Surprises | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 4, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 14.

Surprises.

A San Francisco journal, Gleason's Horizon, notes the source of the current flood of social remissness in the following terse paragraph:

We have thought that our troubles would take the form of a revolution of the working classes against the industrial lords. We have feared the red flag, and the red hand of Socialism. We have trembled only for what might come rumbling up from below, like volcanic disturbances. And lo! here rises this monstrous form of moral anarchy in the political and civil world, this deep shadow of dishonesty in the business world that is just now boasting of phenomenal prosperity! And the striking feature about it is that the evil is most conspicuous in the upper crust of the social world, among men who rank high in the social world.

But a greater surprise—to many who are following Socialism—will come when its leaders shall have come to be the "upper crust," their expectant goal. It is not what Socialism is now that is so much to be dreaded as what it will be when it gets the upper hand. It is safe to predict that as the Socialist boat nears the prospective shore, the "upper crust" politicians, infected with the views of moral anarchy, will be piling in, and as it enters the haven, the shrewder ones will be seen at the helm.

That the "deadly wound" of the church-and-state "beast" power is in process of healing, and the consummation is near at hand, is receiving confirmation from all sources. A good witness in the case is Cardinal Gibbons. Referring to the terrible reverses following the outbreak of the Reformation, he says: "Ireland alone, of all the nations of Northern Europe, remained faithful to the ancient church." Then, as to the restoration of that church's power and influence, he continues (the Catholic Mirror of Jan. 13, 1906):

Let us now calmly survey the field after the din and smoke of battle have passed away. Let us examine the condition of the old church after having passed through those deadly conflicts. We see her numerically stronger to-day than at any previous period of her history. The losses she sustained in the Old World are more than compensated by her acquisitions in the New. She has already recovered a good portion of the ground wrested from her in the sixteenth century. She numbers now about 250,000,000 adherents. She exists to-day, not an effete institution, but in all the integrity and fulness of life, with her organism unimpaired, more united, more compact, and more vigorous than ever she was before.