Isaiah 62

Isaiah 62:12

THE MORAL OF THE Isa_62:12THE moral leprosy of the modern metropolis is a dark picture. In Raymond’s “Life of Lincoln” there is an anecdote of Mr. Campbell, once Secretary of State for Illinois. He speaks of a cadaverous looking man with a white neckcloth, who came requesting the use of the House of Representatives for a course of lectures. The Secretary inquired, “What is to be the subject of the lectures?” The clerical gentleman replied, “The Second Coming of Christ”. “It’s no use,” said Mr. Campbell. “If you will take my advice you will not waste your time in this city.

It is my private opinion that if the Lord has been in Springfield once He will never want to see it a second time.” We believe that Christ is in the city in Spirit, but as previously suggested, He is sickened by what He sees. Christ is going to come to the metropolis eventually, in judgment, and, if things are not improved over the present condition, many, yea, multitudes, must perish.The purpose of this chapter therefore, is to suggest possible ways of improvement.

IS TO THE We talk of soulless corporations, but no one ever speaks of a soulless city. A city is soulful instead.The corporation may express itself in steel rails, puffing engines, clicking! telegraphs; but a city expresses itself in a moving, breathing, laughing, sorrowing crowd. Aside from the individual there is nothing which impresses us as more sentient than a city. It lives and moves and has a being. The heart of Christ broke over Jerusalem, and He wept about her, as He did at the grave of His friend Lazarus. He loved that city as He loved His own blessed mother.

There is just as much reason why this living thing we call a municipality should be moral as there is why a man should be moral.The mayor’s character determines, in no small measure, the morals of the city. In a recent gathering a mayor likened a city to a family, and said, “The average father finds it difficult enough to control two or three, or a half dozen; how much more difficult then to restrain a quarter or a half of a million or two millions.” The figure is fit.

There are many features of the city life akin to those of the family life; and, while we speak from time to time about the city fathers, after all, the paternalism of every town is more surely located in the mayor than in any other man, or even set of men. It is accepted as settled that what I think, what I say, what I do, what I am, will decide, in great measure, whether my house is orderly or disorderly, moral or immoral. It is not enough either that in my thought, word, and deed, and character, I should be righteous; my very office, as father, imposes upon me the necessity of looking after the thought, language, deeds and character of my household. Sodom reached the acme of sin when Lot was its mayor. He was a respectable citizen, not much more; but evidently he had poorly kept his oath of office. He paid the price in the loss of his wife, the destruction of some of his children, and the moral damnation of others.

One is not surprised, therefore, when it comes abroad that Lot himself has fallen into nameless iniquity.Given a mayor who hates sin and delights in righteousness, and reforms are inevitable. Suppose, for instance, Anthony Comstock was a resident of your city, and had just been chosen mayor for two years, what do you think would be the feeling on the part of saloonists?

What commotion do you suppose would exist with those human hyenas who “sleep not except they have done some mischief” and who shadow our daughters whenever they walk the streets? How many gambling devices would be exposed to gullible youth when Comstock had been in the chair a month? When in Chicago forty years ago, Mr. Hesing was a candidate for the mayorality, he said to the public “I would like to be mayor of Chicago. I want to put to the test the honesty of the reform movement. I will pledge myself to all reform measures, for I believe I am as sincere as any man who has taken a part in the movement for reform in Chicago.” That is good campaign “stuff” as the speakers say.

What we need is to have post-election men who will put campaign speeches into practice.The moral element in society is solemnly responsible for municipal improvement. A good mayor has a perfect right to expect their hearty endorsement and co-operation in every movement looking to better moral conditions.

Too long this element has excused itself from taking any active part in politics save on election day. When told, as we often are, that the mayor and every alderman, and every official of power, is dogged and importuned, cajoled and threatened by the whole vicious crowd who want to Sodomize the city, we are prone to reply that they have a financial interest large enough to justify them in putting in their whole time in politics. The implication is that the better element has no material interest. But is that true? Would our interests were no greater than financial. But our interests are social, domestic and religious.

The man who is silent and inactive, while the very social atmosphere is polluted, will pay the price of indifference by losses before the magnitude of which he will be driven mad. If soldiers do not keep the barracks in repair they cannot expect to escape the enemy’s bullets; if citizens do not provide pure water for the public schools, in some way, they must look to having their children smitten with typhoid fever; and if the moral element of society does’ nothing to create a condition of moral atmosphere they will pay the price not only in purse, but in domestic grief, and probable personal pollution.The Church of God is especially charged with civic reform.

Let us define! According to the New Testament, the chief business of the Church of God is not that of cleaning up a world doomed already to the fires, but it is that of righteous conduct upon the part of every member, and the reclamation of their sin-smitten fellows. Under no circumstances should the Church become a political organization. Romanism has already revealed the ruinous effects of such a procedure upon both Church and State. Even as good a man as John Calvin never went more sadly wrong than when he attempted to rule Geneva through the power of the Church. The present-day position of the Church of England, with the Passive Resistance Movement, is only another evidence of injury to the cause of Christ, and injustice to the State when a Church assumes political functions.

