p. 99 | Civilized Heathens by G. W. A.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 23, 1864

Civilized Heathens.

By G. W. A.

THE Rev. E. H. Chapin, one of the most popular preachers in New York City, in a neat little volume entitled, "Humanity in the City," discourses thus pointedly in reference to the heathenism of his own town. G. W. A.

"No one needs to be told that there are savages in New York, as well as in the islands of the sea. Savages, not in gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and the eyes of police men; with war-whoops and clubs very much the same, and garments as fantastic, and souls as brutal, as any of their kindred at the antipodes. China, India, Africa? will you not find their features in some circles of the social world right around you? Idolatry? you cannot find any more gross, any more cruel, on the broad earth, than within the area of a mile around this pulpit. Dark minds from which God is obscured; deluded souls, whose fetish is the dice-box or the bottle; apathetic spirits, steeped in sensual abomination, unmoved by a moral ripple, soaking in the slump of animal vitality. False gods, more hideous, more awful, than Moloch or Baal; worshiped with shrieks, worshiped with curses, with the hearth-stone for the bloody altar, and the drunken husband for the immolating priest, and women and children for the victims. I have no terms of respect too high for the brave and conscientious men who carry the gospel, and their own lives, in their hands to distant shores. But surely, they need not go thus far to seek for the benighted and the debased."