Article February 21, 1920 Issue

Signs of the Times

[San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-Herald]

Most of us do not need to be told, that, except on Sunday and when the influence of the church service or other religious observance is upon us, our Christianity rests very lightly upon us. We yield to many of the temptations that beset our non-Christian neighbors. We have much the same ambitions and use very much the same methods to gratify them—many of them anything but Christian. We do not much regard the welfare, rights, and interests of others when these things stand in the way of the attainment of our own cherished ambitions and desires. If every one of us would hold an honest examination of himself, he would be obliged to admit all this to be true.

And that it is true is what is the matter with the world right now. Because it is true, we have steel strikes and coal strikes and general unrest; we are threatened with industrial prostration, with its accompanying inconvenience, loss, and suffering. If you chide the ordinary man because he is seeking his own selfish ends without much, if any, regard to the interests, welfare, and happiness of others; if you charge him with a willingness to bring cold and hunger and suffering to helpless and innocent women and children in order to accomplish his own selfish purposes, he will justify his lack of the Christian spirit by frankly declaring that all other men, no matter what they profess or pretend, are in fact actuated by the same motives that he is. Unfortunately, this is so generally true that he is almost justified in believing it to be universally true.

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