But, when the Church is regarded as the body of God-fearing, righteous-living men, then, it ought to be in politics, and as a powerful influence, before which the saloon, and all evil accessories, should be made afraid and in the face of which sins should be made ashamed. The silence of the Church of God should be broken at every sight of gross civic sins.

It is related that the dumb son of King Chroesus broke the string that held his tongue when he saw them about to slay his father, and cried, “Kill not my father!” When we witness the wicked children of the city in the act of matricide, the church ought to resist effectively the bloody attempt upon the life of our nursing mother. DEPENDS UPON In this picture of the city of Jerusalem, in its eventual and glorious estate, the Prophet speaks not only of the fact that a holy people shall be there, but he mentions expressly the circumstances that they shall be called “the redeemed of the Lord”.Enforced morality belongs to the realm of legislation. Men have no right to be mean, no right to be vicious. The decalogue has God’s declaration against the transgression of those great natural laws, the keeping of which is essential to the good of human society. And, the decalogue, divinely given, and enforced by the Almighty Himself, is an ensample of the righteousness of restraining men from evil.When Anthony Comstock attended the World’s Fair at Chicago, he had not been on the grounds a day when the worst institutions on the Midway were being locked up by the sheriff; and Anthony Comstock was right. Whenever an individual, or a corporation, adopts a course which evilly affects public weal, there exists every moral right why they should be restrained.

Some time ago, when the Elks were coming into the writer’s city, a report came that a man had made an arrangement to sell the vilest picture upon which one ever looked. A detective was put after him, and he was sent to jail for six months.

They compelled him to behave himself by putting him behind the bars. When, on another occasion, it was learned that two men were guilty of the grossest violation of the rights of children, a little company saw to it that they were imprisoned. There is not a common citizen who does not have a perfect right to swear out a warrant for the booze sellers who are violating the law against sale of liquors. Those who have read Jacob Riis’ book, “The Battle with the Slums” will recall how when Mr. Roosevelt was mayor of New York, some of the grossest immoralities were called to his attention, and although it involved in some instances the destruction of large areas of property, buildings were demolished and razed to the foundations, that plague spots might be stamped out of the municipality. There is such a thing as making men behave themselves by putting them into the penitentiary, and all society admits the justice of it; but an enforced morality, while needful, is not sufficient.The best morality is voluntary, and born of Divine redemption.

There are few classes of men who are more moral than those who are behind prison bars, especially if they are condemned to solitude. Aside from a muttered oath to one’s self, they do not break the letter of the Ten Commandments, and yet their hearts may be burning hells.

The man who does right as Joseph did, because it is right, because God expects it of him, because his own mind and heart prompts it, is the man who is making a real contribution to social redemption. The Gadarene of the New Testament they bound with fetters and chains, and when these were upon him he must needs be moral in conduct; but that Gadarene was never fit for citizenship until the Son of Man, passing by, unbound him and spoke peace to his soul, and, dispossessing his heart of every dark angel, redeemed him to a right mind and dismissed him to people and home. The only morality that makes for all that is best in home and society is that which is born from above. Henry Ward Beecher reminds us that even industry, frugality and honesty are not sufficient in themselves. To them must be added love for the right, which is Heaven-born, else they all come short. The Apostle says, “By the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight” and it may be said that by the deeds of the Law no man’s moral character is established.

If you ask, “What weight do you put upon this,” we reply—“The proper weight. But it does not reach up to the voluntary morality born of redemption.” Mr.

Beecher says, “What becomes of those qualities if they do not measure up to God? If a man undertakes to jump across a chasm that is ten feet wide and jumps eight feet, what are you going to do with the eight feet that he did jump?” It is one of those things which must be accomplished in whole, or it is not accomplished at all. A man who drops anchor but his rope does not reach the bottom has an anchor good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. A morality that comes short of that voluntary morality engendered by an indwelling spirit only produces, as Beecher puts it, “The lower leaves without the bloom and the fruit; and the lower is no substitute for the higher.” If our city is ever saved the redeemed of the Lord must be there.The true Christian is the best possible citizen. Sometime since the chief of police in one city said, “I find when people become Christians the officers have no trouble with them.” But far more should be claimed in the Christian’s behalf. He should not only cease to give the policeman trouble; he should commence to give the policeman assistance.

In fact, one true Christian in the neighborhood is worth more for its moral condition than one policeman. That is particularly true if it be the sort of policeman on some of the city beats—the sort, who was seen in my city a few years since, sitting between two lewd women, half drunk, at the time when a score of small boys were lined up before the bar paying their dimes for liquid damnation.

John G. Wooley once said that there are many men who are willing to talk of “good citizenship”; who say they want to get together with the crowd at something better than the worst, but they do not want a Christian citizenship. They will vote for the best men to do the bidding of the unclean party; they will consent to having a saloon open six days in the week and request that it be closed on Sunday; they will object to having a saloon planted down by their own homes, but be willing to have it set down by other homes which are less attractive, where it can the more easily accomplish its dreadful work. He tells the story of three little boys, who, on their way home from school, fell to talking about their fathers. One said, “My father is a democrat. What is yours?” The second said, “Mine is a republican.

