“WHAT SHALL THE HARVEST BE?”
An unchangeable law, operative in morals as in agriculture, is, “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” If the sowing be to righteousness, the reaping will be strength, security, life, and prosperity. If the sowing be to the flesh, to falsehood, to lust, to greed, to the baser passions and principles, the sure reaping will be corruption, decay, disintegration, crime, destruction, death. What will the world, the church, society, political organizations, reap from the present sowing? Men may look at mere high professions, at great wealth, at outward prosperity, at the institutions founded by gifts which cost no sacrifice, and predict a soon-coming millennium; some one of the various cults abroad may persuade man that he is divine—is Deity; and that out of humanity is coming somehow, somewhere, certain righteousness and triumph, and the world will roll on through a millennium of peace and prosperity. It is the predicted cry of “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.” The condition of society is simply fearful, and thoughtful men feel it and know it. It is almost impossible to run amiss of revelations of corruption. The newspapers and magazines teem with them. A few expressions from Lincoln Steffens’ article, “Enemies of the Republic,” in April McClure’s reveal the inward facts of the case. Mr. Steffens has before shown the corruption existing in Minneapolis, in Pittsburg, in Chicago, in New York, in Philadelphia, in St. Louis. The forms are different, but the crime of boodle and graft is everywhere manifest. In “Enemies of the Republic,” Mr. Steffens traces the crime back of the grafters, the boodlers, the bribe-takers, the purchasable politicians, the corrupt city fathers, to the source. He tells us that in his researches into corruption:— Every time I attempted to trace to its sources the political corruption of a city ring the stream of pollution branched off in the most unexpected directions and spread out in a network of veins and arteries so complex that hardly any part of the body politic seemed clear of it. It flowed out of the majority party into the minority; out of politics into vice and crime; out of business into politics, and back into business; from the boss down through the police to the prostitute, and up through the practise of law into the courts; and big throbbing arteries ran out through the country over the state to the nation—and back. No wonder cities can’t get municipal reform! No wonder Minneapolis, having cleaned out its police ring of vice grafters, now discovers boodle in the council! No wonder Chicago, with council reform and boodle beaten, finds itself a Minneapolis of police and administrative graft! No wonder Pittsburg, when it broke out of its local ring, fell, amazed, into a state ring! No wonder New York, with good government, votes itself back into Tammany. And then Mr. Steffens tells us just what every one knows who follows the light of God’s Word, that the corruption is not of the municipal rings, nor of the city, nor a local affair, nor of any political party. He continues:— It’s corruption. The corruption of our American politics is our American corruption, political, but financial and industrial too. Miss Tarbell is showing it in the trust, Mr. Baker in the labor union, and my gropings into the misgovernment of cities have drawn me everywhere, but, always, out of politics into business, and out of the cities into the state. . . . Not the politician, then, not the bribe-taker, but the bribe-giver, the man we are so proud of, our successful business man—he is the source and sustenance of our bad government. . . . The highway of corruption is the “road to success.” And we are told that this is a “System” with a capital S, which ramifies through the entire government, municipal, state, and national, which conducts the government of all three, “not for the common good, but for the special interests of private business.” And the men at the head of the System “are not ‘low down politicians’; they are ‘respectable business men.’” In the St. Louis sink of corruption were many of the biggest businesses of the whole state of Missouri. And Missouri is in the toils now. In her coming election will the people stand with Folk and clean government, or with the business men, the politicians, the System, and corruption? “Both the Democracy and the democracy,” remarks Mr. Steffens, “are on test and out there. But Missouri can not decide alone. ‘Corruption is everywhere.’ The highway of corruption . . . goes far beyond Missouri.” In this mass of corruption in Missouri appears three great national concerns, part and parcel of the system, the American Sugar Refining Company, the American Book Company, and the Royal Baking Powder Company. Connected with these are senators, and the road “leads straight to Washington, where in political infinity, as it were, in that chamber of the houses, the United States Senate, the parallels seem to meet.” From the view-point of Christian morality, the picture is an appalling one. No church can continue to exist and exert an uplifting influence, which fellowships in men, howsoever prominent, such things. It may have a name to live, but it will be spiritually dead. No government can continue when its very essentials are perverted by its leading citizens and officials. It is bound to end in oligarchy, and then anarchy. We are not noting this to call attention to men’s wickedness as such. If no good could come from exposure, better let the whole corrupt mass fester and rot and die in the darkness. But that can not be. The whole body becomes corrupted by it. The great sad thing is that it is already corrupted, so that, appeal as the earnest reformer may, he finds his best efforts thwarted, his best promised reforms aborted. The people as a whole are indifferent; and the professed churches of Christ are indifferent, and growing more and more utterly oblivious of deeds of darkness. Did you know, reader, that these very conditions are what God has predicted for these very times, the last days? that, notwithstanding the great increase and dissemination of knowledge, morality, in the face of it, would be at very low ebb? Read the following, which might be multiplied. Jesus says: “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” Matt. 24: 12, 13. Thus speaks the apostle Paul: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, from such turn away. . . . But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” 2 Tim. 3: 1-5, 13. And the evangelical prophet presents this fearful arraignment: “None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth; they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web; he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works; their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. . . . For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us; and as for our iniquities, we know them; in transgressing and lying against the Lord, and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity can not enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey; and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgment.” Isa. 59: 4-6; 12-15. The only hope for the world is Christ’s coming, and these sad conditions are precursors of the day dawn. What shall the harvest be?—Destruction of the republic, destruction of the world. There is no other nation left for the world’s salt to stay its political corruption. The “little flock” scattered everywhere in the Babylon of creeds, still stays the plagues of wrath, but not much longer will eternal justice wait. He will come unto His own, and before His forthshining glory all sham will perish.