NATIONAL SINS

The shameless immodesty of the day calls for reformation. The half-dressed modern woman should be arrested and prosecuted for menacing the morals of the times. Go back ten years ago! Had women dressed or undressed then as now, they would have been shunned as denizens of the tenderloin who were segregated in a certain morally leprous district no Christian would walk through unless on the mission of calling sinners to repentance. Modesty and many modern women have parted company. Let us pray for a speedy reconciliation. The first order God gave to the fallen pair in Eden was for the covering of their nude bodies that the shame of their nakedness should not appear; and the first evidence of their fallen condition was couched in the question He asked: "Who told thee that thou wast naked?"

Depravity, nakedness, immodesty and possession by unclean, shameless, foul demons, go hand in hand and cheek by jowl. The demon-possessed man of Gadara wore no clothes. How easily is the affinity traced between his condition and that of the shameless modern woman! Frequently, when Christ delivered from demon possession, He called attention to their relation to impurity: "Come out, thou foul spirit!" or "thou unclean spirit." There is further light on the relation to demon possession of the modern nudity craze in the fact told us by the missionaries from Africa that as soon as the poor nude heathen find Christ, their first instinct is to cover their bodies. [5] A well known Christian leader, recently returned from a world tour of mission stations said that even in her nudity, the heathen woman is more modest in her demeanor in many cases than some of our civilized women, passing by with downcast eyes and quiet, dignified mien.

To the immodest attire of the guilty women of the time is chargeable much of the evil thinking and acting and speaking by the groups of men on the street corners and the general immorality of the day: man naturally weak, and only strong when in Christ, is greeted at every turn by the suggestive; young boys in their teens stand gazing at the nude representations of women on the magazine-covers, calendars, paintings or statuary, making vulgar remarks; groups of men stand on the street-corners and watch and laugh as the nude show passes by. When a specially shocking type passes, people can be seen standing in the center of the block gazing after the indecent specimens. Jack, the Peepers need no longer skulk around in the dark, they can remain in the open. Who will say that the man suddenly appearing in a Nebraska city with buggy whip which he laid lustily on the women's semi-bare limbs, was not the scourge of God?

We once found a young man on the train weeping. He had been a Christian but had fallen through his besetting weakness, and convulsively he sobbed: "I do want to be right, but the women so expose themselves in their immodest attire that I cannot help seeing them as I walk the streets and I go to the bad women for the appeasement of the lust they arouse."

Infanticide (child murder) is a common practice in America, statistics showing over a million abortions annually in the United States, not to mention many precincts from which we have no reports and the many potential cases where preventatives are used to forestall the necessity of abortion, and the amazing part of it is that we are so losing the sense of sin and wrong that such cold-blooded murder is thought innocent and justifiable. Unlike the practice of infanticide in certain Pacific Islands before the advent of Christianity, where they waited for the birth of the child before they murdered it, in enlightened America we kill the child before it is born and sometimes kill the mother too in the abortion, or else incapacitate her for future motherhood; and sometimes worse, the attempted murder fails and the child is born a sub-normal or a criminal, with an uncontrollable mania for cruelty or murder, which often sends him to the electric chair. If self-incrimination were necessary in the world, there would be such a jam at the doors of our penal institutions that no one could get in.

Many of the modern society women can swear like troopers, play cards like seasoned gamblers, drink booze like the most confirmed tippler, smoke cigarettes and dress (or undress) like a denizen of the tenderloin, murder their children by abortion, and sad to state, belong to a church at the same time and have a reputation for respectability and get away with it.

Some of us are praising God that He gave us mothers of the old type, reverent, God-fearing, modest, and that they gave us birth before the advent of the wild, half-dressed, bare-legged "Flapper" type, who dresses to appeal to the base in man.

A recent account of a burial ground for dogs, where society women repair to weep and pray (?) over their departed canine, is almost too sickening to record.

