Article December 5, 1901 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Jean Nicholas Grou, W. C. Gannett, John W. Chadwick, George Matheson, J. G. Holland, John Locke

THE FEEDERS OF INIQUITY.—The New York Tribune in a late editorial on "Civic Righteousness," in which it treated of the horrors of wickedness to be found in our great cities, brought out the point that the villages of the country and its purely rural communities are the sources from which the cities are fed, and that the terrible forms of wickedness which flourish in our great municipalities are only the full development of what in more moderate from is allowed to begin and maintain itself unrestrained in the smaller places. Only by an aroused sentiment in every town and hamlet can the evil of the cities be effectually cured. It thus sets forth this idea:—

"The same apathy which is responsible for evil government in the large cities is to be found in the village and rural life of the country. Little or nothing is done for the suppression of nuisances that retard the moral and material life of the community, for the removal of untoward conditions that tend to produce the village hoodlum and idler, for the repression of drunkenness or other allied forms of vice, for the securing of better sanitary regulations or for the promotion of civic pride and nobler ideals of citizenship. In the village and rural community, just as in the city, the good people are often unorganized for the promotion of the general welfare, and are sometimes found working at cross-purposes"

But these most true words apply equally to the individual who, while he shrinks in unaffected horror from the awful crimes that find expression in the lives of abandoned men and women, yet practises little forms of selfishness whose logical outcome is in these very iniquities which so shock him. Little transgressions which do not transgress the law, and the little injustices which yet do not bring one into the courts, are the sources from which come, as children from a parent, the vast wrongs of the criminal world. If we would have righteousness on earth we must begin at home; we must begin at the beginning. If we would not have wolves and tigers, we must destroy the cubs of these animals. He who would not have robbery and murder in the world, must put away from his own heart the envies and the hatreds of which these crimes are the ripened fruit.—New Church Messenger.

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