Living Too Fast

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 15, 1914

WE hear scientists speaking of the glacial age, the stone age, the iron age, etc.; but the age in which we live is the age of fast living. A Los Angeles pastor, in a sermon based upon a fearful local tragedy, speaks as follows:—

From the individual culpability and depravity of the murderer, whoever he is, we may not subtract one iota. There is guilt enough to go around. But there are other facts that we as parents and those responsible for the birth and raising and training of children must not fail to face. And it is at a time like this when we in Los Angeles and California cannot escape, and to which we as responsible agents of God must give attention.

Young people of today live too fast. There is hardly an experience possible to a life that the boys and girls have not had before they have reached sixteen. You cannot surprise them. They know more at sixteen than their parents at twenty-five. The silly dances of the present time, the perfect tidal wave of almost constant amusement, the highly specialized social life of boys and girls of today, are appalling dangers which thoughtful souls see and seem powerless to stop. We are sowing what we reap. Los Angeles should have a curfew perfectly enforced. Young people should be subject to some form of parental control that will be firm but kind.

This pastor has not overdrawn the picture of the conditions which this generation faces. The ingenuity of the evil one is taxing itself in this age to invent ways of ensnaring the young. His activities are not restricted to any city or to the cities. His agencies are everywhere in the cities, the villages, and the country. The responsibility resting upon the parents for the children is a weighty one, and at no time in this world's history were greater efforts necessary on the part of parents to keep the young in the love of the truth and uncontaminated with the immoralities of the world.