The progress and the prevalence of even the gross-est 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 record 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, not only the young but the aged, in well-nigh equal measure, the refined and cultivated as well as the coarse,—all seem to be smitten 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 affectionate115friends, 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 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 with 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 unsaferness 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.”—Sel.