambler, and hardly a fit example for young men.

Fruits of Intolerance

A despatch from London dated August 3 declares that 20,000 Albanians have fled from their country to face death by starvation in Montenegro. High Albania is now a desolate wilderness. Many have been massacred and burned, it is stated, in their homes. Others are now near death from starvation. More than 20,000 crowd all Montenegro. The object of the Turks seems to be to expel the Catholics from the land. The Albanians declare that death is to be preferred to further Turkish horrors. No grain has been sown, nor can be sown, in the devastated district this year. Certainly conditions in Montenegro and Albania are anything but encouraging, and it all comes because of the intolerance of men who put themselves in the place of God, for this persecution is essentially religious. If men were willing to adopt the principle laid down by our Saviour, the giving to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and rendering to God the things that are God's, persecution would be wiped from the earth. All true civil liberty must grow out of a recognition of this principle. It is well, also, to keep constantly before us the words of the Master Himself, "If any man hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." Civil governments ought to be founded for one purpose only: to repress incivility; in other words, to keep order, and to see that equal justice was rendered to the weak and the unprotected, and those who might differ from the great mass religiously.

Not Ethics Alone, but Life.

It is not the ethics of Christianity which save. These are admirable; in fact, perfection. No other religion of the world has ethics superior; but man may believe in the ethical teaching of Christianity, and still die. He has no power in himself to meet the standard. This is where God, in His great goodness, meets us. He knows we are weak, knows that we are powerless to put away sin, or overcome it; and therefore He sends to us the very life of God in our Lord Jesus Christ; and as a demonstration of what that life can do we have the example of our Lord while here upon the earth, and His own words of encouragement to every seeking soul: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." The world knows only the life of the flesh, the life that is fed on food and water and air and sunshine; the Christian knows the life direct from the heart of God, flowing out from the great Fountain of life and into the being of the Christian, in the channel of God's holy law, to which the heart of the Christian is subject. That is what the world needs to-day; it is not ethics, more ethics; not theories, more theories; not some new-fangled scheme by which Christianity can be remodelled; it needs the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, which He has placed in His Word for every child of faith.

The War Spirit.

The Western Watchman, that virile Roman Catholic paper, tells us some clear truths once in a while. Concerning the war spirit in the world, it has this to say, in its issue of August 3:

We can moralize over this [that is, the condition of things in Europe] as we may. The fact remains that men will kill each other for what they would not pay a month's wages. It is not the value of the Morocco land or bays that is the wage of war; it is the fixed determination that the power that depends on its armed men to make good its pretensions, will have to show the stuff which men are made of. There are millions and millions of people in France, Germany, and England now shouting for war who do not know where Agadir is. The fact is, the world is not ruled by reason, but by brute force, and we have not advanced much from the time and men who made the "middle C" the terror of the world's trade and navigation.

Then after telling us that neither Germany nor France has any right in Morocco, it says: "What a pity the pope is not arbitrator in the present crisis! Strange to say, Germany would be the first to welcome his intervention." "Will the world ever come to fully appreciate the wondrous influence for peace and international amity it possesses in the successor of St. Peter?" But it might be well to consider whether there would have been any such wars at all as have cursed Europe for centuries had it not been for the teachings of the so-called "successors of St. Peter."

A despatch from Berlin, August 4, declares that there have been over one thousand deaths in that city from sunstroke during the ten days of Germany's heat wave, and as many more from heart failure during bathing, and some from gastritis and typhus, caused from lack of water. In the Moselle Valley the fish died, seeming to suffer from a kind of scrofula owing to the overheated water. In the South German States almost all the governments have suspended work in the public departments at least for a few hours in the early morning, as sickness resulting from heat has desolated the staff. Schools will not be reopened until the middle of August, the doctors declaring that only strong children would be able to endure the work in the intense heat. The despatch is headed "Unparalleled." The Scripture tells us there will be a time when the sun will have power to scorch men with heat. It would seem as tho the beginning of it was reached, and yet we know from the Scriptures that this is not the beginning. When the time predicted comes, what we have hitherto had will be faint indeed compared with the fearful heat under the last plagues.

It must be a novel sight to see a swarm of grasshoppers which darkens the sun; but a despatch from Webster City, Iowa, August 4, states that an enormous cloud of them was passing over the city, which darkened everything for miles. They were flying about one hundred feet from the earth, and there was no way of estimating the thickness of the cloud except that it was dense enough to shut out the light. They were an hour and a half in passing over the city, and the stream was miles wide. It is not known whence they came, but there was great fear on the part of the farmers as to where they would light.

According to the president of the National Fire Protection Association, Mr. W. H. Merrill, in fifteen years fire has cost the country 20,000 lives and $2,000,000,000 worth of property. He declared that his association was waging an educational campaign on Christmas decorations, Fourth of July celebrations, defective flues, the incendiary, or fire-bug, the fire danger and children, the cost of carelessness in stoves, and other things which menace the safety of life and property. Certainly it is an awful toll to pay for what is almost invariably the result of carelessness.

This is a poor, unbalanced world. There is poverty-stricken Portugal, for instance, sadly lacking in education; yet it is said she will spend $150,000,000 on war-ships and forts.