Signs of the Second Coming of Christ
By Prof. G. W. Rine
Signs in the Social World
In one of His last discourses while on earth, our Lord affirmed: "Likewise even as it came to pass in the days of Lot; they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; . . . after the same manner shall it be in the day that the Son of Man is revealed." Luke 17: 28-30. The following inspired words afford additional light respecting the sins peculiar to the people of Sodom just before its destruction: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before Me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." Eze. 16: 49, 50. Again, note 2 Peter 2: 6-8: God turned "the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, . . . and delivered righteous Lot, sore distressed by the lascivious life of the wicked (for that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their lawless deeds)." The inspired apostle distinctly characterizes the people of Sodom as lascivious. That is, they were a people abandoned to licentiousness, to lechery. The commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," was wantonly trampled under foot. Adultery, then, was the all-pervading crime of the society of Lot's day. So acute and so deep-rooted had this and kindred sins become that the only thing which even infinite Love could do for that people was to sweep them out of existence. Recall now the Master's declaration: "As it came to pass in the days of Lot; . . . after the same manner shall it be in the day that the Son of Man is revealed." Prevalence of Licentiousness To-day.
The most trustworthy statistics attest the deplorable fact that our cities have become vast caldrons of sexual vice. Greater New York herself acknowledges that she harbors within her confines between 50,000 and 60,000 abandoned women. Men and women who devote their lives to social reform testify that Chicago, since the Columbian Exposition in 1893, is burdened with an army of fallen women nearly twice as large as that of New York. In Philadelphia there are probably 25,000 of these unfortunate women. In proportion to population, San Francisco supports more prostitutes than any other city between the two oceans. Paris alone is supporting 100,000, according to the testimony of her public officers. Berlin estimates her army at 50,000; while London's army is slightly smaller. Of these harlots nearly one half are under twenty years of age. "Child-vice is anything but a myth." No large city is free from "pimps," agents for the houses of prostitution, who are relentless in their hellish quest for the young girls who fill the rapidly decimating ranks of the army of sorrow. The Massachusetts commission has shown that the large majority of these doomed girls come directly from their homes. Incredible as it may seem, I have been reliably informed that not fewer than five hundred innocent girls, each month, from San Francisco alone, are lured into this damnable traffic. The same hideous truth is duplicated in Portland, Ore., and in Seattle. Half as many innocents are drawn into the same horrible abyss from Los Angeles. Imagine the awful magnitude of this loathsome traffic throughout the civilized world! Of this mighty host of moral lepers, 50,000 die annually—a mortality-rate five times as great as obtains among a like number of persons who live virtuous lives. Again, it must not be forgotten that for every dissolute woman there are from four to six dissolute men. Marital infidelity, too, is alarmingly rife in these latter days. Apart from the church, the home is the most sacred and conserving institution of human society. During the past twenty years not fewer than 400,000 American homes have been disrupted in the divorce court. At least one fourth of these domestic tragedies have been openly laid at the threshold of adultery. Four hundred thousand divorces in twenty years means that the morals of domestic life "are on a gallop down hill." A noted social worker recently averred that one marriage of every seven is dissolved in the divorce court. A member of the Educational Alliance, who is devoting himself to the work of ameliorating the unhappy conditions peculiar to the factory and laboring population in the great industrial centers, recently gave out for publication the following statement among many others: "We are called upon every evening by deserted wives; and a noticeable element common to most of these cases is that the women are about to become mothers." He goes on to show that this results in many bigamy cases, "the woman living with the first man who offers immediate support, with or without the form of marriage." As a result of this world-wide plague of social and domestic vice, society is stricken with multiform venereal diseases. It is estimated that New York City to-day harbors 225,000 persons infected with the most loathsome of unmentionable diseases, and 800,000 persons who are the victims of a slightly less virulent form of such maladies. Dr. Sturgis estimates that 50,000 new victims are yearly added to the first army mentioned above, "each of which at once becomes a new focus for the spread of the disease." Think of the awful danger to which innocent wives and mothers are exposed! An eminent physician declares that seventy-five per cent of all cases of venereal diseases among American women originate with the infidelity of the husband. Statistics show that more than fifty per cent of the young men of this country are infected with some form of venereal disease before their thirtieth year. In France, where such statistics are recorded, we find that about 25,000 children die yearly of the worst form of hereditary venereal disease. "A far greater number never live to die." Dr. R. N. Wilson, of the University of Pennsylvania, who has made an extended and methodical study of the social evil, asks the following question, to which he appends his own answer: "Is the social evil incurable at the present time? I think we must answer, 'Yes, under existing circumstances, and as long as it enjoys the sleek, contented, participating activity of the people!'" He asks further: "Is there any prospect of its disappearance in our children's time?" His answer is: "Probably not, owing largely to the indifference or positively bad influence of many fathers and mothers, and of much of the literature of the day." That the infraction of the seventh commandment is growing from year to year is further attested by the following census figures: In 1880, of every 1,000 births in our country, fifty were illegitimate; in 1900, eighty out of every 1,000 were illegitimate. In Germany the illegitimate birth-rate grew from sixty to ninety-one per thousand, between 1880 and 1896. In both Scandinavia and France the rate of increase of illegitimate births is far higher. Then, too, this tremendous rate of increase during the last quarter-century took place in spite of the fact that the practise of "criminal operations" became fearfully common during the same period. Another foul blot upon the social escutcheon of to-day is the city slum. The slum is the vortex of the city whirlpool, "where is gathered the wreckage of society." It is here where one finds overcrowding, illiteracy, the maximum of saloons and brothels, of vice and crime, of squalor, misery, disease and death. In one of the slums of Chicago there are 35,000 people; in another, 30,000. "The inhabitants neither labor regularly nor marry. Half the men are beggars, criminals, or floating laborers; a fourth of them are engaged in the sale of dissipation; and a third of the women are prostitutes. . . . Society here has lapsed back into a condition more primitive than the jungle." The slums of Chicago are typical of those in other cities. Not long before his death, Huxley wrote regarding an East End slum in London: "In my experience of all kinds of savagery all over the world, I found nothing worse, nothing more degraded, nothing more helpless, nothing so intolerably dull and miserable, as the life I had left behind me in the East End of London. Nothing would please me more than to contribute5to the bettering of that state of things, which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will tend to become worse and worse, and to create something worse than savagery—a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will swallow up the surface-crust of civilization. . . . Unless this is effectively dealt with, the hordes of vice and pauperism will destroy modern civilization as effectively as uncivilized tribes of another kind destroyed the great social organization which preceded ours." It should be remembered that the city slum is a recent phenomenon; it was unknown a hundred years ago. Nothing but the power of God, in the Gospel, can purge society of its festering uncleanness. But even infinite Power, Wisdom, and Love can not save society except through its individual units. "In the last days . . . evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." 2 Tim. 3: 1-13. Can we escape the conclusion that the "days of Lot" are repeating themselves in this very time in which you and I, dear reader, are living? Are we not, then, living in the days when the Son of Man is about to be revealed,—revealed to save His believing children, and "to destroy the works of the devil"?