What is yours?” The third replied, “Mine’s neither. He is a Methodist.” “So little children,” he adds, “exalt the virtue of church membership.”Church membership is not the same thing as Christian citizenship.

There are church members who will stoop to a job that only the degraded ought to do; but Christians, never! After all, then, the future of your city, and the future of any city, depends upon how many may be numbered among the redeemed of the Lord. The great work to which every follower of the Nazarene is called, is not that of veneering political appearances, but it is that of accomplishing personal redemption. Every time a soul is snatched from the moral sinks of the metropolis, the evil power of those sinks is reduced, and good citizenship is increased. The Son of Man was the best Statesman the world ever saw, and He gave Himself to the one work of seeking and saving that which was lost.There is another point in this text worthy of attention.THE MORAL PEOPLE ARE THE PEOPLE“Thou shalt be called, Sought out, A city not forsaken”. There are some men who are always alarmed lest a reform administration kill the municipality.

One of these, living in a town which had been cursed by a saloon, saw local option obtain, and afterwards, talking with Geo. W.

Bain, said this, “Yes, we have a dry town, but it is an awful dead one! The liquor is gone.” To which Mr. Bain facetiously answered, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord”. There are people in Minneapolis, scores of them, who positively believed that to put the saloon and its accessories out of this city would be to destroy its business prosperity—and apparently they believed it in spite of the per capita wealth of the people of Maine; they believed it in spite of the rapid financial strides of North Dakota. In spite of the prosperity of the last eleven years of prohibition, they still believe it!The proposition that the moral people are the prosperous people is argued from every conceivable standpoint.Reason demands this result. Some time since the editor of a journal said, sagely enough, that there were some men who foolishly believed that money was only easy when it reached them through the tills of a saloon.

The adverb “foolishly” was properly employed. In Bloomington, Illinois, years ago, when the gambling houses and saloons were rife on every side, the business men contended with bitterness, that the credit system was ruining them.

Men were losing so much at the gambling table that accounts went undischarged. When a few men inaugurated a movement that shut up many of these places, the best business men of the city poured letters of gratitude upon them. They had learned that when the men conducting the gambling rooms, and the professionals they had imported, were filling their pockets, just that much less could go into the channels of honest commerce.It would be a strange world if morality was not under Divine favor. God would be no longer worshiped, and men would be justified in their unbelief. When the human mind conceives of such a world as that, it thinks only of chaos and darkness, and a place where God is unknown. It is far more impossible to suppose that a righteous Creator would not bring out of good moral behavior material success, than it is to imagine that sunshine and rain could never bring the tiny shoot to flower and fruitage.But still further, Revelation is replete with promises of it. “Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come”.

The Lord promised to Abraham if he would obey Him, “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great”. The Psalmist says, “Thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt Thou compass him” (Psalms 5:12). “The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles” (Psalms 34:17). “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Psalms 37:25). “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee: He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved” (Psalms 55:22). “Verily there is a reward for the righteous” (Psalms 58:11). “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon” (Psalms 92:12), etc., etc.

But why multiply instances? No man who knows the Word of God will ever call into question its promises to the people of righteous morals.History has also demonstrated this as a fact. The Christian people of the world today are the most prospered in it. Victor Hugo, in “Les Miserables” speaking of “The Lark” says, “To be wicked does not insure prosperity, for the Inn did not succeed well.”Bancroft, in his “History of the United States”, speaking of Benjamin Franklin, says “On the deep foundations of sobriety, frugality, and industry, the young journeyman built his fortunes and his fame.” That was a good foundation; but there is one infinitely better, and that is the foundation— Christ Jesus. A man may be all right in the eyes of his fellows, but if he is to have an abiding peace and be without condemnation, he must also be right in the sight of God. Some years ago in Southern Illinois, a young man committed a crime.

Fearing detection, he fled to the West. He deeply deplored his fault and was never guilty of another offense.

In the West he married, and, when a little one came into the home, his heart yearned after his mother that she might see the child. Finally he ventured back; stayed quietly with his mother for a few days, and then, growing bolder, he went to see some of the neighbors.The sheriff heard of his presence and went to the house. After his arrest he called his wife to him and said, “Have I been a good husband to you?” “Yes, dear, you certainly have.” “Have I been a good father to our child?” “No child ever had a better.” “Mother, have I been a good, dependable son?” “Yes, my boy, but what is the matter?” “Well, there is a crime back of me and I am now under arrest.” He was all right with his mother; all right with his wife; he was more than right in the eyes of his baby; but in the eyes of the law, wrong; and his fidelity as husband, as neighbor, counted for naught against this crime.Men and women, though you may be all right in the eyes of the public; and with your fellows; by your brothers, sisters and friends, you may be held in the highest esteem, unless you have repented your transgressions of the law of God and have made all right with Him there is no prosperity that can remain permanent, no abiding peace for the present, no promise of peace for the future.