When of one mind, Janus' views
form a composite of his two main sides. He attempts to consider issues with care and thoughtfulness, though he remains biased towards Christianity and Western
traditions. Outsiders might call him a Conservative, but in fact he is a Fundamentalist in that he promotes the Christian values that raised Western civilization to its peak.
One of the faces, looking to our right and called Patulcius, is the headstrong and determined side of Janus, tending to authoritarian ideals. Patulcius looks to history and upholds the traditions of
Christianity and Western civilization, and the well-being of Western nations. Patulcius sees world events as a struggle between divine and demonic
forces.
The other face—the easy-going, more open-minded, left-facing Clusivius—dislikes authority and prefers a more individualistic outlook. Clusivius looks to the future and contemplates changes. While
Christian, Clusivius takes an interest in the well-being of other civilizations as well as the Western. Clusivius tends to believe that elitist conspiracies play a major part in world events.
When possible, the complete Janus seeks to form a synthesis of the two sides when making a decision. At other times Janus allows any differences to stand without resolution. But now and again the two sides must battle one another until one side wins Janus' acceptance.
Tending to sensationalize, and sometimes to hyperbolize, C. F. van Niekerk over-analyzes any number of subjects from mundane minutiae to the great philosophical questions of life itself.
Katáxiros, the parched one, alone and adrift at sea, yet ever rowing ahead anyhow, sometimes weakly and sometimes vigorously, thirsting after God through the Orthodox Christian Church, contemplating the ways of the Lord, recognizing that while he is inadequate to the task, he must press ever ahead. Katáxiros writes about matters pertaining specifically to the Orthodox Church.
Barzillai Alpheus Bozarth claims to be a 19th Century man marooned in the 21st Century after a failed experiment in inter-dimensional travel. Not at all impressed with the wonders of our time, he would give just about anything to return to his beloved world of "horse manure and civilized etiquette". Barzillai writes historical observations and pores over old books and documents.
We don't know what to make of the Wanderer. He walks in with the moon and rolls out with the wind. He uses no name; the smells of rank sweat, dirt, and smoke mark him as much as anything. He's always near, but never close. Heedless of human ideals and bounds, he stands unyielding for honor on the ground. He's practical to a fault when he's not romantic to even greater fault. He says little, but when he does finally speak, we listen up. The Wanderer is our lawman of final resort. By hook or by crook, he sees a job done, just don't ask how. Frankly, we're a little afraid of the Wanderer.
Nature can be cruel to mankind.
If Concussus had his way, nature would be crueler yet. Concussus tends to arrive at the blackest of times, when humanity seems the most despicable.
Diabolus, the devil's advocate. Sometimes we are tempted to embrace the evil world that we despise. Diabolus is there to encourage us in this folly. Fortunately a rare visitor here.
– 17 May 2024 –
Barzillai “19th Century” Bozarth:
The author of the first view, Samuel Loomis, writing in 1887, presents a pessimistic vision of the future of Christianity with regard to rapidly growing cities in the United States. In the second view, John B. Robbins, presents a response to the first pessimistic vision two years later, and he offers a more sanguine future for Christianity in the United States.
Excerpts from Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems, by Samuel L. Loomis:
The Threat of the Cities
“Is our civilization perishable?” To this startling question, which a recent writer answers in the affirmative, one’s first impulse prompts the reply: “By no means. With Christian faith for the soul of it, the free school for its breastplate, and the printing-press for its weapon, the modern civilization can never perish.” But careful attention to the perils of the times must modify the answer. If our civilization stands, this will not be because it is incapable of destruction, but because its sons and daughters, roused by its dangers, rally to its defence.
There can be no doubt that a state of society like the one in which we are living would be impossible except for the Christian religion. So vast and complex a structure as that of modern civilization could only stand on the solid foundation of public integrity. Unless the majority of the people were honest you could not have confidence and credit sufficient for the conduct of commercial transactions; unless a spirit of order and justice were abroad, property would not find secure protection and enterprise would be discouraged. Domestic purity is the corner-stone of civil liberty. Popular intelligence forms the chariot-wheels of progress. Thrift and prosperity ever follow industry, economy, and temperance. The degree of advancement in any state depends chiefly upon the prevalence of such qualities as these among its citizens. But these qualities are distinctive marks of Christian character. They are the fruitage of the tree of faith, and never have been known as popular traits except in nations whose God is Jehovah.
