Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1879 — Prof. Swing on the Pocasset Trag eay. [ARTICLE]

Prof. Swing on the Pocasset Trag eay.

In his sermon on “The Laws of Nature,” at Chicago, recently, Prof. Swing alluded to the horrible child murder at Pocasset as follows: That most sickening tragedv at Pocasset, where the father and mother of a beautiful and tenderly-loved child ’ felt called upon to offer their little daughter to God in a sacrifice, may well remind the Christian world what sad work Christianity may perform when it cuts loose from natural law and acts upon some theory of voices heard in the night, or upon the order of some special revelation, or upon some inc dent in a miraculous history. This father and "mother had been fed upon some form of Christianity, out of which God’s daily rules of action have all been stricken—a Christianity which had " made the universe ail revolve around Abraham offering up Isaac. The recent letter of the guilty another is one of the most pitiful pages in all terrible volumes made up by modern events. She says that her husband dally felt that he must make some great trial of his own faith, and step by step he reached the conclusion that he must offer up his daughter to Je hovah. He went onward with the terrible preparation, not fortifying himself by any study of the laws of human life and right, the rights of children, the rights of society, the tender duty of parents, but fortifying himself by the study of the story of a patriarch who lived 4,000 years ago. The mother says: “My dear husband thought that before the knife should reach the child’s heart God would be satisfied, and would stay the outstretched hand' but when this was not done, and the child lay dead in the house, we then faithfully believed that God would raise up our dead daughter, And through her resurrection preach with power the gospel of salvation.” ' But

this restoration did not come, and the lovely child sleeps In the cemetery. But if the resurrection of the little girl did not come to make effective the gospel, its decay and dust do come to render powerfill the union between gospel and natural law, and to teach us anew and afresh that Jehovah loves his laws of child life and child-prewar vation as much as He loves the story of Abraham and Isaac. Had the child been in any way spared or recalled to life there is no infant in the Second Advent Church whose tender life would have been safe on its mother’s bosom. We should have had ■mothers feeding poison to their children that they might see for themselves the Intervention of God, and have seen each* home seek its own miracle. It will not be a sufficient explanation of this distressing murder to state that the parents were insane. Indeed their reasoning was unsound, and to that degree they were insane. But we need a better solution of the crime, and that when Christian teachers fill the minds of the common'peopie with the idea that natural law is for atheists and infidels, and that Christians are partners of God, and enjoying miraculous advantages, then those teachers become the fountain of all such child murders. In England recently the civil law was compelled to interfere to break up the delusion of some Christians who were threatening their sick by means of prayer. They denied cleanliness and bath, and nutriments, and medicines, and were going to Goa in prayer. The law was compelled to intercede and set up against such a religion tne natural laws of man. At Pocasset, in our own land, the same tendency of a miraculous religion has repeated itself in a way horrible enough to arouse the continent. Insanity! Of course it was, but of such a quality that in different degrees it holds in its sickly spell tens of thousands of Christians.