MAN'S NATURE, AS INTERPRETED BY THE PREVALENCE OF CRIME.
It was well remarked by one of the speakers at the recent anniversary meetings in this city, that the present times bid fair to be distinguished, in this country at least, not especially as a period of art, of liberty, of humanity, of general comfort or general culture, but pro-eminently as a period of CRIME. The progress and the prevalence of even the grossest forms of wickedness, in different places, and among diverse classes, are facts frightful to observe, and more frightful to ponder. Every newspaper is laden with the records of such. Dishonesty, licentiousness, violence, murder, they do not meet us as exceptional instances; they make the staple of the news of the day; they load and darken the columns of all journals; till one trembles almost to take up the morning paper, is afraid to have it read in the family, and lays it down with a sense of heart-sickness, a saddening impression of the ineffectiveness of our means of public moral and religious instruction, a keen apprehension of what is to be expected in the future. It is not the rich and luxurious alone, among whom such evidences of viciousness abound. It is not those who are avowedly worldly and godless in their life. Mechanics, merchants, farmers, teachers, physicians, lawyers, ministers of the gospel, men high in social rank and in political influence, women as well as men, the young not only, but the aged, in well nigh equal measure, the refined and cultivated as well as the coarse—all seem to be smit with the foul contagion, and suddenly to break out with the vile and hateful leprosy of sin. Not crimes of dishonesty alone are common; but the murder of wives, of husbands, of children, of the most confiding and affectionate friends, a horrible lustfulness, the most flagrant and fiendish violations of faith—all seem as common as the blossoming of trees, and are coming to be spoken of as familiarly and frequently, and with nearly as little apparent concern, as are the most ordinary and trivial facts. No one, we think, can feel that in this descriptive outline the case is at all overstated; that any slightest exaggeration of the truth is either intended or allowed. The same impression must be made upon all whose eyes and ears are measurably open to what is publicly passing around them, and who contrast this present state of things, not against some ideal plan of the social state, some fancy of their own as to what might be but what never has been, or even against the comparative pureness of the manners of our fathers, but against the actual state of society as it was in this country only twenty or thirty years ago. That was not Arcadian, but it looks almost so in comparison of the present. It certainly is true that excesses of crime are vastly more common now than then, and that what would then have shocked a community so deeply and indelibly as to be remembered and recounted for years, is now forgotten, beneath the impression of that which follows it, in a few days or weeks. A sense of unsafeness begins to prevail throughout many circles. A sudden death can hardly anywhere occur without exciting the suspicion of foul means. Elopements and domestic infidelities are so common as hardly to excite any remark, unless perhaps a ribald jest. And no sense of strangeness is awakened in the public mind by the story of even a parricide or a wife-murder. There are many thoughts suggested by this state of things, as also many duties that are palpably impressed by it, to some of which we may very likely have occasion hereafter to refer. But there is one truth so plainly preached by it, and in itself so important and imperative, that we cannot but advert to it for a moment here. It would seem impossible that all thoughtful persons should not be at once and equally reached by it, and should not equally recognize the proof of it: It is, that HUMAN NATURE, as unchanged by grace, is now JUST AS DEPRIVED AS IT EVER HAS BEEN; is, in fact, precisely the same in its character, and the same in its tendencies, that it was in the age of the Roman amphitheater: that it was in the days of the Ptolemies or the Pharaohs. An intense and passionate selfishness is at the heart of it. It does not seek the interests of others, but primarily its own. It does not seek to honor God, but to gratify its own ambition and passion. It does not acknowledge allegiance to virtue, but aims at indulgence, mastery, pleasure, and at whatever cost, at whatever hazard; and so it has in it the quick seeds of all crime, and only shows these more fearfully and boldly, in more horrific forms of exhibition, as its means and instruments for such revelation become more complete. We have not always been as ready as we should have been to perceive and to feel this; but it is true nevertheless, and the papers now proclaim it with million tongues, and a most appalling and unanswerable emphasis. It is one of the wide-spread errors of our day—most disastrous and most dangerous—the notion that our institutions of freedom, with an outrunning commerce, a copious prosperity, a generally diffused intellectual cultivation, the discipline and invigoration of the popular mind, the accomplishment of great outward and material works, the wide circulation of religious instruction—that these have essentially elevated man's nature, and made it less sensual and gross than it was. The gilding on the drug has been believed to have eliminated from it the radical poison; the ornamentation on the outside of the sarcophagus to have arrested the process of decay underneath; the placing of the tiger in zoological gardens to have made him less ferocious than he was in the woods; the housing of mankind in marble or in freestone to have cleansed their inner spirit, and made it less vile and less deadly than it was when the unlettered tribes dwelt in huts or in tents. Perhaps we all have felt something of this. And not a few have really accepted the plausible idea that all these material means and mechanisms were raising a sort of inclined plane, up which men would pass by insensible degrees, till without help of grace it should lift them to the level of millennial attainment. Away with such dainty and delicate theories! The times denounce them, and unanswerably demonstrate them short-sighted and pernicious! Man is to-day, unchanged by God's Spirit, precisely what he has always been. He is in Massachusetts, in New Jersey, in New York, what he was in old Rome or older Babylon. This city is Nineveh on another continent, wanting only its readiness to repent. The mechanic at Weymouth, if guilty as alleged, is Caligula or Tiberius, with only, thank God! a less opportunity. The Methodist preacher poisoning his wife, wants only a different occasion and arena to repeat the worst horrors of what we are wont to call, by way of eminence, "the Dark Ages." The outward glitter and garnish of society have not availed to regenerate man, to reform or essentially to restrain his nature. His manners may be modified, but his temper is still, at the root, identical. His wealth is greater, but his heart is no more God-like than before. He now, as of old, carries in him the furious volcanic fires of idolatry, and of lust, that may break at any time into lurid and devastating manifestation. He is hardly afraid of the law man has made; not at all of the law which is higher than this, the ground of its authority, the measure of its justness, and which has the Eternal and Omnipresent for its executive. He may shrink from human courts, but not from the great assize of the future. He is at heart just as godless as ever, and just as rebellious; making gods for himself of his pride and lusts, and of his greed for worldly good, and wishing that the Almighty were out of the way, ready to hurl him from his throne each moment, to gain the liberty of unlimited indulgence; of doing precisely what he wishes! When we get to the center of the nature of man, as shown in the current history of our times, it is precisely this that we find there; unchanged by years; unremoved by the progress of outward civilization; tastes and tendencies just as vicious as ever; capacities for cruelty, treachery, falsehood, for crimes of every grade and die, exactly the same in kind and in measure, that have been shown along the bloodiest passages of the past.—Any other description of this nature misstates it. Any other view of it essentially misconceives it. To try to change it by any other means than those which reach the heart itself, and rectify that, is to treat its inward hurt too slightly. And it is not the pulpit that now alone or chiefly preaches this; but it is the common speech of men. A thousand newspapers are every day announcing and repeating it, with an appalling irresistible energy, to the whole reading world! Let us think of this, and feel it! and let the force of its meaning and the lessons of its verity, instruct and inspire us as of right they ought.—Independent. As the Independent accounts for this sad state of morals on the ground that "human nature unchanged by grace is now just as depraved as it ever has been," it must admit, in view of the late exceeding increase of these manifestations of depravity, that the restraining grace of God has less hold upon the hearts of men than it formerly had. This is just what Inspiration has told us to expect, in the unequivocal language of 2 Tim. iii, 13: "But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." And this, be it remembered, is laid down as a prominent and unmistakable sign of the "last days." What description of the fulfillment of this sign could be more graphic, than the foregoing article?—ED.