Youthful Criminality and Its Significance
A LEADING pastor of one of the great churches on a recent Sunday night referred to a murder that had been committed shortly before by a mere boy. Names and places are omitted so that the reader may give all his attention to the facts without thinking of personalities. This pastor, in seeking to place the responsibility for the horrible crime, among other things said: "Young people of to-day live too fast. There is hardly an experience possible to life that the boys and girls have not had before they have reached sixteen. You can not surprise them. They know more at sixteen than their parents at twenty-five. The silly dances of the present time, the perfect tidal wave of almost constant amusement, the highly specialized social life of boys and girls of to-day, is an appalling danger which thoughtful souls see and seem powerless to stop. We are sowing what we reap. — should have a curfew perfectly enforced. Young people should be subject to some form of parental control that will be firm but kind." Most people will recognize the truthfulness of these statements so earnestly delivered from an aroused pulpit, but did you ever study facts of this kind in connection with the first part of the third chapter of 2 Timothy? Love of pleasure and disobedience to parents, or the lack of "parental control," are, among other things, in that chapter set forth as perils of "the last day." World conditions of the present that men are driven to acknowledge by the stubbornness of facts, are specifically and minutely described in prophecies of the Bible that were written thousands of years ago. These prophecies point us past the darkness and the foreboding dangers of this time to the satisfying realities of immortality at the second coming of Christ. Are we studying these prophecies? and do we know the meaning of the conditions of this time?