p. 208 | Signs of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 13. (4/7/1914)

Earlier text: The Living Message Making Healthy Progress

TEMPERANCE

By Editor

Here is where the children help to make the nation dry. Every parent, every schoolteacher, and every Sabbath-school teacher,—in fact every one, old and young,—is interested in the temperance cause.

The special double Temperance Number of Our Little Friend is designed especially for the little folks, and their part in this great campaign. There are sixteen pages and special colored cover, a most creditable little Temperance journal — stories and pictures that will make deep and lasting impressions on the minds of children from six to twelve years old.

Large quantities can be circulated in schools, homes for children, and Sunday-schools. The children, where encouragement is given them, will sell the paper enthusiastically. They can buy 20 copies for 50 cents, and sell them for $1.00. Some will want more. All will want some. Five or more copies, 2½ cents each. Price to Canada, 3 cents each, because of extra postage.

This number ready April 15. Its date is May 1-8.

OUR LITTLE FRIEND, Mountain View, Cal

Conduct and Courage Lead to Honor

"CONDUCT and courage lead to honor."

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Missionaries in foreign lands can order from this one store the necessities and comforts to which they had become accustomed in the home land. This will prove both an economy and a convenience. Our catalog will be sent free to any address on request.

Despairs of Putting End to Vice

DR. BRAND WHITLOCK, as mayor of Toledo, has had splendid opportunities for observing the great vice problems that are confronting the world. He has recently written an article which appeared simultaneously in the Forum magazine of New York and the English Review of London. Mr. Whitlock thinks many of the efforts that are made to suppress vice are serving to extend and spread it rather than to diminish it. All the laws, both in the Old World and in this country, for the segregation and regulation of prostitution, in his opinion, have proved ineffective; and if we are not to be carried down beneath the corruptions of vice, very different and much better methods must be inaugurated than anything heretofore advanced.

Reformers everywhere are quite united in affirming that the world is being inundated by vice, and that our civilization is thereby most seriously menaced. Each school of reformers has some particular theory or panacea that it is sure would be a cure for these evils. But all must admit that the trouble lies in the fact that the world is breaking away from the great foundations of morality.

We have had a generation that has been taught to laugh at and ridicule the stern piety of the Pilgrims, and of all people who are similarly inclined to piety and devotion. We have had a generation that has been teaching that much of the Bible story is a myth. And as a consequence, the salvation, the morality, and the manliness offered in the gospel of Christ have been discounted. Men have tried to teach themselves that they could live a refined, moral, and genteel life without the saving power of the gospel; but every nation on the face of this earth that has ever gone down has sunk beneath the load of its own internal immorality and vices.

Oftentimes these vices have been highly refined, and even embellished by an artistic touch, but they have been vices just the same. And the world to-day is perishing through lack of the plain teaching of the gospel of Christ.

The flood of sensuality that has become a menace to all the civilized world is one among the many indications that we have reached the time when God will settle with the world for its iniquities. The Bible is filled with warnings like the following:

"I said, My leanness, my leanness, wo unto me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously; yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously. Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth. And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again." Isa. 24: 16-20.

The treacherous dealers and the transgressor, in this, as in many other scriptures, are charged with the crime of bringing about conditions that call for visitations from God. We should open our eyes to these warnings from the divine Book, and have a realizing sense of what they mean.

As Viewed by a Great Jurist

JUDGE BEN LINDSEY, Denver's famous juvenile jurist and reformer, has recently said some very striking things in regard to the condition of society. Two paragraphs from his utterances are the following:

“The sooner we rub the nose of society into its failure, and wake it up to the truth, and take its ostrich head out of the sand pile, the sooner we can do the big, splendid work that must be done in this nation for its womanhood and motherhood. I am proud to be one of those to take whatever consequences may come from telling the truth.”

“The birth-rate of illegitimate children is amazingly on the increase, that of legitimate children on the decrease; that is, as far as we have any reliable data upon which to base estimates. Of course, all estimates are, in a measure, conjecture.”

Men who are in living contact with actual conditions in the world can not be true to themselves without affirming the facts as they exist; and such facts as these will not warrant us in looking to this world, or to any devices of men, for salvation. But what a glorious thing it is to know that the world is soon to be redeemed from all of these conditions through the mighty power of Christ Himself at His coming!

He Is Coming

IN THESE times when there are so many discordant and violent elements among men in the world, in these times when even nature itself is breaking out with the furies of storm, flood, earthquake, and volcano, how quieting it is to know that there is a bright and glorious day just before us! These conditions of distress are only for a short time. They are nothing more than the expressions of Satan's fury, because he knows that all the prophecies are pointing with unmistakable accuracy to this generation as the one that is to see the second coming of Christ.

Nothing in all the Bible is taught any more clearly than Christ's return to this earth with power and great glory. Statements and promises concerning His coming may be found by the score scattered through all His word. One of these numerous texts is the following:

"And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Matt. 24: 30, 31.

