Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Problems of the Age: Dealing With Religious, Social and Economic Questions and Their Solution; A Study for the Quorums and Classes of the Melchizedek Priesthood
We have ceased to look to the Government at Washington as our sole protector. In the city of New York the lives of millions are dependent not upon Congress or upon the president of the United States, but upon the great transportation companies that hourly transport the daily bread of the people. If it be said that state and federal governments may control these transportation companies, it will be admitted that capital is after all the primary power, and the government's only secondary. Some captains of industry have set up a divine right to rule as the stewards of the people's needs. What Mr. Adams here writes was given out before the war. The war emphasizes the weaknesses, vices, and dangers of our national life. As the evils of governments become more pronounced, they invite all opposing forces in opposition to them, and hence we see the menace of capital and labor to the present standards of life.
New Problems. - As a result of the present world catastrophe a new order of life will come into being, old institutions will give way to new organizations brought forward to meet the demands of the new agz. Our social, industrial, and religious life must undergo pronounced changes in the reconstruction of a new age.
It is not easy to establish a new order of things without some prepar tion, some experience. Has God permitted this debacle to come into th. World without some revelation of the needs of the new life to which people will be subjected? Is there no one to point the way, no institution given to some delegated authority as a guide to the life of the new world? The crumbling processes are already felt, but an easy-going world has not yet become serious enough to think of substitutions. It will be the aim of the writer to point out in the chapters to follow some of the important and already established methods of dealing with the new age, revealed methods that have already found their way into the daily lives of comparatively small communities, but yet suited for the largest of human aggregations. The world is being thrown into a vast cauldron, the melting pot of human institutions. What the moulding processes will be it is not easy to deter mine, but out of the incoherent mass of activities will come a new earth, if not a new heaven. One may readily believe that this is God's day, that he is speaking through those calamities which the world is bringing upon itself. The history of the past proves that more than once it has been easier for the voice of God to penetrate the world through the roar of cannon and the shrieks of famine than through the vices, oppressions, and luxuries of life. Out of great calamities have been born many divine institutions that brought alleviation from the sorrows of life. Too bad, one may say, that we must suffer so much that we may learn so little, learn what we might know and practice if only our lives were turned to the will and purposes of God; but we have our free agencies, the freest of all human institutions. It is not agencies that make us free, but the truth which is learned only in obedience to divine purposes. We have not the strength to say not my will, but thine be done. What we vainly imagine is the strength of our will is the weakness of our selfishness and vain ambitions.
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