Will Puritanism Ever Return?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 30, 1914

Will Puritanism Ever Return?

THIS is a question asked by the editor of the Independent in the issue of that journal for March 23, 1914. He declares:—

Lean years follow the fat. Radical and conservative policies alternate. The fashions swing from wide to narrow and from narrow to wide. Loose morals and puritanical habits are no exception to the rule.

Periods of notorious profligacy have usually been followed by revivals of emotional religion and by a general discountenancing of “worldly amusements.” These reactions, as every dispassionate student of history knows, have not been unmixed blessings. . . .

These reflections and reminiscences have been suggested, as our readers will surmise, by the present-day madness of self-indulgence. The craze for dancing, objectionable and unobjectionable, the vulgarity and lewdness of the stage, the speed mania of the automobilists who think no more of killing a human pedestrian than of running over a rabbit, the wanton extravagance in dress and in entertainment, make up a sum total of waste and vice not often matched since the Protestant Reformation. Will a puritan reaction set in?

We predict that it will, and that it will begin with a widespread emotionalistic religious movement. Probably, too, it will overreach and outdo itself, after the manner of such reactions in the past, perhaps seriously impeding a wholesome artistic development and a normal intellectual progress. These losses, if we have to meet them, will be a part of the price that the world has to pay for its follies.

The Independent is one of the popular magazines that believes the race is improving, that better times are ahead; but there is in the above a note which suggests the suspicion that the one who wrote it had somewhere read this statement of Scripture: “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” God has set religious leaders in the world to speak for him; but when they predict that the world will grow better, while the Scripture declares it will grow worse until the day of his appearing, the people are deceived to their own ruin, and Heaven must repudiate the message of such leaders.