Some men have sought to spiritualize away such plain statements of the divine Lord. But there stands His clear promise, and that promise will be fulfilled to the letter. And the glorious truth concerning the promise is that it will meet its accomplishment in this very generation in which we are living. If we will but receive His truth and prepare for the great event, His coming, which will soon put an end to all the distressing conditions of this time, will also bring us into the everlasting joys of eternal bliss. How the heart should thrill with joy, how it should palpitate with every pleasing emotion, as we drink in the knowledge of the fact, not merely that He is coming again, but that He is coming very soon!

The Conditions in Germany

By Editor

THE lower house of the Prussian Diet, after a long debate, passed a motion requiring the government to use all lawful means to "check the growing immorality, especially in the large towns." Out of the 443 members, 370 voted in its favor.

Moving-picture exhibitions and dance halls open all night are among the things spoken of as causes of the degradation. The report states that "there is not the least doubt that 'night life' is flourishing extraordinarily throughout Germany, and there is hardly a provincial town of any importance which has not one or more dancing establishments open until the early morning. These establishments carry on their business under the flare of electric lighting."

We should not close our eyes to the fact that conditions of this kind answer accurately to the Saviour's prophecy that the world at the close of time would be as it was in the days of Lot. If ever there was an exact fit in anything, it may be seen in the accuracy with which present-day conditions fulfil the Bible predictions.

The Moral Tone in England

IN a recent issue of the London Daily Mail, Sir A. Conan Doyle is reported as saying that there are two hundred thousand men and women separated in his country, and "that the lower classes were rotted through and through" by the law which made it possible for them to be divorced. Concerning the law he said:

"The ingenuity of man could not possibly have been used to invent a more demoralizing thing than the Acts of Separation had been. Divorce was not an evil, but a cure,—a deplorable cure for a deplorable state of affairs. He had no doubt that if all of these suggested reforms came about there would be a deluge of divorces for some little time, and every one would hold up their hands. It would be the opening of an ulcer which had got to be opened, and after opening it they would see what was below the surface."

If the world is getting better and better all the time, as some people try to make us believe, why are men who have to deal with social affairs, continually confronting us with facts of this character?

England’s Double Crisis

By Editor

THE double crisis in England is one of the most interesting and at the same time one of the most perplexing social problems. The British government has been in sore straits for several years in trying to deal with her discontented and turbulent masses; and as if to add to this already overpowering perplexity, the bishop of London is taking steps, as he says, "to allay the wide-spread uneasiness of the church." He speaks of the books that are being published by some of the clergy which "seem to deny the great miracles." There never was a time when more people were professing to believe the Bible than right now, and yet among these very followers of the Bible there are multiplied thousands who ridicule the miracles that the Bible records. To throw out the record of the miracles of the Bible as untrustworthy means so to undermine the authority of the sacred Book as to destroy completely its influence upon the minds of those who accept this modern teaching. And yet there is no one among the most modern of the so-called modernists who can write a document upon present-day problems that will describe them anywhere nearly as vividly and as clearly as they have been described by the prophets and the apostles of the sacred Book. There is a master hand back of these superhuman efforts to overthrow confidence in the Bible. If we want to know the meaning of these times in which we are living we should study our Bibles as never before; for while it is the most ancient of books, it nevertheless was inspired by a Being that could cause men anciently to discuss for us the problems with which we are grappling in these very days. And what is best of all, those inspired writers have told us the meaning of the conditions that are now filling the world with terrors and alarms.

IN her campaign against habit-forming drugs, Mrs. Vanderbilt has ascertained that some 15,000 drug victims are to be found in New York City alone. She is prosecuting a vigorous war on the traffic of cocaine, heroin, morphin, and similar drugs; because it is learned, through these and similar investigations, that most of the "gun fighters" and "gangsters" of New York and other cities are "dope fiends." The use of habit-forming drugs has come to be a world-wide problem that is about as hard to handle as the liquor traffic itself. This old earth is going to pieces under its weight of depravity, and is giving way to every form of unnatural appetite and passion.

WE used to speak of the ranks of armies as decimated, that is, one man out of every ten being killed, and that was thought to be a fearful slaughter. But the statistics of the late Balkan war show that out of 1,330,000 combatants, 286,200 were killed or wounded, which is an equivalent of 21.5%. When we add to those killed and wounded in battle the suffering occasioned by the starvation produced among the people, as the effect of the devastating armies, it will give us a little glimpse of the horrible carnage of warfare with modern weapons. How good it will be when the Prince of peace returns in person to this world to put an end to all this misery and cruelty!

GERMAN aggressions in Asia Minor are keeping the European diplomats uneasy lest Turkey should soon become the center of another war, and that this time all Europe should be embroiled. The conditions there are by no means reassuring.

BECAUSE of the revolt in Ulster over the home rule controversy, England is said to be facing the worst internal crisis with which she has been confronted since the colonies of America revolted more than a hundred years ago.

ANOTHER ARMY OF THE DISCONTENTED
Such scenes are among the evidences of the feebly restrained human volcanoes of world-wide discontent and smoldering revolution. — ANOTHER ARMY OF THE DISCONTENTED Such scenes are among the evidences of the feebly restrained human volcanoes of world-wide discontent and smoldering revolution.