Cities and the Commandments of God
Once in a long while a joke takes the form of a parable pointing to a fact. The Yonkers Gazette is credited with this anecdote, which was probably intended for fun:— “You know, Jessie, the Good Book says, ‘Love your neighbors,’” spoke the mother to her little girl. “Yes, mama, but that was written before the days of flats.” This is an apt illustration of the ways in which the devices of men have operated to make “the commandments of God of none effect.” Packing people into cities, hence into flats, and, worse, into tenements, giving them too much opportunity to gratify the natural propensity to pry into one another’s affairs and otherwise to plot mischief, is a most effectual scheme to keep people from loving their neighbors as themselves. The building of these great nurseries of crime was inspired by Satanic cunning for the very purpose of frustrating the commandments of God, and of thwarting His purpose to have every man live happily “under his own vine and fig tree.” He who knows the end from the beginning, foresaw the evils of sinful men crowding together in compact masses, and gave us a striking object lesson in overthrowing the effort at Babel, in the land of Shinar. Yet in the face of the history of this city of corruption, and in the face of present conditions patent to all, there is no one aim among men so prominent as that of building and magnifying cities. And the rivalry between these centers of population for prestige is evidence that they are in nowise helpful to the spirit of the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”