p. 767 | Signs of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 48. (12/8/1914)

Earlier text: If You Can’t Give Libraries

Happiness at 1 2/5c a Week

Cheap at that price, isn’t it? Who gets it at that price, and why?

Well, now, suppose a parent, or an uncle, or a grown-up friend, should make a holiday gift of a year’s subscription to OUR LITTLE FRIEND to some child, wouldn’t it afford great happiness to the giver? Of course it would—almost as much happiness as to the recipient, those will say who know. And the cost, as stated, is but 1 2/5c a week—70c a year.

Let us suppose again. Suppose you spend that 70 cents for some other gift—candy, or a toy. In a day or two the candy would be gone; the toy, broken and ruined, would be cast aside and soon forgotten. Not so with a subscription to OUR LITTLE FRIEND. It lasts a whole year, and each of the fifty-two numbers is a recurring reminder of your love and thoughtfulness.

A better paper for children can not be found. Its eight pages of interesting, helpful moral stories and lessons have had a molding influence for good on the lives of tens of thousands of children.

Send the name and address of your young friend, with 70 cents, to our depository in your state, with instructions to enter the name on OUR LITTLE FRIEND subscription books for one year.

OUR LITTLE FRIEND

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

FOR SALE

Four and sixteen-hundredths acres, set to a variety of five-year-old fruit, 2½ miles from Kennewick, Benton County, Washington. Two water systems, irrigation and domestic. Soil deep and rich. Will sell at half value to any one wishing to enter this locality in the interest of the message.

Address JOHN HULTBERG, Lucas, Washington.

A Look into the Future

By Editor

That is what the January Signs of the Times Magazine affords. It answers the question, Shall Peace Follow This War?

It tells about Satan’s Arrest and Imprisonment. This is not a fanciful product of the imagination, but in God’s time will be a reality.

The Bible prophesies many other things that are about due. Every month, this magazine devotes many of its pages to one or more of these prophecies. 8 1/3c a month is all it will cost you to have the Signs of the Times Magazine delivered at your home. Send your subscription for one year with $1.00 to our depository in your state.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES MAGAZINE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

OUR COMBINATION OFFER

The SIGNS MAGAZINE has arranged with the following for special low combination rates:

LIFE AND HEALTH PROTESTANT MAGAZINE WATCHMAN MAGAZINE SIGNS MAGAZINE

The regular yearly subscription price of each is $1.00.

COMBINATION OFFER

price of each is $1.00.

COMBINATION OFFER

Any 2 for $1.70—Saving of 30c Any 3 for $2.40—Saving of 60c All 4 for $3.00—Saving of $1

Liberty Magazine will be furnished with any combination for 30c extra.

You may have them sent to one or separate addresses.

Order through our depository in your state, or

SIGNS OF THE TIMES MAGAZINE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

John Wesley Said:

“It was not the design of Christ to revoke any part of the law. It can not be broken. Every part of it remains in force upon all men in all ages. Neither time, place, nor circumstances make it liable to change.”

This same law says, “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.”

Read What Others Say

Here are two pamphlets, also an assortment of tracts, which will help a reader to understand better this important question:

Change of the Sabbath .................... 25c Lord’s Day the Test of the Ages ........ 10c 25c Tract Package No. 3, assorted tracts —7 varieties, 30 tracts, 400 pages—on the Sabbath and the law.

Any of the above may be secured from our depository in your state.

PACIFIC PRESS PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

Dens of Thieves

THE state's attorney for Cook County, Illinois, the county in which Chicago is located, has been conducting some extensive investigations in the criminality that has been manifesting itself in that city. His findings are that there is an organization of bandits, and that policemen, as well as paid detectives, are members of this gang of pickpockets. They work on a regular plan, the policeman and the detective protecting the one who is actually doing the stealing.

One member of the gang, frequently a woman, will watch until she can locate on some individual on the street the pocket or receptacle where a watch, a pocketbook, or some other valuable is carried; and then at a given sign some kind of excitement is started, and in the jostling the theft is committed. If the individual calls out that he has been robbed, the policeman who is a party to the game of wickedness frequently arrests the person who has been robbed, in place of arresting the thief. In one case that was specifically mentioned in the reports, the victim caught both of the perpetrators, and called for the police. The policeman led them off to an alarm box to send in a call for the patrol-wagon. Then he conveniently let one of the men get away. He left the other one in charge of the victim of the theft while he ran after the fleeing thief. Of course he was not able to catch him; and when he came back, he found that the other one had got away, and so neither of them was arrested.

The report indicates that Chicago is full of just such work as that. The officers of the law find it very profitable to be in league with these thieving characters. There is no denying the fact that all the great centers of population in the world are full of dens of thieves, and their business is made all the more profitable because of their ability to ally themselves with the police departments and other officials. The stories that are now told of Chicago are simply the repetition of what has been reported over and over again, year after year; and yet our civilization, which has promised so much, does not put these things down. They grow worse and worse; and men who have read history ought to know that such conditions can not continue without bringing destruction to the nations that are engaged in them the body politic that permits them. But since they have grown, in their wicked proportions, until they have filled the world, the only hope that can be left to people who will look at these conditions without prejudice, is the second coming of Christ itself. For with these conditions general throughout the world, there is no part of it left to reform the other; and while many well-meaning men and women are doing heroic work in their efforts for reform, the conditions, in spite of them, continue to grow worse.

Not very long ago vice crusades were conducted in Chicago which, it was declared, would cleanse the city, and the news went out that the thing had been actually done; but now we have to be shocked with the information that after all that has been said and done, the great city is still in a desperate situation. God has forewarned us that evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; and if we will take pains to examine, we will find that the facts are in harmony with God's word.

