Increase of Crime

Mr. Editor: I am horror stricken with dreadful facts of almost daily occurrence. Scarcely a newspaper which is not surcharged with terrible accounts of murder, theft, robberies, house-burning or the like. Moral restraint no longer hold men in check.-The ligaments of law are but feeble barriers to licentious man. Ambition, rage, revenge, or lust, are the laws by which he is governed. The most slight insult, is a pretext for shedding a fellow creature's blood, as if the blood of a murdered man had no voice before the throne of the Lord God of heaven and earth. Dirks, Pistols, Bowie-knives, &c., are daily worn by thousands-worn even at the plough [plow].

I tremble for the fate of my country-for the fate of the human family! Where will these things end? What a horrid state of things at this time, compared with the moral situation of the world thirty years ago! What a recklessness of life! How impotent are the laws of God and man in checking the mighty tide of crime!-What is to be the state of society, thirty years hence, if vice should go unchecked at a ratio with the last ten years?-O, heaven! my heart sickens! No human being on the earth will see the fact tested. Long before thirty years, the world will be smitten by the strong arm of Omnipotence! The most imposing events are hanging over the world-at the very doors-events which will put all past events in the shade-obliterating all the epochs of the human family-stamping a new era on the annals of time! These things are true, or I have read the living oracle in vain. These things are true, and the pulpit is crying out peace and safety! These things are true, and are come on the world as a snare; aye, as a snare, or the scriptures are not true. Why as a snare? Because the pulpit is crying "peace and safety!" Oh, what a crash of governments, thrones and empires is awaiting the world, and the pulpit is chaunting [chanting] lullabies to its slumbering care! War, pestilence, and fire, standing in dread array against the human family, and the conservators of its moral weal, hailing the dawn of universal peace-hailing a millenial [millennial] dawn, when the harbingers of war and carnage are standing in bold relief over a guilty world.

They are dreaming about times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, when we are to have the vials of his wrath! They are clothing in brilliant drapery, the future triumphs of the gospel, when the drama is about to close, and present a theatre [theater] of blood! They are, in imagination, smoothly gliding by the gradual flow of time, into a heaven of repose, without once turning an eye to an intervening vortex which is to engulph [engulf], perhaps, more than half the human family! They are spreading a banquet of peace, and proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord, when he is about to deluge the world in fire! This tremendous event is passed over by the pulpit, as a doomsday work of Almighty God, when it is to be pre-millenial [millennial], and, probably, consummated on the present generation

A deluge of water once depopulated the world for crime; a similar scourge, by a different element, has a similar mission to perform, and for a like cause. The measure of human crime is coming to the full, and the arm of Omnipotence lifted to "shake terribly the earth;" and the watch quarrelling [quarreling] about creeds territory or gold. The present christian dispensation is about to close like the Jewish-the heavens about to be rolled together

like a scroll; the stars in that heaven about to be thrown from their orbits, in wild consternation, and the indications overlooked; prophetic allusions to the terrible wreck, mistaken, misapplied, or applied to the wreck of nature; an even without foundation in holy writ. These things are true.-They are not the freaks of a heated imagination; but predicated upon a long, candid, cool, unbiassed [unbiased] investigation of the living oracles; and on the premises we throw the gauntlet to all the clergy, learned or unlearned on earth!

S. M. M'Corkle, a layman.