Moreover, the degree of the nation’s civilization depends upon the purity of its faith. The better the religion, the better will be the public integrity resulting from it; and the stronger its basis in public integrity, the higher will become the development and the more complex the organism of society. There is no need of showing that those countries in which degraded forms of Christianity prevail have lower standards of morals, and consequently lower degrees of civilization, than they enjoy who cherish a purer faith. Nor is there need of pointing out the truth that the evils which pervade our own land and sadly mar the beauty of its freedom, arise from the corruptness and incompleteness of our Christianity, our far-off following of our Master and our failure to accept His teachings and put His principles to practice. Many earnest men, indeed, are thinking that civilization in the most enlightened nations of the earth has reached a point where it falters, and can be urged no higher until men eschew the selfish plan of competition, which is now omnipotent in trade and industry, and substitute for it the essentially Christian principle of co-operation.
Now, if a community whose social system has been organized amid Christian influences and upon the Christian plan should at any time lose its religious faith, such loss would inevitably be followed by the slow decay of its morality, and the subsequent collapse of its civilization. The higher and more complex that civilization had become, the greater would be the ruin of its overthrow; for the body of Christian civilization cannot live without the soul. Let faith leave society and the lapse back toward barbarism will commence at once. Or if a purer and higher form of faith should give place to a lower and more corrupt form, such a civilization as had naturally grown up under the influence of the purer faith could not be sustained, but must certainly give place to civilization of a lower type.
Again, if from any portion of the society of modern times Christian life and power should be cut off throughout that portion the process of integration would speedily ensue. If from certain strata of the people the preserving strength of the “salt of the earth” be taken away, those strata, whether high or low, would forthwith commence sinking toward the normal plane of heathen living; and in their decay would bring distress, if not ruin, upon the whole of society. The portents of such perils as these are, as we believe, plainly to be seen in the present religious condition of American cities.
We have already observed that a gulf broad and deep divides the people of our towns into an upper and a lower class; and that by no means the smallest element in the difference between these two sections of society is a difference of religious belief. The pure high faith of our fathers, the faith that promoted at once free-thinking and right-thinking, power and purity, personal liberty and personal responsibility, —the faith on which the nation was founded, and through whose strength she has endured the shock of battles and stress of stormy times,—this faith has almost no place among the working-class. But the working-class holds a preponderance of power in the cities; and the cities, already mighty, in their fearful growth, promise at no distant day to have a preponderance of power in the nation.
It will not be difficult to convince those who are acquainted with the life of our cities, that the Protestant churches, as a rule, have no following among the workingmen. Everybody knows it. Go into an ordinary church on Sunday morning, and you see lawyers, physicians, merchants, and business men with their families : —you see teachers, salesmen, and clerks, and a certain proportion of educated mechanics: but the workingman and his household are not there. [. . .]
[. . .]
There is no more striking illustration of the alienation of the masses in the cities from the Protestant churches than the meagreness of their accommodations. If the laboring class should contribute its due proportion to the congregations, the churches, many of which are now half empty, would not begin to hold the people. In 1880 there was in the United States one evangelical church organization to every five hundred and sixteen of the population; in Boston, counting churches of all kinds, there was but one to every 1,600 of the population ; in Chicago, one to every 2,081; in New York, one to every 2,468; in St. Louis, one to every 2,800. In New York below Fourteenth Street, where the people are principally laborers, there are only half as many Protestant places of worship in proportion to the number of people as above Fourteenth Street in the well-to-do parts.
The worst of it is, that instead of improving, the condition of things has been growing worse every year. [. . .]
[. . .]
Or consider, again, the drunkenness of the cities. The fearful statistics of the vice need no repetition. But it should not be forgotten that, unlike the churches, the drinking-saloons find the majority of their patrons among the workingmen. A machine moulder recently said to the writer that he did not know a person in his trade who is not a drinking man. Drinking-saloons are both causes and effects of a city’s degradation. They are effects; they come where poverty makes the home dingy, squalid, and unattractive. Day and night their doors are open, offering to the weary laborer retreats that, with their polished brass and stained glass, their light and warmth and cheery company, are immeasurably more attractive than his home. Apart from the drinking, the drinking-places have a strong fascination for their patrons; but the drink too is made the more enticing by the misery of the drinker. Exhausted by long hours of monotonous labor, or by a still more trying search for labor when ” out of a job,” the man has an irresistible craving for some stimulus which will lighten his heart and banish his sorrows for an hour. The relief is close at hand; it is cheap and easy to take. That “at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder,” no one knows better than they who are most familiar with the ruin of it. But those that have the least are the most reckless. For the sake of relieving present discomfort they are willing to run the risk of future misery. You find the saloons thickest in the poorest quarters.