A Tame Crop Is Never Reaped From The Sowing Of Wild Oats

Five hundred and ten percent increase in dope fiends in New York, general crime conditions worse everywhere, the substitution of the divorce ring, (decorated with Cupid's broken bow, with space for the addition of a jewel for each new husband acquired) for the wedding ring, are sad signs of a world which some tell us has been purified by war's blood! In Omaha, Nebraska, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce! The record!

Marriage (unadulterated by affinities, infidelities and divorce and re-marriage at caprice) is everywhere sanctioned in the Word of God -- "Marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." Though the mills of God seem to grind slowly, yet with terrible exactness will they grind well! Sin will still surely be found out! The soul that sins shall die! "Every man that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong he doeth."

It is no more lawful for modern Herods to have their brother's wife than for the Herod of John the Baptist's time. The law of the land will condone things for which the violated law of God will doom forever.

"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not pass away." Hear this Word: --

"And the Pharisees came to Him and asked Him-Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting Him. And He answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept... But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder." -- Mark 10:2-9.

The national government is posting warnings against the sin of abortion or infanticide and the prevention of conception by transmission of word or device through the United States mails. The penalty is $5000.00 fine or five years' imprisonment or both, a light enough penalty for potential and actual murder. Well they might take such action as at the present rate among Americans of abortion and the prevention of conception in a few decades the Americans will be more nearly extinct than the Indians. Let the Government find some way of punishing those mother-in-laws, mothers and old women who maliciously teach young women how to prevent conception instead of to love their husbands and bear children as Paul enjoined and thereby stop the Adversary from just blasphemy. It is alarming how prevalent this sin is in the world Church and higher life (?) movements.

Our Country

"Blessed is that nation whose God is the Lord;" not whose god is itself or money. The curse of Jehovah is on the nation that makes gold its god; which makes gold more precious than man.

That we think more of gold than God is evident; it is our standard of value. We shoot men like dogs for touching it -- arm men to the teeth to guard it. The happy day is coming when, as God has said, a man will be more precious than gold. It is useless to say on our coin -- "In God we trust" and then oppress His poor. His word pronounces the most terrible judgments on those who oppress the poor.

The recent and present unemployment is a crime which calls to high heaven for vengeance on those bankers and financiers who cause it by holding the means of employment and exchange from circulation at a time when there is more money in hiding than ever in the history of the country -- gorged swollen fortunes from war profits!

Money is scarce unless, in some centers, you are willing to pay the usurer 3 1/2 percent per month, to whom the poor, depleted financiers refer you to, and who get a rake-off, it is said, for the reference. When a little corner banking establishment makes $500, 000 a year, or takes it, it is evident that all the hold-up artists are not yet apprehended. When our financial wizards cry -- "Hard Times!" in one breath and in the next are eager to bind several billions on the people for the bonus-which bonus we have no word against, but rather the inconsistency of crying "Hard Times!" and then binding five billions on the already bled-to-the-white taxpayers, we ask: Where will the arbitrary taxing end? We used to hear -- "No taxation without representation!" Where does the representation come in, in quadrupling taxes without consulting the individual who is supposed to pay the taxes out of an income that has been that many times diminished?

While prosecuting the left-over slackers from the war, let us not forget the guilty owners of the slacker dollars who are potential murderers. Hear John, the Beloved's testimony: "But whoso hath this world's goods and seeth his brother have need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" It was in this connection that he wrote: "Ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in Him." These guilty men are frequently in the church. God pity the minister under whose preaching they are never troubled! They will not be warned by the signs of the times nor by the warnings, threatenings, and prophecies of the Word of God, to desist from their greed and avarice; perhaps not until the wrath of God breaks upon them will they realize their awful sin, and cry aloud for the rocks and mountains to fall upon them and hide them from the wrath of the Lamb. There is nothing more certain than that they shall reap as they have sown.

Personally, we have no complaint, but are only seeking to record what, from prophecy, seems to be the handwriting on the wall of impending doom. (Hear James: "Come now, you rich men, weep and shriek over your impending miseries! You have been storing up treasure in the very last days; your wealth lies rotting and your clothes are moth-eaten; your gold and silver lie rusted over, and their rust will be evidence against you it will devour your flesh like fire. See, the wages of which you have defrauded the workmen who mowed your fields call out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have reveled on earth and plunged into dissipation; you have fattened yourselves as for the Day of slaughter; you have condemned, you have murdered the righteous-unresisting." (Moffatt).

