Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1896 — Anarchistic Preacher Called Down. [ARTICLE]

Anarchistic Preacher Called Down.

Delubi ‘Journal. I Dever saw J. A. Mi’bu' u, who preaches down in Indianapolis, but 1 Lavn read seveial of his sermons as reported in the papers and I can not lYelp being impressed with the fact that he is scraping the earth and sky to get something to talk about that will cause people to talk about him. I should judge that he is a young man • He lacks discretion and is a little shy on information. He could study up <u> politics and politicians with good results. - mon and went to great trouble to establish the proposition that the public men of the present day are selfish, U’lpatrioifc and degenerate. He said; “Think of the names of our presidents in the years gone by, howriuminous their ability, how justly entitled to immortality, and then think of the men who stand before the world to-day as claimants for the next presidency. Here and there a man who has made a name for himself and here and there a really great and noble man, but for the most part the applicants are men wholly without other distinction than their millions,” There are three really prominent men who may be said to be applicants for the Republican nomination for the presidency. They are McKinley, Reed and Allison. So far as I know Matthews and Olney are the only Democrats who may be classed as applicants on the other side. If any one of these men possesses millions I am not aware of it. They have all earned by individual effort whatever distinction they have won. And so far as the Republican hide of . the house is concerned there has never been a time in the history of the Republican party when it was so rich in splendid presidential timber and when the candidates measured higher in character and sterling manhood. When Rev. Milburn gets older he will learn that great men are not appreciated until after they die. He speaks of Washington. If he will read up bn the political campaigns when Washington was a candidate he will find that no man was ever made the target tor viler abuse than was George Washington. And the same thing is true of Hamilton and Jefferson and Calhoun. Comipg down nearer the present, I’d advise Rev. Milburn to talk with the old men in his congregation about the stories, the shameless, cruel stories by which it was attempted to blast and break down the character of Lincoln. That patient, kindly man was hounded and traduced as no man in public life in the history of American politics. And how they assaulted Grant and branded him a butcher and a drunkard. Garfield did not escape, neither did Blaine. But now that they are dead we deify them. These men were traduced and villified without excuse. And the lives of public men today are cleaner and purer than the lives of the public men of any era in the history of the nation. There is less immorality, less corruption. There is less lying about public men, less slander, less abuse.

I have no patience with preachers who get up in the pulpit and rail about the “degeneracy of our public men” or the “degeneracy of the 1 ” The standard of both is higher today than ever before. Men still live and are not very old either who can testify that political conventions of the “good days” of which Rev. Milburn speaks were scenes of debauchery that today would not be tolerated for a moment It has only been a short time since the whiskey jug had a place in every harvest field. And when a barn was raised maudlin men lay thick around like so many swine. Only a few years ago ruffians with brass knocks ruled small towns and no attempt was made to stop gambling in ’cities. The standard of manhood and womanhood and citizenship and statesmanship is higher today than ever before. And Rev. Milburn ought to know it. “The country has not only ignored morality, the soverign faculty of the soul, but it has taken away from it what food was rightfully its own by abolishing the Bible from the public schools” says this minister. Going on'further Rev. Milburn states that the country has abolished God from the constitution as an unnecessary postulate of well being.” He then goes on and laments the fact that m every city in the country there are men. who are willfully transgressing the laws because they are confed-

erated in such numbers that political parties dare not disturb them. “There such a coofederatioi} of men its almost every city a r ;d hamlet in this country Ahs? are perpetual and persistent violators of the laws and yet whom the law, by reason ot politics, is afraid to touch,” he says. What nonsense. - Bill iisttn to this and then wonder why We have such fellows as Debs: ; “Aud a further illustration of this truth, that our nation is not so democratic as it might be, nor so democratic as it ought to be, is manifest to every man who thinks or who sees with his eyes when ha beholds the myriad and arrayed dominion of wealth, a dominion whose baleful hand is seen in many of our laws, in the laws that favor the rich as against the poor, that fav< >r the strong as against the weak, that favor the millionaire as against the artisan, that favor the corporations as against the people.” This is riotous rot. It is such talk as this that content and breeds anajrchy. It is not truthful. It is at once a falsehood and a slander on our institutions. And if this minister continues in this line unrebuked by his congregation, I expect to see him marching at the head of howling political and social malcontents carrying a red flag, and this at no far distant day either. No congregation interested in law and order and good government should permit a minister to unfload such stuff from the pulpit.