[. . .]
According to the census of 1880 the city of Boston had one saloon for every 329 persons ; Cleveland, one for 192; New York, one for 179; Chicago, one for 171; and Cincinnati, one for 124, or one for every twenty-five families. This calculation does not include groceries or drug-stores where liquor is sold. The amount of drinking has been increasing from year to year. Do not these facts betoken a serious decline from the high plane of Christian civilization?
Other evidence in the same direction appears in the increase of crime that the past thirty years have witnessed. In 1850 Massachusetts had one prisoner to 804 of the population. In 1880 she had one to 487. The criminal population in proportion to the whole population had nearly doubled in thirty years. The report of the prison commissioners for Massachusetts for 1884, shows that the entire number of arrests for the year ending September 30, 1883, was 65,000, or one arrest for every twenty-nine of the population. Who these offenders were becomes evident when you read that Suffolk County, the county of Boston, had in proportion to its population more than twice the number of prisoners of any other county, and five or six times as many as those counties that do not include large towns.
The census makes an even worse showing than this for the whole country. Between 1870 and 1880, the population of the United States increased 30 per cent. Meantime crime in the United States increased 83.32. The superintendent of the police reports that in Chicago, in the year 1883, there were 37,187 arrests in that city, or one for every sixteen of the population. Of these, 159 were for murder, manslaughter, and intent to kill. The same sad story comes from every great city of the land, and one of its saddest features is the increase of what may be called seed crimes—those of the women and boys. Have we not here, too, ominous indications that the foundations of Christian civilization are rotting away beneath us?
[. . .]
Another token of the same thing is seen in the desecration of the Christian Sabbath. Can we have Christian civilization without a Sabbath day? Granting that the Puritanic Sabbath is not adapted to the needs of our time, no one will deny that we need some sort of a Sabbath day,—a day, too, which in all essential elements shall not be one whit inferior to that which our fathers handed down to us. Where is the city in which the Sabbath day is not losing ground? To the mass of the workingmen Sunday is no more than a holiday. The conception of it that they have brought with them from Europe has not been improved. It is a day for labor meetings, for excursions, for saloons, beer-gardens, base-ball games, and carousals.
As a final token of the threatening dissolution of the fabric of Christian society, notice the nature of the new gospel for workingmen which many of the socialists are preaching. This is not the place for the discussion of socialism. We have no time to speak here of its wide and rapid spread in our own country and all over Europe, nor to consider how much of what is true and valuable may be mixed up with its teachings; nor can we notice the extent to which it has influenced the thinking of multitudes who have not accepted its doctrines as a whole—an influence clearly seen in recent labor troubles, in the late elections, in the formation of the Anti-Poverty Society, etc. But the thing to be observed is the tendency of the doctrines that are at present advocated by its leaders. The International Workingmen’s Association, which is the principal socialistic society in this country and the world, makes it its direct purpose to promote the very thing which, as we have tried to show, is now threatening us, namely: the overthrow of the present system of society. These anarchists have most vague and varied notions of what should take the place of that which they wish to destroy. Whenever they attempt to tell how the new society should be organized, they become involved in hopeless confusion. The one plan upon which they all agree is that of destruction. Many of the leaders go so far as to advocate the abolition with private property of religion, the State, the Church, and even the family. Give such men their way, not that they are likely to get it, and they would dash the proud temple of civilization with a single blow to the ground, and leave the world in as dense a darkness of barbarism as ever enveloped our fathers of the Northland. It is hoped that these will not be regarded as the extravagant words of an alarmist. So surely as God is faithful, that Gospel which Jesus Christ brought to the poor must reach the poor, or else they, perishing in their blindness, will involve all Christendom in common ruin. Are not these things already rolling in upon us like a mighty stormcloud,—this increasing drunkenness and crime, this Sabbath desecration, this pauperism, this lawlessness and strife between rich and poor, this worse than heathen poverty and degradation? Do you answer, “Oh, well, but the cities have always been full of drunkenness, poverty, and disorder; they are the feversores of the land”? True: but do not forget that while the “fever-sores” grow redder and more angry, they are growing larger every day. It was a comparatively small thing that the cities were vicious when they contained one-thirtieth of the people, but now they contain nearly one-fourth; soon it will be one-third, one-half ; such fever-sores must not be ignored.
