DURING the month of December abundant rains have fallen in California. They fell in no raging tempest or storm of sleet, but quiet and soft and warm, and the thirsty ground drank them all in eagerly. Between the rains the genial sun has lightened land and hearts, warmed the earth, nurtured into life the seeds and roots, till now as far as eye can see the fresh, delicate first green is hiding the brown old earth, and cheering and resting wavering hearts with promise of coming crops. The old earth is beginning to put on her yearly garb of beauty in the Golden State, and as the days go by she will embellish and adorn it with thousands of various hued blooms from the sea to the Sierras, and from the valley to the mountain top. Bless God for the country!
But the city remains the same. Apart from the borrowed or imitated spots of country the city possesses, called gardens and parks, and the few more flowers as the season advances toward summer, the city is the same the whole year round. Its walls of brick and wood and stone greet us in the same cold stare day after day. Its whistles and bells, its yells and shrieks, its grind and growl, its noise and din, jar the ears and make interminable discord the whole day round. Its ugly sights, its sharp encroaching angles, its everlasting rush and roar and ravage and rage smite with brutal, ruthless hand all the tender sentiment and esthetic sensibilities of the mind. But worse than all, the faces, the human faces, the brute-human faces! Faces stamped with greed and inward grime, with sin and vice and crime! Gloomy, hard, disappointed faces, cheated by justice or providence of their prey! Hurried, harried, anxious, restless faces, fighting the flood-tide and undertow of the human sea for a mere existence! Shrewd, cold, calculating faces, measuring you up at what you may be worth to them in dollars and cents!
Hyde Park, London.
Stolid, apathetic, unthinking, dough faces, pushed on by the crowd, content with mere animal existence! Passion faces, child faces, seeking and chasing the brilliant bubbles of pleasure in the great Vanity Fair of city life, never more than half succeeding in the pleasure, always reaping at last the disappointment! Sad and sorrowful faces, needing no habiliments of mourning to tell the heart's story of the loss of much or all that life holds dear. A few sweet, patient, hopeful, helpful faces, which to look upon gives uplift and courage; which look into yours, and beyond you to what you might be if you would submit to Christ's school of faith, obedience, and the discipline of life! Oases in the desert of faces! And thousands of other faces, faces, faces too numerous in kind and grade and stamp to enumerate, throng you on every side, in that great, throbbing, restless, diseased nerve plexus of present-day civilization called a city.
It is little wonder that the city grows wicked. Its whole life is abnormal, unhuman, inhuman. It is ever driving to excess, and the excess in laudable lines crowds to excess in directions unlaudable, illegitimate. The constant strife in business, the rivalry for political and social position, the strenuousness of the very struggle for existence, throws life open to the constant challenges of the devil to do daring, desperate, devilish things. Greed—greed for gain, greed for pleasure, greed for power, greed for the perishing present—rules our cities to-day. What wonder there is graft and forgery, and embezzlement, and open, flaunting vice, the trampling underfoot of all that is pure and holy in marital and family relationships by unbridled lust, and murder in a thousand forms! These are the outworkings of the flesh intensified by the abnormal, diseased, congested city life.
THINK of the records of the last few years in the investigations which have been made, investigations blocked at every step by those high in position! Think of the revelations of vice and crime in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco, Pittsburg. Did the disclosures clean them? In some cases it stayed the awful tide of crime for a little, but it has not been4long in most cases ere the stream was rushing on the same as ever, over bank full. It would seem that the awful calamity thru which San Francisco recently passed would affect the hearts of the majority of her people with such a fitting, sober sense of sin and its consequences that the very atmosphere would be changed; that sober, earnest, honest work would follow, that evil would be held in check, and that a purer city would rise from the ruins of the old. But before the smoldering fires died out, and the stench of the buried dead had ceased to contaminate its atmosphere, greed opened the doors of saloons and brothels, and the mighty carnival of vice began on a larger proportionate scale than the city had ever known. It would seem that St. Petersburg, the center of a defeated, dejected, humiliated nation, would be humbling herself and crying unto God for a better way; but the reports are that in holiday carnival there was more reckless, open, wanton, shameless gambling and sin and vice manifest than other cities in Christendom had ever known.
IT needs no prophet to predict the doom, the decay, the destruction of these fostering places of sin and crime. Sin full-grown is death. Men may leave God out of their reckoning; they may scoff at His Book; they may trample on His law of Ten Commandments; they may ridicule Christ and His cross; they may go on and on in their shameless sin, unheedful of the warning of certain judgment, loving the sin, clinging to the sin, practising the sin, and they will find the sure result—death and destruction. They are writing their own doom in their own characters; and the shining scribes of God are writing in the record books of the Judge only what is written here. Men ought to learn this by pure reason. Yet God warns over and over in His Book; and just as surely as Babylon, and Nineveh, and Tyre, and No-Ammon, and Athens, and Sodom, and Samaria, and Capernaum, and Jerusalem met their doom because of fostering wickedness, just so surely will the wicked, selfish, shameless cities of to-day meet their doom. All that has gone before are God's merciful warnings to the present. The God of all grace would save every soul. 'As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?' Eze. 33:11. Christ the Lord would make grace super-abound where sin has abounded, if men will turn to Him. Rom. 5:20. But the abounding wickedness unchecked will lead us rapidly on to that time which the 'more sure word of prophecy' foretells: 'The cities of the nations fell; and Babylon the great was remembered in the sight of God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath.' Rev. 16:19.
THE refuge from that doom is found only in separation from sin and hiding in the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. To those who yield to Him, He 'shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as streams of water in a dry place, as the shade of a great rock in a weary land.' Isa 32:2.
