THE CONDITIONS AS OTHERS SEE THEM.
By Editor
THERE appear from time to time in other journals items or articles which show that there are still many who see and sense the condition of this age. A writer in a recent issue of the Christian Cynosure has the following to say relative to the sad conditions that exist in family life to-day:— Family ties are regarded less seriously than a business contract. It took Rome eight centuries to descend from family purity to family leprosy in Elagabalus. How far we have descended in less than ten! Rome fell because of licentiousness. She was honeycombed with corruption. The same corruption is creeping over us. The word “corruption” means to flow together. An orange is divided into cells or sacks, each filled with juice. While these walls are solid the fruit is sound. But when the cell-wall breaks, the juices pour together, and corruption or decay begins. The family is the cell of the social body. Let these cells be kept firm, and the social body is healthy. But let these be broken by divorce, by the social evil, and by adulterous marriages, and the corruption of society follows. Drunkenness, suicide, and murder follow this as pestilence follows war. And the fact that 6,000,000 men in this land are in the lodge, where they pretend to worship Deity while they sacrifice to devils; who exclude the Lord Jesus Christ, and practise a religion of works; who divorce character from salvation, and send all their members to the Grand Lodge above; who rob the family and the church of the time and service and financial aid which God has appointed them to pay lodge dues and perquisites, is one of the most ruinous signs of our times. Apropos of the increasing strife between employer and employee, the same writer continues:— The coal miners' union and coal operators' trusts are arrayed against each other, each glaring at the other with drawn swords, and whetting them for slaughter. The governor of New Jersey said in a public meeting that our country is on the eve of a great industrial war that will be more bloody and general than any in our history. The conditions that produced the French Revolution exist here. The torch may be applied to the powder magazine at any moment. The foundations of God's moral order are out of their course, and are being destroyed.