That soil where weeds grow rankest is ever a fertile soil, capable also of yielding rich harvests of grain. If the towns of modern times furnish extraordinary facilities for the deadly work of the destroyer, at the same time they give no less advantage to the armies of salvation; they afford unrivalled fields for the triumphs of the Redeemer. God has rarely given His servants greater opportunities for doing good, and bringing forth much fruit unto His praise, than one can find in the troubled hearts of the great cities to-day: for the “sword of the Spirit” is never so mighty as when wielded amid the multitudes.
Loomis, Samuel Lane, Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems, 79-106. New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1887.
Excerpt from Christ and Our Country; or, A Hopeful View of Christianity in the Present Day, by John B. Robbins:
The City as a Peril.
No argument and no statistics are needed to prove that the population of the city is increasing much more rapidly than that of the country outside of the cities. Professor Loomis, in “Modern Cities,” gives us many interesting facts in regard to the enormous growth of the cities. He does not see any danger in the growth of cities per se. “The formation of great cities is a normal result of a high development of human society.” He shows that the decreasing death-rate, commerce, mechanical arts, manufactures, and the desire of men to be in multitudes are all causing the population of the cities to increase very rapidly.
Another principle of great interest presented by Mr. Loomis is this: That the evangelization of the city means the salvation of the country. All the facts presented by him are of a very hopeful nature until the fact is made known that the supply of churches is woefully out of harmony with the increased populations. He seeks to account for this in many ways. Here are some of them: The crowded tenement-houses, the indifference of the inmates to religious influences, the mixed populations, or a population made up of foreign elements. In New York, for instance, 80 per cent, of its inhabitants are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents; in Chicago, 87 per cent. In New York in 1840 there was 1 Protestant Church to 2,066 souls; in 1887, 1 to 3,750. It means only this: That the Christianity of the past fifty years has not been able to cope with the increase of population in New York and a few other large cities. In the whole country there has been a great increase in Church-membership. In 1788, for example, 1 in 30 of our population was a Church-member; in 1888, 1 in less than 5—really 1 in 4— is a Church-member. As 36 per cent, of the population is under ten years old, the figures show that more than half of adult American society is in the Church. While there has been a decrease in church-buildings and religious influence in New York City, there has been a wonderful increase in the United States at large.
Dr. Strong sees dangers in the crowded streets and alleys, and in the prevalent saloon. We may now ask: Why is there a decline of moral influences and an increase of evil forces? It is not due to an increase of wealth, or to growing populations, or to crowded tenement-houses, or to the indifference of the poor, or to lack of church-buildings, or to foreign populations, or to skeptical opinions, or to the open saloon. Many of these things are good, some partially evil, and some totally so. Those that are evil must have been placed under conditions favorable to their development. Skepticism is not a product of prayer, nor the saloon the offspring of righteousness. The existence of these evils is due to the imperfect notions and lifeless character of the Church in the cities. This defective character creates conditions favorable to the growth of many evils. Here is a straw that shows which way the wind blows. Mr. Loomis relates this incident: “The recent experiment of an enterprising newspaper reporter, in a certain American city which has the reputation of being the model Christian city of the world, will not be forgotten. He donned the garb of a decent laborer, and in turn presented himself for admission at each of the principal churches. At some he was treated with positive rudeness, at others with cold politeness. Only one or two gave him a cordial (and even then a somewhat surprised) welcome.” A man, no matter how poor or how rich, does not often go where he is not wanted. This gives rise to indifference, to skepticism, and to irreligion generally.
The greatest evil of all (the open saloon) is fast disappearing. It has cursed the race of men and blighted hope about as long as civilized people can endure it. In 1873 the popular vote of the Prohibition party was 5,608; in 1877, 9,522; in 1881, 10,305; in 1885, 151,062; in 1888, nearly 3,000,000. This shows growth, but not all of it. Many counties, districts, townships, and cities have established prohibitory measures by local option; and this has been clone where the Prohibition party did not receive a vote. There is a growing conviction and an increasing disgust against the saloon and its political corruption. It will not be a peril much longer; for the better sense, the conscience, and the reason of the American people are against its continuance. The tide rises faster than did that against slavery.
For the present we only say that the need is not for more liberality, more women workers, more lay help, more, church-buildings, more so-called ministers of the gospel, more complications in Church work, more societies, unions, and organizations, more religious literature, but the need is more of the Spirit of Christ, more of the Christ of Christianity. Cities and wealth ought to increase, and religion ought to increase along with them, while the evils ought to decrease.
Robins, Rev. John B., A.M., Christ and our Country; or, A Hopeful View of Christianity in the Present Day, 64-67. Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1889.
Which Christian view from the 19th century, then, has turned out more accurately after 140 years: the pessimist’s or the optimist’s?
FINES ET INITIA 