A Little Foretaste

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 16, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 23.

A Little Foretaste

CURRENT news despatches give the information that "Mrs. Albert H. Gilbert, president of the Home Protection Equal Suffrage Club," has issued a call "to wives of union men in Cleveland to march on the Euclid Avenue Baptist church, known as the Rockefeller church, as a protest to a sermon preached last Sunday by the pastor in which he upheld John D. Rockefeller in refusing to act in the Colorado mine trouble."

Demonstrations of the character proposed here by Mrs. Gilbert, together with demonstrations of a similar character in New York recently, are a sort of foretaste of what is in store for the wealthy men, only these things that are now taking place are merely preliminary. They are gathering and concentrating upon individuals the feelings that have already been stirred up against them.

There is an immense amount of sentiment of ill will created against the rich. This has been engendered by public speeches, by newspaper and magazine articles, as well as books that have been written.

Many men are indulging in theories concerning these things. But all the theories to one side, the seed-sowing of the past generation is about to result in a definite harvest; and it is very interesting to keep in mind the fact that a pen picture of what this harvest will be, was made by the apostle James nearly two thousand years ago. Read carefully the fifth chapter of his letter. He calls attention to the weeping and howling of the men of wealth who have kept back the hire of the laborers that have reaped down their fields. He tells of how they have lived in pleasure upon the earth, and of their wanton, extravagant expenditures, and that, too, in the face of crying want.

We are in the midst of the very conditions described by the apostle-prophet. The seed-sowing is already largely in the past. The harvest-time is here. We will soon see this world plunged into such scenes of anarchy as beggar description.

All men ought to know this from the simple standpoint of the philosophy of our social conditions; but one who believes the Bible, and who will take the pains to study it, may know this from the doubly strong standpoint of both the conditions as they exist, and the prophecies that foretell these things. But if we know of these prophecies, the picture is not a gloomy one; for in the midst of the scenes of strife and anarchy, the Lord will appear in all His glory to end it forever.