Editorial May 2, 1901 Issue

The Slav in Moral Reform

Editor

As the water lily reveals its matchless beauty upon the surface of the stagnant pool and finds its beginnings in the unsightly mud beneath, so out of the depths of an era of moral debasement has not infrequently sprung the most fragrant blossomings of spiritual aspiration. So Savonarola, Luther, and Wesley rose from a level of religious decadence that seemed well-nigh hopeless, and each stood forth to illumine a period which gave no promise of their coming save that foreshadowed in a universal need.

We have been accustomed to think of the Greek Church as spiritless and torpid because manacled by a venerated and autocratic traditionalism, and lo! from its depths springs a Tolstoi, the prophet of the "New Christianity," whose voice has given religious impulse its new war cry, "Back to Christ," and who with a devotion that is simple, sincere, and unswerving is living as well as preaching again, the Brotherhood of Man. And now comes Markov, a Russian publicist, to plead for a return to a simpler, purer, less luxurious life, and to warn the Christian world against that abandon to amusement which is undermining the character of the young and corrupting society in its every plane.

The votaries of the theatre, the vast multitude of those who are yielding to the appeals of the unrefined, the frivolous, and the bizarre, in their demands for incessant entertainment, may well give heed to this voice from the Northland. Hear what he says of the modern craze for amusement, as quoted in a translation for The Literary Digest:—

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