An Exasperated Laborer

A FEW days ago, in San Francisco, a man shot and instantly killed a big capitalist contractor. The man who did the shooting was rendered desperate because of the condition of himself and wife and two children. He was in poor health. He had done work for the contractor that amounted to something like $17. Not being able to go to the office on pay-day, he did not secure his money. His illness confined him at home for a little while. Then he went to the contractor for his pay, telling that he and his family were without food and in a starving condition. He went again and again; and finally the contractor gruffly turned him away, and as he claims, struck at him, when he shot and killed him.

The advertising that has been given to the matter has brought hosts of people to supply the wife and the children with an abundance of everything needed, including money. More than half a score of attorneys—some of them leading lights in their profession—have offered their services to the murderer. The newspapers condone the action, and speak in the strongest terms of reproach against the man who was killed. The labor-unions are taking the subject up, and are proposing to present the strongest defense that can be made in behalf of the man under charge of murder.

This incident is calculated to appeal to the sympathies of most people, but our peculiar interest in referring to it is to call attention to the deep-seated spirit of hatred that many men of wealth are bringing upon themselves. There is no defense to be made for this person who held back the honest wages of a man who was not only suffering himself but whose wife and children were starving because he could not get what was justly his due. On the other hand, it is also true that this case may give many other men who have been treated unjustly by exacting employers, license to obtain vengeance in the same manner.

If this case were an isolated one, it would be less worthy of mention; but the country is full of similar ones, and the Bible, in addressing those who would heap together treasures in the last days, says to them:

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you. Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh." James 5:1-8.

We already see a little of the popular sentiment in the world against the grinding process of the men of wealth. The heartlessness they have manifested toward their employees is the seed-sowing for the harvest that, according to the foregoing text, they must soon reap. The crop is sure to follow the sowing of the seed. The effect must follow the cause.

This is not incidental theory, but it is a statement of fact that is supported by the prophetic declaration of the Word itself. When the storm finally breaks, there will be scenes of rioting and revolution that will endanger every member of the whole social fabric; and it behooves men and women to understand the meaning of these things, and to know what they all portend.

If the Government Could Control

THE Socialists are making considerable comment on the fact that the United States government maintains its soldiers at an average cost, for rations, of thirty cents a day. The government, so they claim, can do this because of its peculiar opportunities for buying; and this is urged as reason for the government ownership of the various lines of commerce and manufacture.

There may be a point to this. However that may be, we leave others to argue it out. But we feel constrained to call attention to the many different kinds of texts that are furnished in this time for discontentment. This is only one of them. When it is affirmed that the government as a great buyer can secure food so cheaply as to be able to feed its men well for thirty cents a day, that naturally produces dissatisfaction.

We may not blame men for being dissatisfied when there is so much cause for reasonable and possibly just complaint; but it does seem absurd, in the light of history, to think that regardless of the slumbering embers of revolution, men should believe that the world is standing in the dawning of the opening day of a golden age.

When habits of thought or expression become popular, men will utter and repeat them without a seeming realization of what they are saying; and for this reason we find the vast majority talking that the world is getting better and better, when everybody knows, when they stop to consider, that there are discussions on every hand which are the forerunners of revolution and strife.

The Airship in War

A RECENT despatch says a single bomb dropped from an aeroplane killed thirty men and a large number of horses. The aviator succeeded in striking a detachment of cavalry that was massed together. Another exhibited a part of a torn coat taken from one of sixty soldiers, all of whom had been either killed or wounded by a bomb from the skies.

When we consider this new terror that has been added to war, it gives a deeper expressiveness to the language of Jeremiah, who exclaimed, when viewing through prophetic vision the times in which we are living:

“My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart; my heart is disquieted in me; I can not hold my peace; because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is laid waste: suddenly are my tents destroyed, and my curtains in a moment.” Jer. 4: 19, 20.

Reforming the Psalter

By W. H. S.

CRITICIZING previous attempts to provide a selection of scriptures suitable for responsive reading, an advertisement of a recent work of the character mentions that a former one retained “even such a sentence as ‘The dead praise not the Lord.’” “From this prevailing fault,” says the advertisement, “the collection below named is uniquely free.”

The fact remains, however, that whether the churches can use such passages in their worship or not, many such are found in the Bible; and it would be more in harmony with Christianity to bring the doctrine into accord with these, than to drop them as “unsuitable.” W. H. S.

Lessons From the World War

THERE is much experimenting in this war, both with the various kinds of air-ships and also with the submarines. The weak points in these two classes of destructive weapons will be carefully and scientifically figured out. Their effective power will be rendered more and more terrible and dependable in their destructive work. If ever there was a time when the second coming of Christ should look dear to the soul, and when we should be earnestly praying to be delivered from this barbarous, this wicked, this cruel world, that time is now; and if ever there was a time when the possessors of the blessed hope of the glorious gospel of the soon coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ should press forward in carrying the message of hope and cheer to the ends of the earth, that time is now.

THE shocking cruelties of the Old World war, its wide-spread contagion, and the determination with which it is progressing, ought to lead the people of this world to realize their great mistake in thinking that we are living in times of peace, and that the spirit of the world to-day is the spirit of peace rather than the spirit of war.

DOES it mean anything? Three lines of transatlantic steamers, the White Star, the Ashley and Duniston, and the Merchants-Montreal, have closed their bars and abolished the sale of liquor from their boats. Safety, efficiency, economy, morality, demand it.

TO work intensely hard so as to accomplish more before we are called away is often like sewing fast to finish the work before the thread shall run out. A healthy even pace wastes less and accomplishes more.

IT is reported that the British have invented a new gun for destroying air-ships. It has been used a few times, so the reports say, and “has proved a fresh terror to the aviators.”