Editorial January 6, 1917 Issue

"Awake thou that sleepest"

William D. McCrackan

In addressing the Ephesians Paul uncovered a general human weakness when he wrote, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." The stupor of self-ease and the slumber of self-satisfaction may be reckoned among the sicknesses hard to heal. The sleeper does not even recognize that he is asleep. He who while asleep believes himself to be awake, does not cooperate with the one who seeks to awaken him. If disturbed, he is apt to repeat the words of the insane man: "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not." Such an evil state of thought is only fit to return to its original affliation with the herd of swine.

Under the lethal influence of self-complacency men and nations can be turned against their best friends, perhaps their only friends, and made to welcome their worst enemies with open arms. While they sleep, their cupidities, held in check during their waking moments, are aroused to magnify trifling losses into disasters, and unintentional elbowings into monstrous wrongs. While under the influence of this stupefying mental drug, they may be made to acquiesce in palpable injuries to others, to indulge sudden incomprehensible hatred, and to become parties to crime while glossing it over as an unavoidable occurrence. Such somnambulists among men and nations utterly lose the sense of proportion, minimizing outrages, making mountains out of mole-hills, and reversing the gradations of evil from middling, bad, worst, into worst, bad, middling. Under the repeated strokes of unresisted mental suggestion men and nations lose their mental integrity and lapse into the coma of moral idiocy.

What must the end be? An awakening must sometime, somehow break the spell of esoteric magic, and this awakening is terrible in its grotesque features. Then arises the cry, Why did not some one warn us? Why were we left to sleep while the enemy was preparing our destruction? Pitiable beyond words is the recognition that while we were held in a state of arrested development, others grew to maturity, others fought and won, others kept themselves provided with oil and were ready to meet the bridegroom with lighted lamps.

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