Dr. Haldeman says that according to this prophecy of James "the rich will become the prey of the mob and accumulated wealth in the hands of the few will be seized and scattered like grains of sand."

The merry game of taking money by unjust combines will continue until the cry of the oppressed enters into the ears of Jehovah and He arises to "shake terribly the earth!"

For many years, the motto of the country's leading paper has been: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" This is a sort of national sectarianism which places country before God. That is equivalent to the cry of "The Fatherland! The Fatherland!"

Dr. Wayland, a writer of books on Moral Philosophy which were used in the Boston High Schools a hundred years ago, and which read like devotional books, said of war -- "After all our boasted civilization, we are little advanced from the cave man who stood over his possessions with a club and murdered anyone who dared touch them." The only difference is that we have more efficient ways of killing -- on a wholesale scale in war -- which John Wesley said was "the sum total of all villianies."

After destructive war, in its horrible murder-mill, has finished many of the flower of our youth, sensible men get together and seek to adjust matters by reason, which, had not passion been appealed to instead of reason, might have been adjusted, (if God had been taken into account and trusted) before the terrible slaughter of our splendid youth.

However, it is well always to keep in mind that world betterment is not the Christian's mission, but rather, a gathering out of a people for His Name.

"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" has not been revoked so far as the world is concerned. Capital punishment is scriptural (Old Testament) for the taking of life. The Word of God says to the Christian, "There shall be wars and rumors of wars -- see that ye be not troubled." No "Peace Conference" will put an end to war for "When they shall say peace and safety, sudden destruction shall come upon them." The Christian has a different hope -- he is looking for the soon coming of the "Prince of Peace" to abolish war and to bring in the reign of peace.

The Crime Of Profiteering

Crime? Yes, several crimes are covered in the one term. The Profiteer is a thief, because a thief is one who has in his possession that which belongs to another, or who takes that which belongs to another. Well for these thieves that self-incrimination is not necessary, and fortunate for the penal institutions as well.

I am reminded of a statement an evangelist made in a certain church -- "If all the adulterers in this church were suddenly to arise and make for the door, there would be such a jam that no one could get out." That would certainly be the plight of the penal institutions, only the jam would be so great that no one could get in.

It matters not under what pretext the thief takes that which is another's. He may call his stealing or hold-up work, shrewd financiering, or keen business insight, or believe that he is a "Captain of Industry." If, unjustly in the sight of God and man, he has what is not his own, and that which is not made through his own hard work of brain or brawn, he is a thief. His pretext may be car shortage or business necessity or the law of demand and supply, but keen observers know that they are but inventions to justify his crime.

This subtle form of legalized stealing, or at least permitted stealing (and yet lawyers tell us that it is a crime to conceal a crime) even bestows upon its perpetrator a reputation as a successful business man who is heralded in the leading magazines as the type of success to stir the ambitions of the youth of the land. But there is a terrible word of God spoken against him. -- "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." (R. V. -- go unpunished") -- Proverbs 28:20.

What is termed "getting ahead in the world" is based upon the accumulation of that which is left behind when leaving the world. The strenuous effort to get on "Easy Street" causes such anxiety that it incapacitates one for the enjoyment of that fictitious street, which, like the mirage, is ever receding, as does strenuous labor to make a living and to provide for the possible "rainy day, " often kill the capacity to enjoy life.

Carruso said, "Great men often have greater responsibilities than the rewards of their labors and long for the freedom of those who worship at their shrine."

It is said that the multimillionaire rarely ever smiles. Study the facial expression of the owner of the great department store as he goes from department to department; every lineament of his countenance registering vividly the terrific pressure within. What monetary reward can compensate for the strain under which he lives? What a caricature is life, if gold, rather than God, is its greatest goal!  

5 For a further study of the subject of Demon Possession see the Author's book on "Our Invisible Foes."