England’s Double Crisis
By Editor
THE double crisis in England is one of the most interesting and at the same time one of the most perplexing social problems. The British government has been in sore straits for several years in trying to deal with her discontented and turbulent masses; and as if to add to this already overpowering perplexity, the bishop of London is taking steps, as he says, "to allay the wide-spread uneasiness of the church." He speaks of the books that are being published by some of the clergy which "seem to deny the great miracles." There never was a time when more people were professing to believe the Bible than right now, and yet among these very followers of the Bible there are multiplied thousands who ridicule the miracles that the Bible records. To throw out the record of the miracles of the Bible as untrustworthy means so to undermine the authority of the sacred Book as to destroy completely its influence upon the minds of those who accept this modern teaching. And yet there is no one among the most modern of the so-called modernists who can write a document upon present-day problems that will describe them anywhere nearly as vividly and as clearly as they have been described by the prophets and the apostles of the sacred Book. There is a master hand back of these superhuman efforts to overthrow confidence in the Bible. If we want to know the meaning of these times in which we are living we should study our Bibles as never before; for while it is the most ancient of books, it nevertheless was inspired by a Being that could cause men anciently to discuss for us the problems with which we are grappling in these very days. And what is best of all, those inspired writers have told us the meaning of the conditions that are now filling the world with terrors and alarms. IN her campaign against habit-forming drugs, Mrs. Vanderbilt has ascertained that some 15,000 drug victims are to be found in New York City alone. She is prosecuting a vigorous war on the traffic of cocaine, heroin, morphin, and similar drugs; because it is learned, through these and similar investigations, that most of the "gun fighters" and "gangsters" of New York and other cities are "dope fiends." The use of habit-forming drugs has come to be a world-wide problem that is about as hard to handle as the liquor traffic itself. This old earth is going to pieces under its weight of depravity, and is giving way to every form of unnatural appetite and passion. WE used to speak of the ranks of armies as decimated, that is, one man out of every ten being killed, and that was thought to be a fearful slaughter. But the statistics of the late Balkan war show that out of 1,330,000 combatants, 286,200 were killed or wounded, which is an equivalent of 21.5%. When we add to those killed and wounded in battle the suffering occasioned by the starvation produced among the people, as the effect of the devastating armies, it will give us a little glimpse of the horrible carnage of warfare with modern weapons. How good it will be when the Prince of peace returns in person to this world to put an end to all this misery and cruelty! GERMAN aggressions in Asia Minor are keeping the European diplomats uneasy lest Turkey should soon become the center of another war, and that this time all Europe should be embroiled. The conditions there are by no means reassuring. BECAUSE of the revolt in Ulster over the home rule controversy, England is said to be facing the worst internal crisis with which she has been confronted since the colonies of America revolted more than a hundred years ago.