IS IT REFORM?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 18, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 42.

A RECENT issue of the World of To-day, has these paragraphs:

Just now the charlatan reformer is too considerably in evidence. We are in an era of confession. Boodlers confess to escape punishment; good men to ease their conscience. Gentlemen with active imaginations confess in the interest of their income. It is the charlatan's golden age. A man's penitence has come to be his largest financial asset. There never was a time when reputations were so butchered to make newspaper and magazine circulation.

To uncover the sins of one's associates and one's self as a commercial adventure, and to advertise specifics or cure-alls, is a genuine menace to public morals. It is one thing for the department of health to open up a city's sewers. It would be quite another thing if sewer-opening became a commercially-lucrative fad. A man is not a prophet because he lays bare social evils. He may be a common yellow journalist. It is one thing to bare evils in the name of God; it is quite another thing to be a scandal-monger at so much a thousand words.

And this is true. The confession is generally forced or used from a selfish motive. It is not true repentance, because it does not stop the sin. It is the repentance often of the murderer caught red-handed, his knife dripping with his victim's gore. It is the repentance of the thief, caught with the stolen booty in his possession. This is the repentance which needs to be repented of. It is "the sorrow of the world" which "worketh death." See 2 Cor. 7:9-11.

Reformers are needed who will make bare the evils in the name of God; that will let men know that they are not breaking merely human laws, which a judge may misinterpret, nor are they to stand before merely human courts which are fallible and corruptible. They are transgressing God's law, infallible, unchangeable, which will stand out before them in all the white light of eternity. They must answer at that bar which makes no mistake, and whose decisions are never reversed.

In many cases such messages of God would lead to "a godly sorrow [which] worketh repentance, a repentance which bringeth no regret." And this is what such repentance would do for an offender: "What earnest care it wrought in you, yea what clearing of yourselves, yea what indignation, yea what fear, yea what longing, yea what zeal, yea what avenging! In everything ye approved yourselves to be pure in the matter."

Would God this could be said of the arrested and exposed criminals in our great cities, and in our great trusts and insurance companies, as it was said of the sinners in Corinth! Money would find its owner. Men would be honest with God. But this we do not see; the churl still "deviseth wicked devices." The evil work still goes on. Men are becoming indifferent to the most flagrant crimes. Conscience is becoming seared or dead. Nothing but the Spirit of God can arouse men, and this must be done by "the sword of the Spirit." But how can it be, when that Word is set aside for human grime and guess,—for evolution, "higher criticism," "New Thought," "Christian Science," "Spiritism," and the fruits of all open infidelity, ready to be deceived by any of the overmastering delusions of Satan which will appeal to human sense. Well said the Master of this time: "And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold. But he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved. And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come." Matt. 24:12-14. Praise God, that, notwithstanding the multiplied lawlessness, the everlasting good tidings of Christ's soon-coming kingdom is speeding to the world. The end is not far. Worldling, awaken. Christian, endure.