BEDLAM LET LOOSE by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 2, 1904

BEDLAM LET LOOSE.

By Editor

Under the above title Watchword and Truth truthfully epitomizes the present situation in this world, and shows the dangerous fallacy in that teaching so popular with the mass which predicts the speedy entrance of the race into a golden age of peace, knowledge, and universal brotherhood. We quote a portion of the article:—

As the end of this age approaches, the birth-throes of nature, and the spasms of humanity increase in frequency and intensity. Our earth has been the scene of extraordinary catastrophes and cataclysms during the past few years, which have been as great a source of mystery to the scientist as they have been a cause of superstition to the fanatic. But the man of God who has the Bible as a lamp to his feet, knows that these earthquakes, pestilences, and roaring of seas are but the ordinary characteristics of the material world unto the end and the advent.

It is in the political, social and "religious" sphere, however, that we see the greatest manifestation of "freaks," "cranks," "fads," and "fanatics." One man in Persia, another in India, and another in England, is posing as the Messiah returned to earth again. In strange inconsistency with these claims we have three men setting themselves up as Elijah, the Messenger of the Covenant, heralding the coming of the great King of the Nations. Of one of these, little is known, except that occasionally he thrusts himself upon the scene and gets some sympathy because he denounces the other claimants to the distinction. A second, Mr. Sanford, has come to his end in Shiloh, Maine, and has settled in Boston with a handsome property in his possession. But his great "Temple" that was to be built for the tens of thousands of followers in Boston, and his wonderful scheme for evangelizing the world from Jerusalem as a center, have never come into view. But the greatest of them all is a man who claims to be a man "sent from God whose name is John"—John Alexander Dowie. But his coarseness, vulgarity, vanity, bombast and braggadocio, his extravagant living and dramatic display, his evident desire to "make a name" while he built a city and made money, to reign as a prince in an age when Christ is still rejected by the world, to repeat in his own life and work the very mistakes and sins committed by the Roman church which he so bitterly and boldly denounces,—all these have been sources of deepest sorrow to all thoughtful, chaste-minded and humble-hearted Christians. Pride still goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. So this deluded man has come to a sudden halt, and his whole ambitious schemes have barely escaped a complete collapse, under pressure of financial embarrassments.

There are at least a dozen different sets of "cranks" in Jerusalem waiting for the coming of the Lord; and all because they disobey the command of the Lord to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. Now comes a new sensation about "The New Jerusalem" [teaching that New York is to be that city].

But wherein does all this nonsense differ from that which declares that the "New Jerusalem coming down from heaven" is the "new thought" coming into new minds? What new thought?—O, the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God, the belief in a God of love who is too good to be angry with the wicked—the belief in goodness but the denial of sin, the belief in heaven but the denial of hell, the belief that everything is all right and going well in spite of the lying, the perjury, the "artistic swindles," and the daring robberies—in spite of political corruptions, and private defalcations, in spite of the betrayals of innocent women and the murder that so constantly follows, in spite of the startling increase of crime in the whole civilized world, and in spite of the awful revelations of the divorce courts, exhibiting the destruction of the marriage tie, the passing away of the family sanctity, and the wrecking of the divinely-constituted home. "Bedlam let loose" is ravaging in every street, and yet those sleeping, dreaming, deluded watchmen shout their incoherent utterances that the New Jerusalem from God is just at hand.