An Awful Horror by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1904

An Awful Horror

By Editor

An Awful Horror.—Since our last an awful calamity has occurred in the great city by the inland sea, Chicago, which has chilled and appalled every thinking, serious soul in the country. On Wednesday afternoon, December 30, the Iroquois Theater caught fire when it was filled to overflowing at a matinee performance. Most of those in attendance were women and children, many of them society people. At the first report it was supposed that not more than ten to twenty had perished, but as the matter was investigated in detail, the awful list of the dead grew, till at present writing it reports 582, with hundreds sick and injured. Many of these had their life trampled out. At one balcony stairway the people were found ten and twelve deep, where in the darkness they stumbled and fell and fought for fresh air, and died. Among the dead were thirty school teachers, and two ministers. There were not hearses enough in the city of Chicago to bear the dead to the cemetery. Over 200 hearses, many of them white, were in use on the same day. There seems to have been few adequate facilities for escape, and Chicago is endeavoring to fix the responsibility of the horror and the crime. The friends of a noted servant of God at one time besought him not to "adventure himself into the theater." Acts 19:31. The occasion was not a play, but a great uproar caused by the preaching of the truth of God, and entering in before the people in their excited condition would have been to endanger the life of God's messenger; but those who entered the Iroquois Theater on that fated Wednesday afternoon, for no other purpose than the pleasure of seeing acted the old falsehood of Bluebeard, placed in peril both body and soul to a greater extent than did Paul at Ephesus. Awful as is this calamity, it is not so bad as the daily influences of the playhouses of the country, which fill the minds of the young with wrong fancies and their hearts with false ideals, making the realities of time and eternity and the simple lasting beauties of life tame and insipid. If the awful calamity of the 30th ult. would turn forever the millions from the theater to life's realities, costly as the lesson is, the results would warrant the investment. But "the madding crowd" will go on; the theaters will be made safer physically, but will increase in their opportunity and potency to destroy souls.